And now, back to the mother continent
Emeka Ojukwu, The Missionary Revolution and the Remaking of the Igbo (Anambra Univ. Press 1982)
… The Igbo and the delta peoples were spared the three-cornered religious struggle that took place among the Yoruba. There was a considerable geographic and cultural separation between them and the Muslim polities to the north; they had little exposure to Islam in precolonial times, and sporadic visits by Malê traders did little to change that. For them, the battle between religions during the last half of the nineteenth century was a straightforward one: Christian monotheism against Odinala animism, the new against the old, the growing influence of Europe against the traditional elites.
On the other hand, a two-sided struggle proved more than enough.
The Igbo, unlike the Yoruba, had not experienced the fall of a powerful empire. The saying was, and still is,
Igbo enwe eze – “the Igbo have no king.” All the same, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a devastating time – ironically, because of both the Atlantic slave trade and its suppression. Many Igbo were kidnapped into slavery, and their village societies were hard hit by the endemic warfare associated with the trade. At the same time, other Igbo polities, including the powerful Aro Confederacy, had prospered as middlemen, becoming wealthy from traffic in palm oil and slaves; the end of the slave trade weakened them both economically and militarily, and left their victims eager for revenge. By 1850, the combination of a power vacuum, traditional rivalries and new-minted hatreds had cast Igboland into civil war.
The coming of Christianity added a new dimension to the conflict. Missionaries operating under the British aegis had already made major inroads into the delta kingdoms of Bonny and Calabar, which were British protectorates in all but name. They had already begun to expand their efforts into Igboland by the time the century reached its halfway point, establishing the first Igbo-language press and distributing Bibles and religious tracts throughout the hinterland. But what the missionaries understood as a battle for souls, the Igbo saw in terms of power. In a culture that was undergoing wrenching change and in which accepted verities no longer made sense, a new religion represented a chance for the powerless to reshape their society, and many seized that chance. And, just as might be expected, many of the established power-wielders resisted.
The fact that the choice between religions was all-or-nothing added intensity to the struggle. The missionaries had no tolerance for folk religion; to them, traditional practices represented heathen backwardness to be extirpated root and branch. In time there
would be a revival of many folkways, and a synthesis of Chukwu and Christ, as the missionaries’ influence waned and colonial-era divisions became less acute, but in the nineteenth century, it was one or the other.
In some ways, this too advantaged the powerless; for instance, where the missionaries gained control, they banned the killing of twins and decreed that members of the
osu outcast class were to be treated as equals. Indeed, this often resulted in a temporary inversion of the social order as the
osu, who were first to accept Christianity, became deacons in the church, although lingering caste prejudices sometimes caused them to lose this position once their better-placed neighbors adopted the faith.
By the same token, however, the power of the traditional priesthood was totally broken in any place where Christianity triumphed; there could be no compromise, no blending of the old faith and the new. Ironically, this would be what made Christianity attractive to chieftains as well as commoners: if there was bad blood between a ruler and the local priesthood – as there often was – then the Christian faith was a powerful weapon on the ruler’s side. By the 1860s, Igboland was a patchwork of warring mini-states operating under the principle of
cuius regio, eius religio: where the ruler was Christian, the missionaries and deacons held sway and traditional folkways were driven underground; where the chief held to the Odinala faith, the missionaries and their converts were the ones who were persecuted.
All else being equal, the battle might have been an even one, but all else was not equal; instead, both the village-states which accepted Christianity and those that resisted it acted as wedges for British influence. To the Christian rulers, Britain offered protection from their neighbors; those willing to cede control over their foreign relations and grant preferential status to British merchants, as many of the coastal peoples had done, were brought under the umbrella of the pax Britannica. As for the non-Christians, their attacks on missionaries and Christianized villages provided a convenient pretext for punitive expeditions, several of which were mounted between 1863 and 1872. As yet, Britain had no plans to conquer the interior – that design would come later – but British power gave the missionaries and their allies a decisive edge in the cultural war.
With British political influence came commercial influence, and British merchants were not the only ones to profit; along with them came the remarkable Jaja of Opobo, the Merchant Prince of Bonny. An Igbo himself by birth, Jaja – whose full name was Jubo Jubogha – was sold as a slave to an Ijaw merchant in the Niger Delta at the age of twelve. He bought himself out of slavery while still a youth, and became successively the head of the Anna Pepple trading house, the leader of the breakaway Opobo city-state, and finally King of Bonny, which Opobo now dominated. By this time he had become fabulously rich on the palm-oil trade, chartering British ships to transport his goods directly to Liverpool, and through this traffic, he became acquainted with several influential British importers.
Jaja was convinced that Britain represented the new order and, in 1865, he became a Christian and formed a trading company that included several British partners. Through his kinship connections to the Igbo, he was able to piggyback on the growing British-missionary presence in the interior and secure monopolies on the palm-oil production of many villages. In some cases, the Opobo Palm-Oil Company bought the palm plantations outright and invited their former Igbo owners to set up as merchants in Bonny; it would be these men who began to build the reputation of the Igbo as a mercantile people second only to the Malê in the Niger region.
For a time, the palm-oil business made Opobo one of the wealthiest cities in Africa, with its people becoming avid consumers of imported goods and its king cultivated by European and African alike. Indeed, when Jaja visited London in 1871, he became the first African ruler to make a state visit to Britain, and the first to be received at Buckingham Palace, although the courtiers tactfully failed to inform him that his reception was very different from what would have been given to a European monarch. But many British merchants chafed at having to work through an African partner and, with the aid of like-minded men in the Foreign Office and the local consulate, schemed to muscle Jaja aside and take full possession of the lower Niger. The maturation of this plan, in which both the spiritual and temporal aspects of British influence would be recruited as partners, would have profound consequences not merely for the delta kingdoms but for Igboland as well…
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Ayo Aderemi, “Islam, Colonialism and Nationalism in Yorubaland,” African History Quarterly 58: 270-94 (Summer 2004)
… When people speak of Yoruba Islam, they are almost certainly referring to the folk Islam that developed during the later nineteenth century through exposure to Malê traders and teachers. If so, they are being incomplete. The northernmost Yoruba towns, particularly Ilorin, had been Islamic for centuries, and their version of the faith was relatively orthodox. And even in the southern cities where Islam did not begin to penetrate until the 1850s, the educated classes – and particularly the educated women, who learned from the
jaji teaching corps – were also largely conventional in their belief. It was not until the twentieth century, as more Yoruba kings and nobles followed their people into Islam, that a significant number of upper-class Yoruba would adopt folk Islam as a means of maintaining the continuity of dynastic customs. But nevertheless, the popular perception of Yoruba Islam has a great deal of truth to it, as the folk version of the faith is the one that the great majority of Muslim Yoruba follow, and the one that has ultimately had the most influence on Yoruba culture.
Egungun
masquerade in Ile-Ife
What, exactly, is meant by “folk Islam?” By its nature, folk religion cannot be precisely defined, as practices and beliefs may vary from town to town and family to family. In general, however, the peasant Islam of the Yoruba centers around a number of commonalities:
- The veneration of saints. The Sufi tradition of sainthood became a convenient method for the Yoruba to continue to honor their orishas, or traditional gods. With the exception of the creator-deities Olorun and Oludumare, which the Yoruba deem to be the hundredth and hundred-and-first names of God Himself, the orishas, and many ancestral Yoruba heroes, have been repackaged as Islamic teachers and miracle-workers. This reimagining dovetails with the pre-existing legend that the hero-god Oduduwa, founder of the Yoruba spiritual capital at Ile-Ife, was originally from Mecca. During the days of the Oyo Empire, legend held that Oduduwa fled Mecca to escape from Islam and find a land where he could worship the old gods in peace, but by 1870, he had been recast as a companion and guide of the Prophet who was forced into exile by evil counselors.
It isn’t only the gods and legendary heroes who have become saints; in keeping with lingering animist traditions, great leaders and teachers are also venerated. Although outright ancestor-worship is prohibited among Muslims, sainthood provides a compromise, and also allows the ancestors to be viewed as intercessors. Curiously, one of the first such heroes elevated to sainthood was not a Yoruba but Paulo Abacar, the Malê Liberator. The Yoruba began celebrating a day in Abacar’s honor within two decades after his death, which would have displeased the man greatly but which was no doubt to be expected given the identification of Yoruba Islam with the aspirations of the lower social classes.
- The egungun masquerade. In traditional Yoruba belief, the egungun is the collective spirit of the dead, and is honored with an annual ceremony in which costumed and masked performers invoke the ancestral spirits. The Yoruba Muslims have continued this practice, albeit with a different emphasis. Rather than being possessed by the egungun and carrying messages from the dead to the living, the performers are seen as going into a divine trance and bearing words of Islamic guidance. During the nineteenth century, the messages brought by the masqueraders were often subversive of established authority; they challenged slavery and social inequality, and also warned against both the remnants of the old faith and the influence of Christian missionaries. The performers would re-enact and abjure the immoral deeds of commoner and ruler alike, but would usually focus their most biting satires on the rulers, functioning as social critics who the king didn’t dare to punish. Sometimes – particularly in faction-ridden courts – nobles might pay the mimes to satirize the behavior of opposing factions and laud their own, but more often, the performers functioned as a voice of the people and of the religious leadership.
