Name: Ozibo Ozibo
Year in Program: 6
ABD: Yes
Primary Supervisor: Dr. Walter Hawthorne
Major Field: African History
Minor Fields: African American History & Comparative Black History
Email: oziboozi@msu.edu
Link to your personal page or profile: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6266-6868/print
Ozibo Ozibo is a Ph.D. candidate in African History at Michigan State University, East Lansing. Ozibo’s research interests cut across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ social, cultural, economic, and environmental history of West Africa 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 history of risiculture in Eastern Nigeria, using “Abakaliki Rice” as a focal point.
Ozibo’s research situates British colonialism at the center of the introduction of long grain Oryza Sativa (rice) from British Guiana, and its domestication in Abakaliki, Eastern Nigeria. Between 1942 and 1967, rice culture significantly altered gendered farm labor, diets, and identity formation in colonial and postcolonial Eastern Nigeria. The research argues that although rice was introduced as a colonial agricultural intervention, its successful domestication was indigenous and marked a crucial shift in the social, cultural, economic, and environmental history of Eastern Nigeria.