Preparing my trip to Nigeria

I'm currently in the middle of organising my one-month trip to Nigeria in April this year. I will stay in Ibadan, Oyo State, for about three weeks and then travel around Yorubaland, the Southwest of the country, for another week.

I'm planning to work in the National Archive in Ibadan to research private letters and journals of prominent political and religious figures like Herbert Macaulay, the grandson of Africa's first bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther and pioneer of Nigerian nationalism, as well as the brothers Alexander Babatunde Akinyele, bishop of Ibadan and CBE, and HRH Isaac Babalola Akinyele, Ibadan's second Christian Olubadan. I'm hoping to explore the ramifications of 19th century missionary language use on religious coexistence and tensions of early 20th century Yorubaland, and the rise of Nigerian nationalism in the same period,


From consulting the material I expect to learn about the space allowed for Yoruba religious heritage in early modern forms of Nigerian Christianity. The Akinyele brothers were highly influential public figures in positions of both clerical and mundane power; tracing back their views on syncretism as well as their position towards Islam to 19th century missionary language use connects the missionary enterprise I mainly focus on in my research with the formative period of Nigerian Christianity. From the private papers of Herbert Macaulay I also expect to discover more about the relation between the rise of Nigerian nationalism and the religious landscape of the early 20th century. The role of Yoruba religious heritage and Christianity respectively in mundane power struggles will be of equal interest to me as the dialectic of Islam as an ally against European influence and a threat to a Christian elite in the emerging nation.


Towards the end of my stay I'm planning to travel to several places in Yorubaland: Abẹokuta, the centre of the Yoruba mission between the late 1840s and 1860s; Ile-Ife, according to Yoruba anthropogony the birthplace of all human beings; possibly the sacred forest of Osogbo with its shrine to the Yoruba goddess Osun; Lagos, centre of the British colonial administration. I'm hoping to experience first-hand the long-term repercussions of the 19th century religious encounter between European and African missionaries, African converts, Muslims, and the traditional Yoruba population.

I'm of course planning to post regular updates on this blog, where possible including photos.

Teaching religion in HE

In their series Academics Anonymous, The Guardian today published an article by a Russell group university 'senior academic in a religion department' who feels their authority in the class room and the environment of critical engagement with religious ideas is being undermined by the presence of a majority of evangelical Christian students. Not wanting to qualify the author's distress, I can gladly say that my experiences so far have by and large been different (with a few notable exceptions). Having said that, I do feel the authors raises the worrying issue of cultural and social homogeneity on UK campuses. While the rise of tuition fees and the partial privatisation of student loans no doubt affect faculties across the board, the critical and secular engagement with religious traditions and their presence and influence in public life in particular suffers from the lack of a broad variety of students from all walks of life, social and cultural backgrounds, and (non-) beliefs, which gives rise to a complacent and matter-of-fact atmosphere in a filter bubble unsuited for uncomfortable questions and agile, critical minds.

New beginnings

I am happy to say that I can start off this blog with excellent news: The peer-reviewed journal Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics has been kind enough to include my paper "Spreading which word? Philological, theological and socio-political considerations behind the nineteenth-century Bible translation into Yorùbá." in their latest issue, pp. 54-83.

In this paper I offer a linguistic perspective on C19 missionary correspondence from South-West Nigeria concerned with the translation of the Bible and other Christian texts into Yorùbá. I reconstruct the considerations behind thet ranslations and the often unexpected linguistic, religious, and political repercussions of missionary work. I show that the missionaries, by committing Yorùbá to writing, developing the Christian vocabulary, and by linguistically reinterpreting elements of native theology and cosmology, reconceptualising the native population’s world, effectively wielded linguistic power over their target audience. However, as can be seen in the case of the Yorùbá deity Èṣú, who through his 'translation' as the Christian devil remained meaningful in the converts' minds and lives, the native readers also re-appropriated the translated text and thus became active creators and not merely passive recipients of the message delivered to them.

I find the time of the publication rather encouraging. It correlates with my idea to open a blog, writing about my interdisciplinary postdoctoral research at the University of Leeds, in which I provide a synthesised account of the power of language to create, reflect and interpret reality in inter-religious contact, as well as my thoughts on the intertwined nature of religion(s) and language(s).