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For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

J. D. Y. Peel
J. D. Y. Peel
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
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Extract

When anthropologists come to examine the role of Christian missionaries in the transformation of non-Western societies, as they have done increasingly over the past decade, they soon become deeply embroiled in debates about narrative. Most obvious and immediate are the written and published narratives in which missionaries report their activities, providing the single most important source of data. But the more fundamental issues lie beyond: They have to do with the role of narrative in the social transformation itself, and eventually with the place of narrative in the ethnographic account that anthropology sets itself to produce. In this essay, which arises from a larger project on the encounter of religions in nineteenth-century Yorubaland, the focus of the argument will move through several levels of narrative, but it will start and finish with an argument that demonstrates why narrative is so important for the achievement of a properly historical anthropology.

Type
Ethnographic Drama
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , July 1995 , pp. 581 - 607
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1995

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References

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36 The Church Missionary Society was founded in 1799 by leading members of the evangelical wing of the Church of England. For an excellent recent study of its intellectual and social milieu, see Hilton, B., The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).Google Scholar The CMS's great secretary, Henry Venn (1841–73), was strongly committed to the ideal of self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating local churches, so the development of “native agency” was a priority of the mission. The presence of many Yoruba among the Christianized “liberated Africans” in Siena Leone enabled the Yoruba mission to realize this policy from the outset, a circumstance nearly unique in missions to Africa. For details, see the classic studies by Ajayi, J. F. Ade, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891 (London: Longman, 1965),Google Scholar and Ayandele, E. A., The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914 (London: Longman, 1966).Google Scholar

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38 See White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in his The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1–25.Google ScholarPubMed

39 Young, C. N., Journal, May 2, 1875.Google Scholar

40 This structure has some similarity to the typical conversion narrative current in Santa Isabel (White, Geoffrey M., Identity through History, ch. 4). Here, too, a dialectical schema is used: approach/resistance/acceptance. White argues that these narratives are “mythical schemes which … work to recreate social and emotional meanings as much as they function to ‘preserve’ historical events” (p. 160), and shows, by comparing them with contemporary mission records, how much the events of many decades before had been reworked. The Yoruba approach/response/reposte structure is not only contemporary to the events reported but can be taken as shaping them, as it is intelligible as a strategy as well as a report.Google Scholar

41 Young, C. N., Journal, April 20, 1875.Google Scholar The crisp opening almost suggests that Young was anticipating the well-known debate about ancestor worship that took place in the pages of Africa in the 1960s, launched by Kopytoff's, Igor “Ancestors and Elders in Africa,” Africa, 41:2 (1971), 129–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Kermode's, FrankThe Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967),Google Scholar which has been so influential in shaping the discussion of emplotment, seems especially congenial to these missionary texts since it is so much to do with the literary influence of Christian ideas of completion such as pleroma, to eschata. These ideas, of course, were more than literary: They had practical social consequences.

43 King, T., Journal, September 15, 1855.Google Scholar

44 Carr, , Time, Narrative, and History, 59.Google Scholar

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46 E.g., , Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);Google ScholarStromberg, P. G., Language and Self-Transformation: Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

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50 Barber, J., Journal, January 4, 1855.Google Scholar

51 Further on slave narratives, see Curtin, P., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967);Google ScholarDavis, C. T. and Gates, H. L., Jr., eds.; The Slave's Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

52 See, too, White, James (himself a former slave), Journal, October 22, 1862:Google Scholar “Formerly it was your notion [he tells pagan interlocutors at Ota] that when a black man is sold and taken to white man's country, that the person is gone to the other world, believing him to be really dead.” For similar ideas about the identity of the enslaved and the dead among the BaKongo, see McGaffey, W., Modern Kongo Prophets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 126–40.Google Scholar See, too, Orlando Patterson's idea of the slave as “a socially dead person,” in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38 ff.Google Scholar

53 Barber, J., Journal, January 4, 1855.Google Scholar

54 Thus, the Englishman Edward Roper to Venn, H., December 3, 1861.Google Scholar

55 Moore, W. to the Reverend Jones, W., April 30, 1863. Dahomey actually attacked Abeokuta, the Egba capital, on only three occasions, but fears of an invasion were recurrent almost every dry season till the late 1880s. These fears tended to enhance mutual feelings of dependence between the Christian body and the town authorities.Google Scholar

56 Pearse, S. to Venn, H., December 31, 1859. The source of the quotation is not acknowledged.Google Scholar

57 Pearse, S., Annual Letter to Venn, H., January 13, 1868. The reference is to Luke 5:5.Google Scholar

58 Phillips, C., Senior, Journal, March 22, 1855;Google ScholarHinderer, D., Journal, July 22, 1851,Google Scholar specifically comparing the manner of Oluyole's death to Herod's; Okuseinde, J., Journal, January 20, 1878, on an influential man in Ibadan who said he'd like to be a Christian if his position would let him.Google Scholar

59 There are many instances, including, among others, the king of Ota, a senior diviner at Oyo, several chiefs at Ibadan, a war chief at Ijaye, and a chief at Isaga.

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65 Idem, Journal, January 31. 1848.

