Ikenga

About Ikenga

Ikenga — Journal Profile

Ikenga, in full IKENGA: International Journal of Institute of African Studies, is the journal of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in Enugu State, Nigeria. The university's own call for papers describes it as a double-blind peer-reviewed journal, published by the Institute twice a year, providing a common forum for all aspects of African studies: well-researched original papers, reviews, discussion and analysis, oral narratives, conceptual frameworks, analytical and simulation models, case studies, fieldwork, empirical research and related methods. It carries ISSN 2006-4241 and online ISSN 2714-4321 — the pair stored on this JournalsWorld record and grouped together in the journal's OpenAlex source record — and its recent articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.53836/ijia. The journal's name is itself a statement of purpose. In the university's words, the Ikenga, after which the journal is named, is a cult object of the Igbo-speaking peoples to which success or good fortune in the professions or in life generally is traditionally attributed, closely associated with the right arm with which a man hacks his way through life — briefly, the Igbo god of achievement. A journal so named, the Institute explains, is dedicated to the critical study of the fortunes of Africans down the centuries, and of their contemporary problems and dilemmas, across the entire spectrum of African studies.

At a Glance

History — an institute journal with a long, interrupted life

The journal belongs to one of Africa's oldest African-studies institutes. The Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2013, counting from a 1963 founding, and its published history of those fifty years records the place of its two journals — Ikoro and Ikenga — in the Institute's life. That history relates that the two journals had last been published in 1975 and 1992 respectively, and that between mid-2006 and October 2008 the Institute revived them, producing two volumes of Ikoro and two volumes of Ikenga — among them Ikenga, then styled International Journal of African Studies, volume 9, numbers 1 and 2, of 2007 — with the journals registered with the National Library and International Standard numbers assigned to them. The journal behind this JournalsWorld record is thus best understood as a title with roots in the Institute's early decades, a long silence, and a twenty-first-century revival that has since consolidated.

The consolidated modern run is easy to trace in the journal's own volumes. Volume 20 appeared in 2019 and volume 21 in 2020, each in multiple numbers; citations in the scholarly literature show volume 24 in 2023, with articles on Igbo art and cultural activities as informal education, on understandings of suicide in Igboland, and on Igbo political thought, and volume 26 in 2025, carrying work including a study of the role of kinsmen in the socio-economic and political development of Nsukka metropolis. The stored JournalsWorld record gives the modern coverage as 2019–2025, which matches that visible run, and OpenAlex's counts for the journal show its recent rhythm: 23 works in 2021, 34 in 2022 and 35 in 2023 — the output of a journal publishing several numbers a year at its most active. The Institute's history also lists the company the journal keeps: the same Institute publishes books, conference proceedings and the companion journal Ikoro, and Ikenga is its general African-studies journal, the flagship periodical of the Institute's publishing programme.

Through all of this, the journal's self-description has remained strikingly stable, and it is quoted in essentially the same form in the front matter of its recent volumes and in the university's standing call for papers. Ikenga, the statement says, is not committed to preaching any particular gospel, but will accommodate all views based on the objective study and analysis of issues, whether historical or contemporary, which are of special relevance to the fortunes of Africans; opinions expressed in its articles are entirely those of the authors. That combination — a defined subject (Africa and its peoples, at home and in the diaspora), a defined home (an Igbo-founded institute in south-eastern Nigeria), and an expressly open intellectual door — explains both the journal's breadth of content and its particular flavour, in which work on Igbo language, art, religion and society sits naturally beside work on the wider continent and its global connections.

Scope — the entire spectrum of African studies

The University of Nigeria's call for papers lists the journal's areas of focus, and the list is worth reproducing in full because it is the journal's scope in its own words: African thought and politics; African social institutions; African literature; indigenous African languages; African drama and theatre; African music; African art; African archaeology; African religion; mass communication in Africa; African technology; gender issues in Africa; African education; and any other topic relevant to Africa. The list is deliberately disciplinary-blind. The university describes the journal as accepting well-researched and original works from every discipline and interest that has Africa as its focus, and its recent contents bear that out: the same run of volumes carries a study using traditional Igbo art and cultural activities as informal-education interventions against age-related muscle loss among older people in eastern Nigeria; a philosophical rationalisation of initiative-democracy and covenant-based authority drawn from Igbo thought; historical work on widowhood practices in Igboland; and literary-critical work on chronotope and female spaces in African fiction. Health, philosophy, history and literature are not four journals here; they are four rooms of one house, united by place and by the journal's founding question about African fortunes.

OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's contents, from the source record resolved at checking time, reads consistently with that scope, grouping its output under African studies and ethnography; postcolonial and cultural literary studies; African cultural and philosophical studies; and Caribbean and African literature and culture — the last cluster catching the diaspora dimension that the journal's “fortunes of Africans” formula has always included. For authors, the scope test is therefore geographic and thematic rather than disciplinary: is Africa — a place, a people, a culture, a history — the centre of the work? A paper on a Nigerian, Igbo, West African or wider African topic, or on African-diaspora material, is in scope whatever its home discipline; a paper with no African centre is not, however strong it may be. Within scope, the journal welcomes the full range of scholarly genres it lists, from oral narratives and fieldwork reports to conceptual and analytical modelling, which makes it one of the relatively few African-studies venues where a carefully documented oral narrative or a piece of fieldwork-based case study sits comfortably beside conventional analytical articles.

Editors, peer review and standards

The journal's recent mastheads show its editorial structure. Volume 20, number 1 (2019) names Emeka Nwabueze as editor, with an editorial committee drawn from the Institute and consulting editors including scholars at Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa and at the University of Nigeria itself. Volume 21, number 3 names Florence Orabueze as editor, Emeka Nwabueze as research advisor, and Ifeanyi Iwundu as associate editor, again with an Institute-based editorial committee. Editorships of institute journals rotate with institute leadership, so authors should confirm the current editor from the journal's site or the most recent issue before addressing a submission; the names above are given with their volumes precisely so they can be used as a dated record rather than mistaken for a permanent masthead. The university's description of the journal as double-blind peer reviewed is confirmed and extended by the journal's own front matter, which states that all manuscripts are subjected to internal and external peer-review processes, that the critical opinions of reviewers are respected, and that editors insist on original manuscripts, with all submissions subjected to plagiarism checks.

Two standing instructions from the university's call for papers shape every submission. Papers should carry an abstract of not more than 200 words, and works should be presented using the MLA reference style, in not more than twenty pages including graphs, charts and appendix. The journal's older front matter adds presentation conventions of the print era — a separate cover sheet with the author's name, title, position and address — which the modern online route has absorbed into its submission forms. The through-line is clear: a compact, fully referenced, Africa-centred paper, anonymised for double-blind review, checked for originality, and read both inside the Institute and by external reviewers before a decision.

Metrics, indexing and how to read them

The journal's citation footprint is modest and growing, and the sources agree on its scale. The thin listing that this profile replaces recorded an h-index of 5. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through the ISSN endpoint at checking time (October 2026) as source S4210206030 — under the name IKENGA International Journal of Institute of African Studies — records 193 works and 165 citations, with a summary h-index of 5, an i10-index of 1 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.20; its recent year counts (35 works in 2023, 34 in 2022, 23 in 2021, with a high share of open access copies among the recent works it indexes) show a journal whose recent output is increasingly visible online. SCImago's listings, built on Scopus data, record an SJR of 0.176 for the journal in 2025 and place it in the third quartile (Q3) of its subject categories, with arts and humanities and the social sciences as its subject areas — figures that position Ikenga as a small but Scopus-visible African-studies title, in a field where much important work still appears in journals with no metric presence at all.

On indexing, the journal's own front matter states that Ikenga is indexed by EBSCO information services, and its Scopus coverage is evidenced by the SCImago record quoted above. The journal is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals: a DOAJ search by either ISSN at checking time returned no listing, a fact authors with funder mandates tied to that directory should note. Its articles are discoverable through its own site, through Crossref metadata under its DOI prefix 10.53836/ijia, and through OpenAlex. No article processing charge or submission fee figure for the journal could be verified from an official source fetched for this profile, and none is quoted here; authors should ask the editorial office for the current position on fees at the time of submission, since institute journals' arrangements change and are not always published online.

