“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
