Name: Ozibo Ozibo
Year in Program: 5
ABD: Doctoral Candidate
Primary Supervisor: Professor Walter Hawthorne
Major Field: African History
Minor Fields: African American History & Comparative Black History
Email: oziboozi@msu.edu
Ozibo Ozibo is a Ph.D. candidate of African History in the Department of History at Michigan State University (MSU), East Lansing, Michigan, United States.
Ozibo’s research interests cut across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries West African cultural history, historiography, and the Atlantic World.
His doctoral dissertation, “Abakaliki Rice: Gendered Labor, Diet Transformation and the Making of Identities in Eastern Nigeria, 1942-1967” examines the introduction and domestication of rice in Abakaliki, Eastern Nigeria, between 1942 and 1967.
Situating the British colonial agricultural policies in Eastern Nigeria, his research explores gendered farm labor, feeding habits, and complex identities inspired by rice culture in colonial and postcolonial Eastern Nigeria.
Ozibo’s research argues that although the introduction of Oryza Sativa rice from British Guiana to colonial Eastern Nigeria in 1942 was a colonial intervention, its successful domestication was Indigenous, and marked a significant shift in the social, cultural, and economic history of Eastern Nigeria