How to submit

The university's standing call directs papers to the editor of Ikenga at the Institute of African Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Enugu State, Nigeria, in hard or soft copy, giving the Institute's address as institute.Africanstudies@unn.edu.ng; the journal's own front matter adds the journal address ikengajournal@unn.edu.ng and an online submission route through its site at ikengajournal.unn.edu.ng. An author preparing a submission should: keep the whole paper within twenty pages including graphs, charts and appendix; write an abstract of not more than 200 words; reference in MLA style throughout; remove identifying information from the manuscript itself for double-blind review, keeping name, title, position and address for the cover information; and expect plagiarism screening and both internal and external review. Because the journal's centre is Africa, the covering message should make the paper's African focus and its contribution explicit in a sentence or two, and authors working from outside Nigeria — the journal publishes diaspora and comparative work as well — should expect the same scope test to be applied. Current editorial names, any fee position and the live state of the online submission system should be confirmed on the journal's site before sending, as these are the details most likely to have moved since the sources for this profile were fetched.

Who reads Ikenga, and how it is used

The journal's readers are African-studies scholars in Nigeria and abroad, researchers in the many disciplines its scope gathers, and — a readership institute journals serve particularly well — postgraduate students at Nigerian and other African universities working on African topics and looking for a venue that takes those topics as central rather than peripheral. Its articles are used in teaching as well as research: a documented oral narrative, a fieldwork-based case study or a study of a named community's institutions can be set before students in a way a purely theoretical article cannot, and the journal's habit of publishing such material alongside analytical work is one reason its volumes are held and cited beyond the citation counts quoted above. For the Institute itself, the journal is also a record: across its revived run it documents what African studies at Nsukka has been thinking about, decade by decade, from the concerns of the revival volumes to the health, governance and cultural questions visible in its most recent issues.

Similar journals

Readers and authors working in the same territory should compare the journal's companion title at the same institute, Ikoro, and the wider field of African-studies periodicals: the Journal of African Studies tradition represented in this directory by titles such as the African Studies Review; Research in African Literatures for the literary side of the journal's scope; the Journal of African Cultural Studies; and Nigerian university journals in the humanities and social sciences, several of which are profiled on their own JournalsWorld posts — including, for the visual and material-culture side of Igbo studies, the art and design journals listed in this directory's African categories. These are distinct journals with distinct ISSNs and publishers; none is an edition of Ikenga, whose identity is fixed by its own ISSN pair, its Nsukka home and its institute.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Ikenga? ISSN 2006-4241 and online ISSN 2714-4321, stored on this JournalsWorld record and grouped in its OpenAlex source record (S4210206030).

Who publishes Ikenga? The Institute of African Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in Enugu State, Nigeria.

What does the name mean? The Ikenga is a cult object of the Igbo-speaking peoples associated with success and good fortune in the professions and in life, and with the right arm — in the university's words, the Igbo god of achievement. The journal takes its name from it.

What does Ikenga publish? Original research, reviews, discussion, oral narratives, conceptual frameworks, analytical models, case studies and fieldwork across the whole spectrum of African studies — African thought and politics, literature, languages, drama, music, art, archaeology, religion, media, technology, gender and education among its listed areas.

How is it reviewed, and how long should a paper be? Double-blind, with internal and external review and plagiarism checks. The university call asks for an abstract of not more than 200 words, MLA referencing, and not more than twenty pages including graphs, charts and appendix.

What are its metrics? An h-index of 5 in the old JournalsWorld listing; OpenAlex (checked October 2026) records 193 works, 165 citations and a summary h-index of 5; SCImago records an SJR of 0.176 (2025) and a Q3 placement. Quote figures with their source named.

Is Ikenga indexed, and is it in DOAJ? Its front matter states indexing by EBSCO, and SCImago's Scopus-based listing evidences Scopus coverage. A DOAJ search by ISSN at checking time returned no listing.

Does it charge a fee? No fee figure could be verified from an official source fetched for this profile; ask the editorial office for the current position when submitting.

Sources and verification

This profile was researched in October 2026 from: the University of Nigeria's standing call for papers for the journal (name meaning, double-blind review, twice-yearly pattern, focus list, submission pattern and institute address); the journal's own published front matter in volumes 20 and 21 (editorial mastheads, review and plagiarism statements, EBSCO indexing note, journal addresses and online submission route); the Institute's published fiftieth-anniversary history (the Ikoro and Ikenga publication and revival record); citations of the journal's volume 24 (2023) and volume 26 (2025) articles in the scholarly literature (modern run and DOI prefix); the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 2006-4241 (source S4210206030; works, citations, summary statistics, topics, yearly counts); SCImago's Scopus-based listing (SJR 0.176, Q3, subject areas); DOAJ searches by both ISSNs, which returned no listing; and the pre-existing JournalsWorld record (ISSN pair, country, coverage 2019–2025, h-index 5), checked against those sources.