Portrait of an Igbo Woman Clerk in Maiduguri

Image Portraits

Portrait of a young Igbo woman wearing a multicolored head wrap and burgundy garment.

Portrait of a young Igbo woman working as a clerk in Maiduguri, September 1966. Photographed by Edward Shearman Ross.

A photograph depicting a young Igbo woman employed as a clerk in Maiduguri. The subject is shown in a three-quarter profile, facing left, with a smile. She wears a multicolored, mottled textile head wrap with red, green, yellow, and white pigments, large metallic-toned hoop earrings, and a metallic-toned chain necklace with a rounded dark pendant. Her garment is burgundy with a visible collar. The background is an indoor setting with low ambient light, featuring a blurred mechanical or electronic device with a display screen. The image was captured in September 1966 using a Kodachrome transparency process.

Community Notes

Onyeka Nwokike

Sep 20, 2026

The image was captured by Edward Shearman Ross (1915, 2016), an American entomologist and curator at the California Academy of Sciences who specialized in close-up photography and authored Photography for Scientific Publication, A Handbook in 1966. According to his California Academy of Sciences CV, Ross was on a six-month motorized expedition through most West African countries and south to Cape Town via Cameroon, Angola, and Namibia during 1966.

Onyeka Nwokike

Sep 20, 2026

The date of the photograph coincides with the peak of the 1966 anti-Igbo pogroms in northern Nigeria. As detailed in Wikipedia, these widespread massacres reached a peak after September 29, 1966. Historical Nigeria states that between 10,000 and 30,000 Igbo people were killed in the Northern Region during September 1966, leading roughly one million people to flee to the east. Eyeway News identifies this violence as the catalyst for the birth of Biafra eight months later.

Onyeka Nwokike

Sep 20, 2026

The photograph is held by the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. While the museum is widely recognized for its anthropological object collections, it also contains a smaller, specialized archive of materials relating to Nigeria.