Research Fellow, Raoul Wallenberg Institute
About
Dr. ibrahim Bàbátúndé Anọ́ba is a historian of colonial and postcolonial West Africa, specializing in the history of religious movements and postcolonial identity formation. His research also explores the intersections of jurisprudence, Pan-African consciousness, and transnational spiritual communities, specifically how their convergence has shaped the transformations in religious and ethnic identities.
Anọ́ba earned his PhD in African History, with a designated emphasis in African Diaspora Studies, from the University of California, Davis, in 2026. He holds prior degrees in Political Science and in African History, with a specialization in Pan-Africanism. He is spending part of 2026 as a Visiting Graduate Researcher in the School of History and Cultures at the University of Birmingham.
At the University of Michigan, Anọ́ba will be completing his first monograph, Olórìṣà: Alternative Decolonization, Spiritual Identities, and Recasting the African Postcolony. The project examines how devotees of Òrìṣà religion, collectively known as Olórìṣà, emerged as a distinct demographic in Nigeria through decades of state-sponsored religious persecution. It shows how their endurance and self-fashioning in the face of this persecution proved consequential to both the emergence of decolonial thought and the construction of postcolonial identity in the country.
Since 2015, Anọ́ba has held advisory roles in several of Africa's leading policy think tanks, and he currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of African Liberty. His scholarly publications have appeared in History in Africa, Journal of Religion in Africa, and Journal of Church and State. A forthcoming article, "Voice of the Dead," a study of spiritual jurisprudence and inheritance law in early colonial Lagos, will appear in Law and History Review.
Anọ́ba's research has been supported by the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, the New York Public Library, the Hoover Institution, and the Huntington Library, among others.
