Nwando Achebe was born in Enugu, eastern Nigeria to Nigerian writer, essayist, and poet, Chinua Achebe, and Christie Chinwe Achebe, a professor of Education. She is the wife of Folu Ogundimu, professor of journalism at Michigan State University, and mother of a daughter, Chino. Her older brother, Chidi Chike Achebe is a physician-executive.
She has published six books. Her first book, , was published by Heinemann in 2005. Heralded as a “landmark in African historiography” by Distinguished Professor and author, Isidore Okpewho, and "a major event in African gender studies publishing," by Chancellor Professor and feminist scholar, Obioma Nnaemeka, Achebe’s Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings represents an important contribution to understanding gender and women’s history in Africa, as well as political and religious change in the colonial period. A significant and sustained intervention into debates over feminist historical methodology, the book centers what Achebe theorizes as the “female spiritual principle” and northern Igbo women’s lives in ways that existing texts on Igbo history do not, by presenting both as active participants in the making of northern Igboland. Throughout the study, northern Igbo gendered histories are used to challenge received orthodoxies that characterize African women as subordinate by raising questions and presenting evidence concerning the true nature of female power and authority within this particular Igbo society. The author identifies she considers the religious, economic and political structures that allowed women to achieve measures of power during the precolonial or tupu ndi ocha abia epoch; as well as the effect of colonialism and missionary encroachment on these old structures and on women’s choices. As a piece of scholarship, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings is unsurpassed in its engagement with indigenous meaning, interpretation and understanding. Her second book, the critically acclaimed The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, was published in 2011 by Indiana University Press. It is a full-length biography on the only female warrant chief and king in British Africa, and it has won three book awards: the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, The Barbara "Penny" Kanner Book Prize and the . A Leeds African Studies Bulletin review of the book calls it “one of the most compellingly argued, rigorously researched scholarly writings in the fields of history and women studies in colonial Igbo society, Nigeria and Africa." The biography, a fascinating case study of an extraordinary Igbo woman, Ahebi Ugbabe —who during the course of her life transformed herself into a female king—reveals much about the shifting bases of gendered power under British indirect rule and the ways in which Igbo women and men negotiated and shaped the colonial environment. Drawing on extensive oral research, Achebe situates Ahebi’s life within the context of multiple gendered transformations into the femalemasculinities of female Headman, female Warrant Chief, female King and female husband. At the same time, the biography delineates the limits of such gendered transformations. In sum, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria illuminates one woman’s agency in remapping the terrain of traditional and colonial gendered politics in her district. Dr. Achebe is a co-author of the 2018 History of West Africa E-Course Book, “a textbook aimed at West African students taking West African Senior School Certificate Examination History Paper 1, “West Africa and the Wider World from Earliest Times to 2000.” She is also co-editor with William Worger and Charles Ambler of ACompanion to African History, and with Claire Robertson, Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective. Achebe's 2020 Female Monarchs and Merchants Queens in Africa is published by Ohio University Press.
