page_title: Igbo people
section_title: Diaspora
hierarchical_section_title: Igbo people / Demographics / Diaspora
caption_attribution_description: New Yam (igbo) Festival in Dublin
context_page_description: The Igbo people are a meta-ethnicity native to the present-day south-central and southeastern Nigeria and also Equatorial Guinea. There has been much speculation about the origins of the Igbo people, as it is unknown how exactly the group came to form. Geographically, the Igbo homeland is divided into two unequal sections by the Niger River – an eastern and a western section. The Igbo people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa.
  The Igbo language is a part of the Niger-Congo language family. It is divided into numerous regional dialects, and somewhat mutually intelligible with the larger "Igboid" cluster.
  The Igbo homeland straddles the lower Niger River, east and south of the Edoid and Idomoid groups, and west of the Ibibioid cluster.
  In rural Nigeria, Igbo people work mostly as craftsmen, farmers and traders. The most important crop is the yam. Other staple crops include cassava and taro.
  Before British colonial rule in the 20th century, the Igbo were a politically fragmented group, with a number of centralized chiefdoms such as Nri, Aro Confederacy, Agbor and Onitsha. Frederick Lugard introduced the Eze system of "Warrant Chiefs".
context_section_description: After the Nigerian-Biafran War, many Igbo people emigrated out of the indigenous Igbo homeland in southeastern Nigeria due to an absence of federal presence, lack of jobs, and poor infrastructure. In recent decades the Igbo region of Nigeria has suffered from frequent environmental damage mainly related to the oil industry. Igbo people have moved to both Nigerian cities such as Lagos and Abuja, and other countries such as Gabon, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Prominent Igbo communities outside Africa include those of London in the United Kingdom and Houston, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. in the United States.
  About 21,000 Igbo people were recorded in Ghana in 1969, while as small number (8,680) lived on Bioko island in 2002. Small numbers live in Japan, making up the majority of the Nigerian immigrant population based in Tokyo. A large amount of the African population of Guangdong, China, is Igbo-speaking and are mainly businessmen trading between factories in China and southeastern Nigeria, particularly Enugu. Other Igbo immigrants are found in the Americas (Igbo Canadian, Igbo American and elsewhere;
  In the 2003 PBS programme African American Lives, Bishop T. D. Jakes had his DNA analyzed; his Y chromosome showed that he is descended from the Igbo. American actors Forest Whitaker, Paul Robeson, and Blair Underwood have traced their genealogy back to the Igbo people.
caption: Igbo people celebrating the New Yam festival in Dublin, Ireland
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