Young Converts: Christian Missions, Gender and Youth in Onitsha, Nigeria 1880-1929.pdf - 3 views
-
Christian faith, to become the "helpmeets" for their Christian male contemporaries and proper mothers of the next Christian (hopefully Anglican) generation. Women, therefore, mattered to CMS missionaries both as the domestic purveyors of an Anglican culture and as exemplars for women's christianization throughout the Nigerian southeast. While Anglican Igbo women, too, were to be missionaries of a sort, their mission was to be bounded by the walls of their European-style homes or, at most, kept to specific Christian localities over which their husbands held priestly sw
-
C[raven]. R. Wilson)' In the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth Church Missionary Society (Anglican) missionaries, both of African and European descent, became interested in gaining converts among Igbo-speaking women in southeastern Nigeria. Schooling was an integral part of the conversion process. This education was perceived by the missionaries as a concomitant training to that of young, Igbo-speaking men. Igbo men were seen as the deepest foundations of the Anglican church in southeastern Niger
-
In the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth Church Missionary Society (Anglican) missionaries, both of African and European descent, became interested in gaining converts among Igbo-speaking women in southeastern Nigeria. Schooling was an integral part of the conversion process. This education was perceived by the missionaries as a concomitant training to that of young, Igbo-speaking men. Igbo men were seen as the deepest foundations of the Anglican church in southeastern Niger
- ...8 more annotations...
-
Female missionaries, perhaps acting out of their own experiences of domestic isolation as well as Christian feminist principles, tried to mitigate this isolation somewhat by establishing women's groups at school. One such group was the Scripture Union, for those women who could read their Bibles and by encouraging Christian women who had graduated from their training to meet periodically as "Old Girls" or members of Christian women's associations. In the early 1900s regular Women's Conferences were established by joint committees of female missionaries and prominent Old Girls. The first of these conferences was held in Janu
-
CMS missionaries first appeared in Onitsha, on the eastern banks of the Niger River, in the 1860s-partially in response to Bishop Crowther's shrewd economic and political assessment of the future importance of the town for European colonialism. When the first missionary (the Rev. Taylor, a repatriated Igbo) arrived, however, he found that Christian evangelism in the town would be difficult and fraught with dangers. Ndi onicha (Onitsha people) eagerly accepted European merchandise and were already involved with the representatives of European trading firms. They were, however, highly skeptical of the offer of a new religion, particularly once they discovered that African CMS missionaries were accorded little respect by western traders. This meant that important Onitsha elders kept their distance from the missionar
-
h century. Missionaries of African descent were recruited in an evangelical campaign in that city by Anglican Bishop Samuel Crowther (a repatriated Yoruba speaker) duri
-
-
Although the majority of Igbo-speaking girls during this period were unlikely to approach the missions, Dennis' account shows us that some were not only willing to take the risk of offending their parents and destroying their patrilineally arranged marital opportunities, they had determined upon it. For Dennis, of course, these were the "women who wanted to be good," but from the point of view of Idumuje Ugboko elders, they must have seemed young hellions, bent on destroying proper gender relations along with carefully constructed networks of alliance and affinity. The picture of girls dragged screaming into the night was constructed by Dennis to woo potential CMS donors for a girls' training institution in western Igbo. Nonetheless, there remains in the account something of the horror and embarrassment that must have been felt by every participant in these evening dr
-
Although the majority of Igbo-speaking girls during this period were unlikely to approach the missions, Dennis' account shows us that some were not only willing to take the risk of offending their parents and destroying their patrilineally arranged marital opportunities, they had determined upon it. For Dennis, of course, these were the "women who wanted to be good," but from the point of view of Idumuje Ugboko elders, they must have seemed young hellions, bent on destroying proper gender relations along with carefully constructed networks of alliance and a
-
The children of Christian women had already proved to be the foundation of the Anglican church in the forty years since its inception in Igboland, and CMS missionaries were eager to maintain a hold on the imaginations of children to come through their mothers' examples of f
-
The CMS missionaries therefore had to respond to their own ambivalences about both the centrality of marriage to Christian culture (most of the women missionaries were unmarried while in the Niger Mission) and the need to establish a proper, liminal period of "youth" or "girlhood" for christianized women to prepare them for their duties as wives and helpmeets to Christian husbands. Older women were welcome as converts, but the missionaries were constantly disappointed at how little influence such women seemed to hold over their "heathen" husbands, at least in terms of evangelis
-
Missionized men who showed some interest in evangelism were, by the 1910s, often sent off to villages at some distance from mission centers like Onitsha in order to prepare the way for more professional missionaries or to demonstrate their own fitness for more evangelical responsibility. Their young, recently trained wives would either accompany them directly or be sent for after completing their course.27 Wives' immediate duties included assisting their husbands in setting up Bible studies as well as developing a mod
