The project · who we are
About Akala
Akala is a codex of Igbo culture, language, and history — a novel as the front door, and behind it an archive the community builds together: a dictionary, a cosmology deck, a proverb and riddle corpus, an nsibidi collection, a museum of artefacts, a word-forge for the vocabulary Igbo does not have yet, and a training corpus that teaches machines to speak the language properly. It is not a website about the culture. It is the culture, documenting itself.
Why we build in the open
We have already seen what gatekeeping costs. For centuries our knowledge lived in initiated lineages, in compounds, in memories — guarded, and therefore unwritten. When the printing press came, it was not our hands on it. The books that defined who we were, what we believed, and what our words meant were written by visitors, missionaries, and colonial officers — and because they were the ones publishing, their version became the record. Our story ended up written for us. We have spent a hundred years arguing with footnotes we did not author.
It is about to happen again, at a larger scale. Artificial intelligence will do to the world what the printing press did: fix the positions, histories, and meanings of cultures — this time inside the models everyone on earth will ask their questions to. Whatever the machines are taught about Igbo life is what the next century will be told when it asks. The training data is the new printing press, and the presses are running now.
So this time, we must speak before we are spoken for.
That is why everything here is open — the corpus is exportable, the derivations are public, the collection will be open-sourced to the world. Closed archives die with their gatekeepers and get paraphrased by strangers. Open archives train the future in their own voice. We are not hiding the culture to protect it; we are publishing it so that it cannot be overwritten.
Documentation is a communal responsibility
No single author can write a culture. The proverb your grandmother says a particular way, the riddle your village resolves with a different logic, the word your dialect kept that the dictionaries dropped — if you do not enter it, it does not exist in the record, and what is not in the record will not be in the machines. Ora na azụ nwa: it takes the community to raise a child, and it will take the community to raise a codex. Every annotation, every submitted ilu, every uploaded artefact is an act of authorship. The wall carries the name of everyone who lays a brick.
The convener
portrait to come
William Ifeanyi Moore
Author of Akala · convener of AfaOS
Novelist and essayist — author of Akala: A Theatre of Apes & Pigs and The Dekolonial Paperz. He convenes this project on a simple conviction: that a story was the right front door, but the house behind it belongs to everyone. The convener's role here is to set the table, keep the standards, and hand the pen around — the codex answers to its community and its council, not to any single voice.
The shoulders we stand on
This platform is seeded from named work, honoured by name — sources are tiered, cited, and credited everywhere they appear.
portrait to come
Prof. John Anenechukwu Umeh
After God is Dibia
Professor, poet, and initiated authority whose two-volume After God is Dibia is the Tier 1 spine of our Odinani deck — the rare case of the sacred science written down from inside the tradition, not peered at from outside it. Every card in the cosmology deck that carries a page number is standing on his work.
portrait to come
Derik Ofodirinwa
The Medicine Shell
Teacher of the Lecture Hall. His body of work — The Medicine Shell — gives this platform its Introduction to Igbo Philosophy: 154 lectures across cosmology, ritual, divination, history, and language, arranged here as a course of study. He is honoured by name in the novel's own libation.
portrait to come
Omenigbo (Nwafor)
The Odinani scholarship blog
The Tier 2 blog scholarship whose writing on Chi, reincarnation, ichi, and the deep architecture of Odinani fills out and cross-lights the Umeh spine throughout the cosmology deck. Proof that serious custodianship of this knowledge is alive on the open internet — which is exactly where we found it.
portrait to come
Nkọwa okwu — the Igbo API
Open Igbo dictionary (Apache-2.0)
The community-maintained, open-source Igbo API — over 8,000 Igbo→English entries with example sentences — stands in the Codex as a second dictionary beside the Ọ̀nìchà lexicon, and powers the Forge's gap-check, telling contributors whether a word they want to coin already has a home elsewhere in the language. Exactly the kind of open cultural infrastructure this project is built to add to, not enclose.
Bring your paper
If you have written — or are writing — interesting work in Igbo history, culture, or linguistics, this platform wants to publish and preserve it with your name on it: papers, theses, field notes, dialect studies, oral collections. The same goes for scholars of the wider Niger-Congo family. Disagreement is welcome when it is argued properly; attribution is non-negotiable.
In a world where language is power, we must remember to speak.