Of Yorubaland and 1st Encounters with Christianity

“What was not anticipated was the way in which the integrity of the indigenous Yoruba institutions of Abeokuta would begin to fell an unprecedented and unassimilable pressure. This is not to say that the region had been culturally insulated. At the time of Odegbami’s appointment (circa 1900-10), Islam has long been present and mosques were not unknown in the city. Islamic culture and doctrine and Yoruba belief and practice co-existed relatively free of tension, for Islam in West Africa went back many centuries and each system had had time and pressing reason to adjust, however uneasily, to the peculiar character of the other.

The new pressure came at this time from an intolerant, bumptious, and vigorously proselytizing European Christianity, a new dispensation that was not to content itself with the harvesting of souls and the elevation of the spirit, but which increasingly set itself the task of transforming societies. The missionaries—courageous and mostly doomed—frequently brought, or possibly had to bring, to their civilizing mission that narrow self-righteousness that is so often the sword and shield of the religious idealist.

More significantly, hard on the heels of their chapels, mission schools, and hospitals had come new laws and moral codes which were enforced by native courts, a parallel civil service buttressed by police and military forces, a mercantile economy accompanied by a different system of currency, and a new and mysterious system of land tenure, all of which in combination represented during the transition first a parallel government and then a superceding one. The cumulative effect of this challenge on all the traditional institutions
 of religion, culture, education, commerce, and government was the growing devaluation of native conceptions of identity, authority, and value on civic, moral and personal levels alike.”

Michael Thelwell, 1984, 180-81

“Introduction,”The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola