I have undertaken a long journey in the course of this book, looking at the local community in Igboland and its transformation over more than a century. In this period, the Igbo “town” became part of a modern state with the power to overwhelm and standardize local structures, institutions, and practices. But the local community did not become irrelevant in this process. It retained some degree of autonomy, often made its own use of the state, and by the end of the twentieth century continued to be highly relevant for its “indigenes.” In the course of the century, the Igbo “town” came into the trajectory of factors and influences that had originated elsewhere and created frameworks extending well beyond the local sphere: the economic and political environment of Nigeria; the world religion of Christianity; and modernity in an intellectual sense, transmitted through formal school education. The history of Igbo local communities in the twentieth century is, to a large extent, a history of the local appropriation of these influences, often in surprisingly rapid and successful ways. Within these wider contexts, Igbo local communities were constantly made and “re-made”; and they made and “re-made” themselves, socially, politically, and intellectually. At the end of this book, I want to summarize the patterns and issues that have been of recurrent and long-term relevance in the transformation of the Igbo local community during the twentieth century. From these observations, I shall draw general conclusions about the relationship between “the local” and “the state” in Igboland and beyond.

The journey undertaken in this book began with an outline of the local sociopolitical structures in Igboland in the late nineteenth century. Precolonial Igbo society had no large-scale political structures such as kingdoms or empires; but it was not an amorphous assortment of unconnected villages or “tribes.” Within this segmentary society, multiple layers of local identities existed along a hierarchy of scale—from the level of the “compound” residential unit, through village quarters and villages, up to what Igbo today call the “town,” as the largest functionally relevant unit. The “town” (the social anthropologists’ “village group”) connected its constituent parts by reference to a common origin, a common deity or shrine, and a common meeting place.