| Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba |
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Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. By J. D. Y. Peel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pp. xi + 420. Index, bibliography, photographs, maps. $49.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. In this book, J. D. Y. Peel combines history and anthropology to produce a comprehensive study of the mutual engagement of Christianity and the Yoruba people of southwest Nigeria in its first seventy years, from 1845 to 1912. Peel's primary source material comprises mission letters and journals in the Church Missionary Society archives, whose authors were mainly Yoruba mission agents (55% of authors prior to 1880, 80% thereafter). Perhaps because of these informants, he presents a perspective that is both male-centered and focused on the political elite, but through which he is able to show the differences between European missionaries and Yoruba Christians in their translation of Christianity into terms attractive for the Yoruba. The many examples from these journals and reports that Peel presents make for fascinating and amusing reading and give us a sense of complex worlds and meanings. Peel frames this study through the lens of narrative: "Christian mission is about the effective telling of a story, and conversion occurs when people are prepared to take that story as their own" (310). Christian missions arrived during what Yoruba people considered an "Age of Confusion," a time of slave-raiding, warfare, and profound dislocation as states warred for trade routes and labor in the form of slaves. Because of the Age of Confusion, especially after the 1890s, Peel argues, Yoruba people began to turn to "world religions" like Christianity and Islam in their attempt to recover and redefine community. Islam and Christianity appealed because they offered rewards in the next life as well as in this one and provided a broader ethical vision of peace and wellbeing, thus giving "superior answers" to the "questions of meaning posed by the experiences of the Age of Confusion" (230). He shows that Islam laid the groundwork for Christianity, in creating Yoruba terms for concepts like cleric or priest, prayer and preaching, evil, a Supreme Creator God distinct from all other beings, and heaven and hell. Yet, at the same time, both religions had to speak to the Yoruba who were concerned with gaining patronage and access to powers in order to obtain healing, fertility, and protection from enemies. Thus, as Yoruba people became Christian, Christianity became Yoruba: prayer became analogous to a sacrifice made to ancestral powers, and powerful ancestral spirits remained salient and active as they became identified with the Devil, a constant source of troubles and personal enemy to Christians. In eleven chapters, Peel gives us a complex picture of the history and social organization of this area of southwest Nigeria in the nineteenth century, Yoruba religious practices and local cult complexes, how the mission itself was established as a political power in the wars and shifting allegiances of the time, what the missionaries preached to disenchant the Yoruba lifeworld and how this message was understood, Christianity's engagement with Islam, why Yoruba became Christian and how Christianity became Yoruba, and finally how Christianity contributed to the production of "the Yoruba" as a distinct ethnic category. Although this book does not present anything that is particularly new for Africanists in understanding conceptually the history of Christianity or the production of ethnicity in Africa, it is a tour-de-force for the way that it illuminates the complexity of this engagement between Christianity and the Yoruba using the rich source material of the Church Missionary Society archives. Cati Coe |
