23/02/2023
How Igbo People Started Becoming Christians 181 Years Ago (1841–2022): A Brief History Of Christianity In Ìgbòland/Among The Ìgbò [Part I]
Present-day Igbo Christian teenagers—including many young adults—raised strictly by Ìgbò Christian parents, and who have held steadfastly to the Christian faith, will hardly believe or know that Christianity was not anywhere known or heard of among the Ìgbò prior to 165 years ago when it came formally to Ọnịcha on 27 July 1857 or 181 years ago when it made its first inroad attempt in Abọ (today’s Ìgbò part of Delta State) in 1841.
What they often know or presume is that Christianity is as ancient as the Ìgbò had existed, hence they are often appalled by the current growing wave of young and enlightened Ìgbò persons abandoning their Christian faith and returning to the indigenous traditional Ìgbò spirituality, otherwise broadly called Omenaanị or particularly, Ọdịnaanị.
This kind of presumption from among the young Igbo population was not so widespread about 30 years ago. The calculated withdrawal of historical activeness and consciousness from the mainstream Nigerian basic education as at 2 decades ago; the subtle unwillingness of the present-day orthodox Christian church authorities in Ìgbòland to constantly remind their congregants how, about over a century ago, European missionaries brought the faith they are currently expressing, and other possible factors, have combined to build the impression of these Ìgbò Christians who are teenagers and young adults, making them to never imagine that their ancestors were only formally and squarely Christianized not too long ago—a development that has sequentially resulted in their being Christians today.
The history of the Christianization of the Ìgbò people is as thick, tall, and entangling as the famed forests in which the people lived before colonization and its attendant urbanization and deforestation. As a notable historian of the Ìgbò, Professor Elizabeth Isichei asked in 1970:
Can one meaningfully reduce the almost infinite variety of responses in a society as various as Igboland, to a phenomenon as complex as the missionary impact?
The honest answer is ‘no.’ We can only tell the history of missionary impact among the Ìgbò as far as we know and have researched it in each generation. Sadly, the one large piece of the whole story which will continue to be regretted is the extremely deficient oral accounts of our ancestors who were the subjects of the Christianization experiment as against the towering, exhaustively written accounts of their ‘Christianizers’ (the missionaries).
This imbalance of narratives/narrative sources leaves a lot of questions unanswered forever. Meanwhile, for more clarity within this context, I have collapsed the entire 181 years of Ìgbò Christianization journey/experience between 1841 and this year 2022 into three broad phases, relying mostly on very major turning points in history, such as wars and expeditions for their partitioning. As such, the following phases have emerged and will be discussed below:
1. Phase One of Ìgbò Christianization (1841–1901)
2. Phase Two of Ìgbò Christianization (1902–1970)
3. Phase Three of Ìgbò Christianization (1971–2022)
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