By the 1870s, the egungun ceremony had begun to take on a secondary meaning. In keeping with Sufi mystical notions of death as another birth, the masquerade took on some aspects of a life-cycle ritual, with the egungun symbolizing the rebirth of the community in a more spiritually advanced state. This combined with the social-criticism function of the ritual, in that the evil practices condemned by the mimes were seen as obstacles to this rebirth. Among a few believers, death and the dead came to be seen as agents of spiritual cleansing, leading to a veneration of death itself similar to the Mexican cult of Santa Muerte, although this extreme is very much a minority position.
- Music. For the Yoruba, ritual must be physical as well as spiritual; music is a central feature of nearly every Yoruba ceremony, and it has filtered into both Islamic festival and daily worship. Ceremonies typically feature drums – of which the Yoruba have several kinds, both rhythmic and melodic – as well as shaken cowrie shells and the agogo double-bell. Choral singing and responsive chants also figure prominently in Yoruba prayer, and dance of the dervish variety is both a part of communal ritual and an individual meditative device. A minority of more conservative Muslims, who disapprove of dancing in public life, nevertheless distinguish between social dancing and religious dancing, characterizing the latter as permissible and even obligatory.
- Folk magic. This is one of the most controversial “common threads” of Yoruba folk Islam, because most Muslims don’t consciously practice it; in fact, the majority, even in the nineteenth century, regarded sorcery as un-Islamic. The open practice of charms and spells that characterizes the Brazilian candomble and rural Malê folk religion has no place among the Yoruba, whose Islamization was not diluted through the filter of slavery. Nevertheless, elements of folk magic survive as part of certain rituals and prayers: for instance, some ceremonies feature stylized dolls that represent evil counsel and are ritually abjured, and the words of some ritual invocations were once spells to control weather, prevent sickness or ward off evil.
It can easily be seen that the folk Islam of the Yoruba contains a great deal of continuity from pre-Islamic culture, both in mythology and ritual, and also provides an outlet for social criticism. These are no doubt among the reasons why the Yoruba took to Islam so easily. In fact, much of the resistance to Islam during the 1850s through 1880s – with the exception, of course, of the regions near the coast where Christian missionaries had established a firm presence before the arrival of Islamic teachers – was political rather than religious. Islam was identified with Ilorin and the Malê, as well as political liberalism, while Christianity was identified with Europe. Those who wished to court Britain or Ilorin adopted the requisite faith; those who opposed British or Malê influence would favor the other religion – or, if they opposed
both Ilorin and Britain, they would hold steadfastly to the old gods and oppose any syncretization.
As with the Igbo, religious differences added fuel to warfare between cities, and religion also became a marker of political factions
within cities as they played out in the royal courts and the
ogboni secret societies. At the beginning, a majority of Yoruba kings and nobles became Christian, because the missionaries were more willing to support their authoritarian rule and because British diplomacy was a valuable tool in both internal and foreign intrigues. Along the coast, where a majority of commoners were also Christian, this proved a comfortable arrangement. Further inland, however, the common population became increasingly Islamized with time, and the
ogboni societies, which were traditionally viewed as the voice of the wisest commoners and were both a political and religious balance to the royal court, also fell more and more under Muslim influence. In some cities, the aristocracy responded by pushing Islam as far to the political margins as they could, beginning a dangerous tug-of-war between rulers and ruled, but in others, the nobles themselves started to become more accepting of Islam.
The first Yoruba king to become Muslim did so in 1868, and he was a major king indeed: the Ooni of Ife, a direct descendant of Oduduwa and the traditional Yoruba spiritual leader. His decision to adopt Islam was as much about politics as conviction, but it represented a major step toward Islam becoming the predominant religion of the Yoruba nation…
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Ahmadu Odubogun, Faith and Ferment: The Sahel and Sudan in the Nineteenth Century (Ibadan Univ. Press 2005)
… When Usman Abacar returned to Ilorin in early 1866, after an absence of eleven and a half years, he found the Abacarists largely out of power. They weren’t completely shut out – nobody would have dreamed of taking the education ministry away from the Nana Asma’u, and no one could imagine the treasury without João Silva’s steady hand – but they had become a marginal faction in a republic largely ruled by the industrialists, the rich merchants and the imamate.
