Catherine Acholonu-Olumba (1951-2014 ) was from Orlu in Nigeria and well known as a writer^(d), researcher and former lecturer on African Cultural and Gender Studies. She was a frequent contributor to the migration-diffusion website^(b). In a recent paper^(a) she proposed “that ancient West Africans nurtured a high civilization that was an off-shoot of the fall of Atlantis and the migrations of its peoples in search of new lands.” She also maintained that the West African Igbo language was, in earlier times, a global lingus franca.

Some of her ideas seemed like a melange from Blavatsky/Cayce/Daniken as the following excerpt from a video clip^(c) demonstrates,

“By 208,000 BC human evolution was interrupted and Adam, a hybrid, was created through the process of genetic engineering. However, our findings reveal that the creation of Adam was a downward climb on the evolutionary ladder, because he lost his divine essence, he became divided, no longer whole, or wholesome. All over Africa and in ancient Egyptian reports, oral and written traditions maintain that homo erectus people were heavenly beings, and possessed mystical powers such as telepathy, levitation, bi-location, that their words could move rocks and mountains and change the course of rivers. Adam lost all that when his right brain was shut down by those who made him.”

Another paper by Acholonu once again endeavours to link the Igbo language with that of the ancient Egyptians^(e).

Even more intriguing is the claim of an association between Ogham and the Igbo language. Erich Fred Legner noted that “All the words that (Edo)Nyland and (Barry)Fell transcribed were Igbo words, which Dr Catherine Acholonu could easily read and translate. She told Edo Nyland that she had translated the words he transcribed from Ogam stones, but he didn’t believe her at first. When Hugo Kennes found Dr Acholonu’s work on the Internet and started telling all the Ogam researchers he knew including Nyland, Nyland then asked him to get an Igbo dictionary from her.  It was only after her meeting with (Christine)Pellech in Belgium when she “read “all Acholonu’s books and convinced her to write for her site, that it was decided to do the “Igbo Ogam VCV Dictionary”^(g)

Acholonu was one of the authors of They Lived Before Adam: Pre-Historic Origins of the Igbo^[1134] which includes some rather wild Igbo-centric claims.

A few years later, she published Eden in Sumer On The Niger ^[1833], which continued in a similar vein. According to an abstract on ResearchGate,^(f) “It provides multidisciplinary evidence of the actual geographical location in West Africa of the Garden of Eden, Atlantis and the original homeland of the Sumerian people before their migration to the “Middle East”. By translating hitherto unknown pre-cuneiform inscriptions of the Sumerians, Catherine Acholonu and Sidney Davis have uncovered thousands of years of Africa’s lost pre-history and evidences of the West African origins of the earliest Pharaohs and Kings of Egypt and Sumer such as Menes and Sargon the Great.” 

>In 2017, Michelle Lopez Wellansky presented a paper in which she investigated the Igbo people, the majority of whom “today are practicing Christians. Though they identify as Christian, many consider themselves to be “cultural” or “ethnic” Jews.”^(h)

John Boze has contributed a series of unconventional posts on Facebook promoting the idea of a West African Genesis including the claim that “Noah, Abraham and Moses were all born, lived and died in West Africa! Not unexpectedly, Boze also claims that Atlantis was situated in Mauritania. For good measure he further claims that the ten Hebrew nations lived in West Africa 4000BC-3000BC! I think comment is unnecessary.<

^(a) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?id=218

^(b) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?authorid=98

^(c) https://igboacienthistory.weebly.com/igbo-language-a-former-global-lingua-franca.html

^(d) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Obianuju_Acholonu

^(e) (99+) (PDF) Egypian Sacred and Religious Lexicon – Its Ancient Igbo Foundations and Implications for Egyptology | Chizoro Okeke – Academia.edu

^(f) (PDF) Eden In Sumer On The Niger (researchgate.net)

^(g) <Ogam (Ogham) Writing System & Ogam Alphabet (ucr.edu)

^(h) https://kulanu.org/wp-content/uploads/nigeria/Igbo-Jews-Senior-Project.pdf *