Ndubueze Leonard Mbah

Ndubueze Leonard Mbah is a Nigerian historian and academic who serves as the Commissioner for Education of Enugu State. He is an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo. His research includes African history, the Atlantic world, slavery and emancipation, migration, and gender and sexuality in West Africa.

Mbah's research has examined the history of the Igbo people, gender relations, masculinity, slavery, forced migration and the effects of colonialism in southeastern Nigeria and the wider Bight of Biafra. His 2019 book, Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age, was published by Ohio University Press and was reviewed in African Studies Review and the Canadian Journal of African Studies.

Academic career

Mbah studied history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and received a doctorate in history from Michigan State University in 2013.

He joined the University at Buffalo as a historian and became an associate professor in its Department of History. The university lists his areas of expertise as African history, the Atlantic world, colonialism, gender in West Africa, slavery and emancipation, and related subjects.

He has also been affiliated with the university's Gender Institute. His listed research areas there include African history, the Atlantic world, slavery and emancipation, gender and sexuality, and social and cultural history.

Research and publications

Mbah's research has focused on gender, slavery, migration and social change in southeastern Nigeria and the Atlantic world. His article "Female Masculinities, Dissident Sexuality, and the Material Politics of Gender in Early Twentieth-Century Igboland" was published in the Journal of Women's History in 2017.

His article "Performing Ogaranya: Kalu Ezelu Uwaoma, Male Slavery, and Freedom Politics in Southeastern Nigeria, c. 1860–1940" was published in the Journal of West African History in 2017.

In 2019, Ohio University Press published his book Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age. The book examines gender, political power, social change, slavery and connections across the Bight of Biafra between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

Mbah subsequently published work on migration, abolition, forgery and gender in West Africa, including "The Black Englishmen of Old Calabar: Freedom and Mobility in the Age of Abolition in West Africa" and "Wives Wishing to Join Their Husbands: Colonial Forgery, Gender Legibility, and Labor Migration in West Africa".

His article "African Masculinities" was published in Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies in 2023.

Fellowships and awards

In 2011, while a doctoral student at Michigan State University, Mbah received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for research on masculinity and gendered power in southeastern Nigeria.

He later received an Engaged Anthropology Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for a project concerning gender and social relations among the Ohafia-Igbo.

In 2019, Mbah was selected as an American Council of Learned Societies Centennial Fellow for a project on migration, identity and postcolonial spaces in the Bight of Biafra.

His book Emergent Masculinities was a finalist for the African Studies Association's Best Book Prize in 2020.

Mbah was a recipient of the 2020 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize for scholarship on gender and sexuality in the African diaspora, according to the University at Buffalo's record of academic honours.

In 2022–2023, he was a fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where he worked on research concerning forgery, forced labour, migration and abolition in West Africa.

Commissioner for Education

Mbah was appointed Commissioner for Education of Enugu State in 2023.

As commissioner, he has been involved in the state's education policies, including the Enugu Smart Green Schools programme. The Enugu State Ministry of Education identifies Mbah as commissioner and describes the programme as involving the construction and development of schools across the state.

He is listed among members of the Committee of States' Commissioners of Education in Nigeria.

Selected publications

Mbah, Ndubueze L. "Matriliny, Masculinity, and Contested Gendered Definitions of Ethnic Identity and Power in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Nigeria". In J. B. Shetler (ed.), Gendering Ethnicity in African Women's Lives. University of Wisconsin Press, 2015, pp. 233–264. Mbah, Ndubueze L. "Performing Ogaranya: Kalu Ezelu Uwaoma, Male Slavery, and Freedom Politics in Southeastern Nigeria, c. 1860–1940". Journal of West African History, 3(1), 2017, pp. 27–54. Mbah, Ndubueze L. "Female Masculinities, Dissident Sexuality, and the Material Politics of Gender in Early Twentieth-Century Igboland". Journal of Women's History, 29(4), 2017, pp. 35–60. Mbah, Ndubueze L. Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age. Ohio University Press, 2019. Mbah, Ndubueze L. "The Black Englishmen of Old Calabar: Freedom and Mobility in the Age of Abolition in West Africa". Radical History Review, 2022. Mbah, Ndubueze L. "Wives Wishing to Join Their Husbands: Colonial Forgery, Gender Legibility, and Labor Migration in West Africa". History in Africa, 49, 2022, pp. 235–275. Mbah, Ndubueze L. "Afropolitan Masculinity: Forgeries of Wife-Owning Husbands in West Africa, 1850s–1950s". Africa Spectrum, 58(3), 2023, pp. 267–293.