The Igbo, or Ibo people live in southeastern Nigeria, generally in the area of the Niger delta. As with most languages, theirs has (or did have) several dialects. Anglican missionary work there originated with the CMS in 1870, and coincided with the publication of the first Igbo BCP, in the Isuama dialect. There was one additional translation in this dialect, one in the Lower Igbo dialect, and two in the Upper Igbo (or Onitsha) dialect.

The text used here is the current translation, called Igbo Union, of the 1662 BCP. It was first published around 1945, but with several earlier components. This printing has a hymnal bound up with it with the date of 1977, and the (undated) Prayer Book portion likely also comes from about that time. It is a somewhat abridged version of the 1662 BCP, as may be seen from the Table of Contents below. It also includes an Appendix of various services and prayers. It is listed as 58:1 in David Griffiths' Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer. The 1662 BCP was used in Nigeria up until 1996; it does not appear that an Igbo translation has been made of the new Nigerian Book of Common Prayer.

The Igbo language includes a number of diacritical marks, including notably vowel macrons and an 'o' with a dot underneath. This text used here additionally includes a 'b' with a > underneath, but, since that is not a part of Unicode (and so can't be rendered on the Web) and isn't part of Igbo as it is currently written, it has been ignored.

More information on older Igbo translations may be found in The Book of Common Prayer Among the Nations of the World, and newer ones in an essay in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer. Three of these older translations, one from 1897 into the Upper Igbo dialect (Griffiths 57:1), and two others in the Isuama dialect, one from 1871 (Griffiths 55:1), and the other from 1907 (Griffiths 55:2), are available from Google Books as PDF graphics.

We also have the entire book (less the Hymnal) available for download as PDF graphics. There is extractable text, but it has not been proofread and undoubtedly contains errors, especially where there are diacriticals. See below for the link.