Ancestor, Book, Church: How Nigerian Literature Responds to the Missionary Encounter
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ANCESTOR, BOOK, CHURCH: HOW NIGERIAN LITERATURE RESPONDS TO THE MISSIONARY ENCOUNTER by Stephen Ney B.A.Sc., The University of Lethbridge, 1999 M.C.S., Regent College, 2002 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) May 2010 © Stephen Ney, 2010 ABSTRACT Ancestor, Book, Church reinserts into Nigerian literary history the texts generated by the nineteenth-century Anglican missionary incursion into Yorubaland, in the southwest of today’s Nigeria. I demonstrate how these early texts – in Yoruba and in English, written by Europeans and by Africans – and the histories and modes of thought that they reflect can be used as resources for understanding contemporary African literatures. Thus I argue against those who would dismiss the missionary text as absolutely foreign to and the missionary encounter as strictly an interruption of an “authentic” African cultural history. In much of Nigeria during the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries the first literacy training was provided by missionaries, whose goal in teaching the ABCs was typically to lead indigenous people away from ancestral beliefs, through books, to the church. Yet this ideal linear sequence is inadequate as a description of what was in practice a complex, dialogical process. Sometimes the education and technologies associated with books enabled writers to reconfigure and revivify ancestral beliefs, to incorporate them into a revised form of Christianity, or to turn towards secularity. In all cases, I argue, literature in Nigeria engaged and engages with the legacy of missionary Christianity. I find evidence for this engagement not only in the contextual and thematic dimensions of literary texts but also, and especially, in a mode of signification exemplified by the English missionaries’ favourite fictional text, The Pilgrim’s Progress, a translation of which was also the first work of extended fiction to be written in Yorubaland. Ancestor, Book, Church reads nineteenth-century missionary texts and twentieth- century literary texts together as instances of the ways that Nigerians think and believe. It builds therefore upon research by anthropologists and scholars of religions, which it presents ii in the first chapter, and then moves into a literary analysis, informed by postcolonial theory, of the Nigerian writers Samuel Ajayi Crowther, D. O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, and Wole Soyinka. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................... ii TABLE OF CONTENTS.................................................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES ..............................................................................................v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................ vi CHAPTER ONE Introduction .......................................................................1 Methodology ......................................................................................................................... 8 The Colonial Encounter as Conversational and Cultural .................................................... 11 The Colonial Encounter as Religious ................................................................................. 18 Religious-Historical Contexts ............................................................................................. 28 CHAPTER TWO A Book-Person: Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the Beginning of Writing in Yorubaland ........................................................ 47 Crowther’s Life and Works ................................................................................................ 52 Censorship and Vernacularization: Crowther among the Missionaries .............................. 59 Two Crowthers in Three Works ......................................................................................... 65 A Literary Response to Crowther’s Legend ....................................................................... 86 CHAPTER THREE English Pilgrim and African Ancestor: Towards a Postcolonial Literary History ...................................................................95 Questions of History and Literary Periodization in Postcolonialism ................................. 97 Pilgrim Comes Home to Yorubaland: Indirection plus Instruction in the Missionaries’ Bunyan .................................................................................................................. 114 Into the Folkloric Forest and Home Again: Three Yoruba Writers and the Question of (Literary) History .................................................................................................. 128 CHAPTER FOUR The New Generation of Interpreters: Wole Soyinka Writes beyond the Missionary Encounter ..............................................150 Soyinka’s Yoruba, Secular Religion ................................................................................. 151 A Colonialist and a Forest Spirit: Two Readings of the Missionary Encounter .............. 160 Radin’s Priest-Thinker and Ogun: Two Figures of Soyinka’s Religious Position .......... 168 Lazarus is the Ladder: The Interpreters as Interpretive Education .................................. 178 CHAPTER 5 Conclusion: The Two Faces of Eşu .....................................188 WORKS CITED ...............................................................................................200 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Pro-Christian cartoon of the three prominent religions among the Yoruba, by Samuel Crowther, Jr. (Peel 89). ...................................................................................... 26 Figure 2. An Ifa divination tray, or Opon Ifa (Gates 11). Used by permission of Oxford University Press. ............................................................................................................. 34 Figure 3. Map of key nineteenth-century towns of the Yoruba, in today’s southwestern Nigeria............................................................................................................................. 46 Figure 4: Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther in 1888 (public domain). ...................................... 58 Figure 5: Portrait of David and Anna Hinderer (Peel 138). .................................................. 117 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As an extravert, I have always felt that Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s journey was too solitary, and regretted that he had to leave his friends and family in order to progress towards the Celestial City. Though his journey was his own, however, he depended upon the help of others at every stage, and so have I. Interactions with my three generous and wise supervisors, Mark Vessey, Laura Moss, and John Barker, have been the most satisfying moments of my pilgrimage, and I thank them. In addition, I have benefited greatly from academic conversation with Andrew F. Walls, Maxine Hancock, Robert Miller, Bettina Stumm, Susan Kennedy Carter, Sarah Banting, and the members of UBC’s Postcolonial Research Cluster; and from the gracious editing help of Jeremy Robinson, Christina Rowan, and Karen Giesbrecht. In Nigeria, Profs. Philip Adedotun Ogundeji, Dele Oshitelu, and Femi Osofisan shared their expertise; Prof. F. J. Ade Ajayi shared his library; Dr. Kunle Ajayi shared his home and car; and my dear friends Adeshina Afolayan and Chika Mba shared their knowledge of place and language. My late Granddad provided the example of what I think is the best kind of academic, and Grandma and Aunt Marg have provided abundant fuel (the Tetley has never run dry!) for the journey. My parents not only got me started but encouraged me and prayed for me at every step, and with love I dedicate this dissertation to them. vi CHAPTER ONE Introduction The University of Ibadan, which has been regarded as Nigeria’s premier research university, was founded in 1947 as Ibadan University College, and in its early years was affiliated to the University of London. More than any other institution in West Africa it has been a greenhouse for the growth of literature – particularly in the years surrounding Nigeria’s independence in 1960 from the British (Wren 17). Internationally renowned Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, J. P. Clark-Bekederemo, Cyprian Ekwensi, Flora Nwapa, Christopher Okigbo, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, and Wole Soyinka have all studied or taught there. The University also became famous in those years in relation to the development of nationalist African historiography; from UI came key early texts (by Jacob F. Ade Ajayi, Emmanuel A. Ayandele, and K. Onwuka Dike) that demonstrated that Africa had a history apart from European colonialism (Parker and Rathbone 124). As an important producer of books about Africa, the University of Ibadan boasts a large bookstore, which I looked forward to visiting when I had the opportunity to visit UI in October of 2007. There I found plenty of scientific textbooks (many written by graduates of the university) and several of the novels and plays I was seeking. However, when I arrived at the bookstore, before I reached any of the academic books I encountered a small section 1 called the Christian Book Corner, located right at the entrance. From what I could gather, the CBC and the UI bookstore are interdependent but not strictly the same company, though the former has been housed in the latter