Current attempts at understanding ‘neo-traditionalism’ in Africa stress the limits of invention and warn against according too great a role to colonial intervention. Colonialism nevertheless remains important to our understanding of specific neo-traditionalisms, not only because it forced particular social and economic changes on to African communities but also because of the way that Africans appropriated colonial claims. This article explores how Igbo villages were re-imagined as a result of the complex relations between Igbo ‘sons abroad’ and their hometowns during the colonial period. Appropriating the colonizers' claims to bring ‘progress’, migrants attempted to achieve status and influence in the villages from which they had migrated. These strategies shaped not only how migrants perceived their connection with their village, but also perceptions of the village itself: it came to include the ‘sons abroad’ in a diasporic public sphere that was not in itself geographically defined, but existed through reference to the village.