Aro Confederacy

Aro Confederacy is a scholarly study that revisits the long-debated Aro question. It places the confederacy within the wider process of state formation, and it examines how the Aro past has been dated and written about. The author compares the Aro confederacy's development with models of state formation in Africa and challenges the Hamitic hypothesis and assumptions of autochthonous origins.

A central contribution of the book is a relatively firm Aro chronology, built from genealogies collected by the British. This yields a core dating structure that fits the Aro into a dependable historical picture and into the chronology of the surrounding region. The author also takes on the imbalance between how little field research exists, how much has been published, and how distorted much of that historical writing has been.

The book is intended as a resource for students and researchers working on any aspect of Aro studies.

Apollos O. Nwauwa is Professor of History and Africana Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He was educated in Nigeria and Canada and earned his PhD in History from Dalhousie University in Halifax. He has taught for more than 30 years in Nigeria, Ghana and the United States. He has written or co-edited nine books, including Against All Igbo Experience in Post-Colonial Nigeria, Nigerian Political Leaders, Politics and Identity Formation in Southeastern Nigeria, Culture, Precepts, and Social Change in Southeastern Nigeria, and Imperialism, Academe and Britain and University Education for Africans. He has also published over 30 scholarly articles in refereed international journals and edits the Journal of Transatlantic Studies.