Ogechi E. Anyanwu – författare

This book provides a unique insight into understanding the Igbo social, economic, and political world through comprehensive analyses of indigenous and foreign religious practices, issues surrounding women, literature, language, sexism in musical lyrics, films, and community development and government. It also explores thought-provoking cultural practices relating to marriage and divorce, reincarnation, naming, and masquerade dance. The themes covered in the book help readers appreciate the often-neglected multifaceted local and external forces that continue to shape the Igbo experience in southeastern Nigeria.

Scholarly studies on the Igbo have been scant and fragmented. Politics and Identity Formation in Southeastern Nigeria: The Igbo in Perspective fills an obvious gap, exploring the social, cultural,economic, political, and aesthetic traditions that distinguish the Igbo of southeasternNigeria from their neighbors. In scope, content, and analysis this book is both multi- and cross-disciplinary, focusing on the experiences and forces that have shaped the Igbo society, identity formation, and sociocultural, political, and aesthetic representations. Themes such as the importance ofIgbo names in understanding the people’s social, linguistic, religious, gender, and cultural identities, as well as the intersection of language, politics, socialization, education, and aesthetic expression in the Igbo experience in Nigeria, are interrogated in a refreshing fashion with an appreciable level of originality.

Through analysis of exceptionally rich data obtained from the Carnegie Corporation in New York, and from Nigeria's national archives, author Ogechi Anyanwu demonstrates how the pursuit of mass university education not only decolonized the elitist British education system but also ultimately reshaped modern Nigeria. More importantly, he argues that the impact of these policies cannot be fully understood withoutlooking closely at the intersection of domestic and external politics dictating the direction of higher education development as a vehicle for nation-building in Nigeria's pluralistic society.Although numerous studies have been made of Nigeria's higher education development in particular, and that of Africa in general, no work has placed the pursuit of mass university education (massification) at the centre of that country's postcolonial higher education reform or discussed it as a policy-driven and need-driven phenomenon. In The Politics of Access, Anyanwu undertakes a historical analysis of the diachronic impact of Nigeria's domestic socioeconomic, political, and ethno-religious forces, as well as external interests, on the country's policy initiatives, shifts, and outcomes of mass higher education policies.