This was more a balance of forces than a coalition, given that the imams and the textile barons had very different views on social and economic issues. The religious leadership often joined with the remaining Abacarists, and the few workers’ and craftsmen’s representatives on the council, to uphold progressive labor legislation, while the businessmen were generally able to overrule the imamate on matters of sumptuary law and free trade. The governing council was at least somewhat more representative than the authoritarian regime which had taken hold in the Sokoto Emirate to the north, and Ilorin had thus far avoided the labor unrest and social upheaval which had taken place to the north. But things were drifting in that direction, and even more, it seemed that the republic was drifting without a rudder in a rapidly changing regional environment.
Many Abacarists hoped that Usman would be the one to change that. To his chagrin, his entry into Ilorin turned into a virtual coronation, with thousands of Malê and other urban workers cheering his progress through the streets. The Abacarist faction urged him to lead the party in the election scheduled for a year ahead, and promised that, if they won, they would create the new office of President of the Republic and nominate him to fill it.
Usman refused to become either party leader or uncrowned king. It offended him that anyone would nominate him to the highest office by right of birth, and he felt that as a twenty-four-year-old whose greatest responsibility thus far had been a junior military command, he was unfit for such power. At the same time, he did not spurn the party entirely, as he might have done at a younger age. His time in Britain and India had given him a firm idea of what Ilorin should be and what it needed to do to navigate through treacherous political waters, and he had absorbed his father’s favorite maxim that knowledge without action is arrogance. If none of Ilorin’s present rulers saw the path forward, it was his responsibility to help them do so.
Thus, although he rejected the leadership of the Abacarists for the time being, he agreed to stand in the elections as a junior candidate and to campaign for other party standard-bearers. When he was elected - and when family loyalty brought enough other liberals with him to wield significant influence in the council - he accepted a colonelcy in the army and a ministry without portfolio. And he was far more outspoken, both in the government and in public speeches, than a backbencher would normally be, arguing in favor of universal suffrage, a return to the Rights of Man, a comprehensive labor code, an outward-looking foreign policy, and negotiating with Britain while that could still be done from a position of relative strength. Although Usman still denied - and would deny to the end of his life - that he was a prince, he had come somewhat to terms with the fact that many of Ilorin’s people thought of him as one, and was willing, within limits, to use the political leverage that gave him.
He had also come to terms with the fact that his eventual marriage would have political consequences, and as both his mother and Nana Asma’u reminded him, it was past time to marry. An opportunity presented itself in 1868, when the Ooni of Ife sought an alliance with Ilorin against a coalition of land-hungry neighbors. To seal the pact, he publicly adopted Islam and offered his daughter Adeseye in marriage to what he, and many in Ilorin, viewed as the republic’s first family. Adeseye, a young woman of twenty-one, had received a liberal education and had learned practical politics at her father’s court; Usman was willing, and at the strong urging of his mother, accepted the match. Another year was spent in negotiating terms, but in early 1870, the Ooni’s daughter arrived in Ilorin for the wedding. The ceremony was marked by the sort of panoply normally reserved for royalty - another thing which Usman disliked but was ultimately forced to accept.
The couple would have little time to enjoy wedded bliss before two momentous events, both occurring in 1872, shook the lower Niger. The first of these took place far to the north in London, where a group of British traders, acting largely behind the scenes, secured a charter for the Royal Niger Company. The company’s purpose was ostensibly to regularize the palm-oil trade, but behind this benign façade, its founders’ goal was to subjugate the delta kingdoms and Igboland and possibly - if circumstances permitted - to push on from there.
The second event happened much closer to home, with the death of Lawalu bin Adama, the canny Emir of Adamawa. Under Lawalu’s rule, Adamawa had benefited more than anyone, even the Malê themselves, from the advent of Abacarism. In 1840, Adamawa had been a province of the Sokoto Caliphate; now, it was the largest and most powerful state in the eastern Sahel, and its
de facto dominance of the Atikuwa buffer state gave it access to industrial products without having to risk the unrest that came from industrializing the homeland. All this had been accomplished through Lawalu’s strategy of military modernization, careful diplomacy, respectful relations with his neighbors, and expansion only when the moment was right. And all this would change now that his brother Sanda bin Adama, a man with a far more aggressive bent, sat on the throne…
Alternate literary traditions are a fascinating idea, and it's the little details like this that make a timeline great.
