National Archives in Ibadan

I would like to write a few lines about my work in the Nigerian National Archives in Ibadan in April. As I have mentioned before, the purpose of my visit to the archives was mainly to find early 20th century documents in the Church Missionary Society (CMS) archives which can give me some indication of the impact of missionary language use on the nascent nationalist movement in the area and the concomitant efforts to form African Christian churches independent of the missionary churches. I was lucky enough to be in Ibadan when the National Archives' 60 year anniversary was held, which was celebrated with a Christian service outside the building.

Unfortunately, a large number of the documents I had expected to find in Ibadan were in fact not available. For example, despite the fact that the respective finding lists were available in Ibadan, documents with the shelfmarks CMS ECC 1 and CMS N (Niger Mission) could only be accessed in the archives in Enugu. Equally, out of the 18 documents I requested from the CMS Y collection (200 documents in total, 1844-1945), only 4 were actually available.

However, the information I was able to gather from the archives can be of considerable use not only to the limited area of my research outlined above.

I was able gather information about conflicts between the CMS and newly emerging native churches, particularly concerning the questions of polygamy and opening the native churches for those previously excommunicated from missionary churches. Trials over land ownership and physical violence against missionaries only served to aggravate the situation and the disapproval on the side of the missionary churches. Rev. Melville Jones' correspondence (CMS Y 1/6/1) in particular proved insightful in this matter. It was also interesting to see from reports about disputes between the native population and the Catholic Mission in the Roman Catholic Mission Papers that in the Benin Diocese similar problems for the missionaries arose almost simultaneously. An opposing point of view on the matter is offered by Herbert Macaulay in his 1941 lecture on "The history of the development of missionary works in Nigeria": "In consequence of certain differences of opinion which occurred between them and the authorities of the several Churches to which they belonged sometimes before the year 1891, they were moved by their honest convictions to secede as they came to the unanimous conclusion that the time had arrived for the Establishment in Lagos of a purely undesirable shackles of foreign control." These differences of opinion primarily arose from the tension of the 'imported' European form of Christianity and the desire to see a 'home-made' form of African Christianity emerge. Macaulay quotes to the sermon of a British Niger Mission agent towards the end of his lecture, which nicely encapsulates the matter: "The Gospel of Christ is for the whole world, it belongs as much to the African as to the European. In fact, in its origin it is more connected with Africa. [B]y associating [Christianity] altogether with European ideas and customs, we are narrowing its scope.”

Another aspect of my research which I would like to mention here is the question of who could access the discourse about missionary work produced by the missionaries' correspondence. It is not hard to guess that this discourse was on the whole informed by male Christian missionaries who wrote their letters, journals and reports for and sent them to male European Christians in the CMS headquarters in London. This means that two major groups involved in missionary activities were excluded from this discourse; African Christians (and also non-Christian natives) who were not intimately involved in the mission, and missionaries' wives[], who had often come to Yorubaland with their husband or, in the case of the African agents, lived in the mission compound, and were often entrusted with teaching tasks. 

The experiences and views of these two groups were generally not part of the picture that was painted of the state and progress of missionary efforts by the agents' correspondence. In the documents I found during my time in Ibadan, once again, women were mainly talked about but did either not take or were not given the opportunity to contribute to the discourse themselves. When Rev. Melville Jones, for example, writes in 1903 "I doubt if Mr. Harding's letter fully represents Mrs. Wood's view" (CMS Y 1/6/1), one can start to wonder if Mrs. Wood herself would not have been the ideal candidate the represent her view. A number of such examples found in the documents in Ibadan can now inform my writing on the power relations allowing or banning access and contribution to discourse.