ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Simon Ottenberg, a retired University of Washington anthropologist, wrote four books and numerous articles on the traditional life of an Igbo group in southeastern Nigeria — their social groupings, family life, masquerades, and boy’s growing up. He authored a history of the Igbo town of Abakaliki from precolonial times until 1960. He curated an exhibition on seven modem Igbo artists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and wrote a biography of the late modem Siena Leone artist, Olayinka Burney-Nichols He co-edited of a volume on African children’s masquerades.