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67 Josipovici, Gabriel, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988),Google Scholar ch. 6. Also of great value are the chapters on Joshua and Judges and on I and II Samuel by Gunn, D. M. and Rosenberg, J., respectively, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, Alter, R. and Kermode, F., eds. (London: Collins, 1987).Google Scholar

68 One might even see this as an early showing of a topic which has continued high on the intellectual agenda of Africa—state formation—and which provided a crucial terrain for the convergence of social anthropology and African history since in the 19605. See Forde, D. and Kaberry, P. M., eds., West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1967),Google Scholar and “Systèmes étatiques africains,” special issue, Cahiers d'études africaines, 22:87–88 (1982).Google Scholar

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70 Horton, R., “African Conversion,” Africa, 41:2 (1971), 85–108;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and, more fully, “On the Rationality of Conversion,” Africa, 43:3 (1973), 219–35 and 43:4, 372–99.Google Scholar For a recent evaluation of Norton's thesis and something of the debate it triggered, see Hefner, R. W., ed., Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 20–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71 Hinderer, D., Half-Yearly Report, ending September 1859.Google Scholar

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73 For a fuller exposition of the ideas in this and the following paragraph, see Peel, , “Pastor and Babalawo.”Google Scholar

74 Johnson, S., Journal, November 16, 1882.Google Scholar

75 For a suggestive exploration of how Ifa as oral literature differs from Sc?pture and of what occurs when attempts are made to assimilate it to Christian forms, see Barber, Karin, “Discursive Strategies in the Texts of Ifa and in the ‘Holy Book of Odu’ of the African Church of Orunmila,” in Farias, P. F. de Moraes and Barg, K., eds., Self-Assertion and Brokerage: Early Cultural Nationalism in West Africa (Birmingham: Centre of West African Studies, 1990), 196–224.Google Scholar

76 E.g., the recent speculative attempt by Andrew Apter to give pagan credentials to Bishop Crowther: Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 194–204.Google Scholar

77 Words that have been used in the British coronation service since 1689 at the point when a copy of the Bible is presented—nowadays by the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland—to the sovereign. Lowther-Clarke, W. K., Liturgy and Worship (London: Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 1932), 699.Google Scholar

78 There is no full-length modern synthetic history of the Yoruba wars. But see Ajayi, J. F. Ade and Smith, R. S., Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964);Google ScholarAkintoye, S. A., Revolution and Power Politics in Yorubaland, 1840–1893 (London: Longman, 1971);Google ScholarAwe, Bolanle, “Militarism and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Yoruba Country,” Journal of African History, 14:1 (1973), 65–77;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFalola, Toyin, The Political Economy of a Pre-Colonial West African State: Ibadan, 1830–1900 (Ile-Ife: University of Ife Press, 1984).Google Scholar

79 See Miller, J. C., “Introduction,” in The African Past Speaks, Miller, J. C., ed. (Folkestone and Hamden, Conn.: Dawson and Archon, 1980);Google Scholar for a Yoruba study, Peel, J. D. Y., “Making History: The Past in the Ijesha Present,” Man, 19:1 (1984), 111–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

80 Pearse, S., Journal, November 12, 1963.Google Scholar

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82 White, J., Journal, January 11, 1866.Google Scholar It does seem unlikely that the Aro would have spontaneously used the missionary metaphor of light/darkness that White puts into his mouth here.

83 Allen, W. S., Journal, May 24, 1873.Google Scholar

84 In the Yoruba Bible, owe is used to render both the Book of Proverbs (lwe Owe) and the parables of the New Testament, e.g., “And he spake this parable unto them” (O si pa owe yi fun won) (Luke 15:3).

85 On Yoruba narrative genres and their relationship to other oral genres, see Deirdre LaPin, “Story, Medium, and Masque: The Idea and Art of Yoruba Storytelling” (Ph.D. disser., University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1977), ch. i. There is some regional variation in these terms, but LaPin notes that the use of owe as story + proverb (= parable) is particularly found at Ibadan, where W. S. Allen's instance came from.

86 See text above (p. 592).

87 One thinks of Aristotle, Poetics 145 Ib: “… poetry [= owe] is more akin to philosophy and a better thing than history [= isan]; poetry deals with general truths, history with specific events.”

88 Allen, W. S., Journal, January 27, 1878. If any reader wonders why old men appear so often as Allen's interlocutors, the reason is that throughout the 1870s and 1880s the bulk of Ibadan's young and active male population was absent from the town for long periods on campaigns in Ijesha and Ekiti.Google Scholar

89 I.e., “The intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature,” (Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,Google ScholarEmerson, C. and Holquist, M., trans. [ Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], 84 ff).Google Scholar

90 Quoted by Williams, J. A. T., Journal, February 26, 1880, at Palma, in a discussion about the afterlife. My colleague Akin Oyetade tells me that the common contemporary form of the proverb is “Arve l'oj” (The world is a market …).Google Scholar Still, the idea of aiye l'ajo (journey of life) is very much still current: See Drewal, M., Yoruba Ritual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), ch. 3.Google Scholar

91 Hinderer, D., Journal, September 17, 1858.Google Scholar

92 Ibid., May 2, 1856.

93 Maser, J. A., Journal, May 3, 1858, at Lagos.Google Scholar

94 On the constitutive role of canonical language in the making of stories (and hence also lives) among modem American evangelical Christians, see Stromberg, , Language and Self-Transformation, 11–13 et passim.Google Scholar