There are milestones that shimmer with ceremony, and there are others that shine with soul. The June 14, 2025 declaration of Igbo Day by the Governor of North Carolina, Josh Stein, belongs to the latter. It is not merely an administrative gesture inked into the annals of the state’s civic calendar; it is a living tribute to a people who turned wounds into wisdom and exile into excellence. It is the echo of ancestral drums finally heard, not as background noise, but as the heartbeat of an American story.
Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first African-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Prof. Agbedo, contributing analyst to USAfrica, is a Professor of languages at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka
Across time and tides, the Igbo have been many things – traders, thinkers, builders, healers. But above all, they have been resilient bearers of memory, never forgetting who they are even when the world tried to forget them. Their journey into the American consciousness did not begin in boardrooms or universities. It began in bondage. And from that crucible emerged something defiant, something divine. In 1803, along the humid banks of Dunbar Creek in Georgia, a group of newly enslaved Ndigbo made an immortal decision. Rather than surrender to the weight of chains, they chose the waters. Walking calmly into the marsh, they chanted prayers to their gods, affirming that their bodies may have been captured, but their spirits would never kneel. That moment, now memorialized as Igbo Landing, was not a collapse. It was a covenant; yes, a sacred refusal that planted the earliest seeds of Diasporic dignity on American soil.
Indeed, every exile is a seed planted in the soil of another possibility, and from that sacred refusal has grown a people who, even in foreign climes, carry their world with them. The Igbo do not migrate to disappear; they migrate to multiply meaning, add value to life, and turn survival into significance. In North Carolina today, the fruits of that legacy bloom brightly. The Igbo community has distinguished itself not only through its visible successes in medicine, law, education, entrepreneurship, and information technology, but through the intangible wealth of character and commitment to civic life. They are not just working; they are weaving communities. Adopting highways, supporting women’s shelters, organizing food drives, and uplifting the underserved, not out of obligation, but out of a deep-seated value system that holds – onye aghala nwanne ya – let no one abandon their sibling.
This ethic of communal responsibility is not new. It is ancient, folded into the Igbo worldview that teaches: “those who have suffered understand suffering, and therefore extend their hand.” Through trials in Nigeria and transitions abroad, Ndigbo have learned how to carry both the weight of grief and the grace of giving. They understand that recognition is not merely the reward of contribution, but the affirmation of identity. This is what makes North Carolina’s proclamation so profound. It does not simply tally what the Igbo have done; it affirms who they are – a people of purpose, power, and peace; a people, who do not wait to be honoured before they build, but whose very act of building becomes its own honour.
The road from Igbo Landing to North Carolina’s Igbo Day has been long. It has passed through plantations and protest marches, through classrooms and clinics, through whispered lullabies and defiant dances. And at every point along that road, the Igbo spirit has whispered: “we are not victims of history; we are authors of legacy”. The philosopher Hemingway once said that “a man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” The Igbo have lived that truth across continents. Torn by war, scattered by necessity, and often misunderstood by their host nations, they have refused to be broken. They have transformed displacement into determination, and in so doing, redefined what it means to belong, not by birth, but by contribution.
In declaring 14 June as Igbo Day, Governor Stein is not just recognizing an ethnic group; he is recognizing a pattern of greatness, a cultural rhythm that enriches the American experiment. It is a statement that diversity is not demographic decoration; it is the soul of democracy. For the Igbo, this moment is more than symbolic. It is spiritual. It is the affirmation that from the chains of the past, they have crafted the chapters of the present, chapters still being written by doctors and dancers, coders and community leaders, children learning Igbo and cultural heritage in weekend schools, and elders preserving ancient idioms in modern spaces.
And so, on 14 June, as North Carolina pauses to honour Ụmụ Chukwu (God’s children), the world is reminded that identity does not vanish in migration; it travels; it transforms; it triumphs. From Landing to Legacy, the Igbo have shown that to remember is not to weep, but to rise, to rebuild, and to reclaim one’s place in the song of humanity. Let the drums sound not just in the Carolinas, but in every corner where the name “Igbo” is lived and spoken with pride. For this is not just their day; it is their story. And the world is finally listening.
Pray, it is a drumbeat that will not cease. From the silent marshes of Igbo Landing to the marbled halls of North Carolina’s Capitol, the story of Ndigbo remains the same – a people unbowed, unbroken, and undeterred. Nigeria may try to hush the drums, but they will beat still, in the diaspora, in memory, and in the hearts of those who know that to remember is not to rebel, but to reclaim. Let June 14 be a reminder; let it be a reckoning; let it be the resurrection of Nigeria’s buried conscience. For in the bitter irony of it all, it has taken foreign soil to affirm a native truth, that the Igbo, whose hands helped shape the very frame of Nigeria, are not strangers in their land but sons and daughters wronged by the silence of the state. Their story, once suppressed, now finds voice in lands far from home, forcing us to confront the wisdom of a local proverbial lore, which warns: “Until the lions have their own historians, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
Perhaps then, it may interest Nigeria to take notice. A people, who survive fire do not fear ash. If it takes the halls of Raleigh to hear the rhythms – Igbo Kwenu:Yaa! Nzọgbu-Nzọgbu: Enyi Mba Enyi – so be it. But the homeland must awaken, or it will find itself irrelevant in the very future its people are already building elsewhere. For the drumbeat will not cease. The question is no longer whether Ndigbo belong to Nigeria. The question is whether Nigeria still deserves Ndigbo. And history, unblinking and unsentimental, is waiting for the answer.
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