Christianity, Islam and Colonial Conquest
The CMS mission and Crowther, how and why Yoruba people converted to two world religions, the British annexation, indirect rule and what it did to kingship, and the making of "Yoruba" as one identity.
In roughly one century the Yoruba-speaking region went from a population practising òrìṣà religion almost universally, with a Muslim minority, to a population majority Christian and Muslim in roughly equal parts, under British colonial administration, and calling itself by a single name it had not previously used of itself. These three changes happened together and they were connected, but they were not the same process and they did not have the same causes. This file separates them.
The most important thing to establish at the outset, because it cuts against both the missionary account and the anti-colonial one, is that Yoruba conversion was overwhelmingly voluntary. J. D. Y. Peel's problem in Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba is precisely this: he sets out to explain why the great majority of Yoruba people willingly abandoned the religion of their ancestors and took up Christianity . Forced conversion is not the explanation, because it did not happen at any scale. Neither is colonial compulsion, because the mission preceded the colonial state by half a century and the largest conversion movements came after, not during, conquest. Something else was going on, and Peel's book is the best account of what.
Islam before and alongside
Islam reached Yorubaland along the northern trade routes well before Christianity reached the coast. Yoruba Muslims were known as ìmàle, and Muslim communities existed in Ọ̀yọ́ towns, in Ìwó, Ẹdẹ, Ìkirun and elsewhere by the eighteenth century. Islamic learning, Arabic literacy and Quranic schools were established features of the northern Yoruba urban landscape.
The relationship between Islam and Yoruba political authority was ambivalent before the jihad and became fraught after it. Shehu Àlímì's move to Ilọrin from the Ọ̀yọ́ area is remembered in tradition as prompted by pressure there , which suggests the ìmàle were tolerated but not always secure. After Ilọrin became an emirate of the Sokoto Caliphate around 1829 and after Ilọrin destroyed Ọ̀yọ́-Ile, Islam carried a political charge in the southern Yoruba states that it had not carried before.
Yet Islam kept spreading in Yorubaland throughout the nineteenth century, including in states at war with Ilọrin, and it did so without conquest. It spread through trade, through Muslim scholars offering the same services Ifá priests offered, divination, healing, protective charms and written amulets, and through the appeal of literacy. Lagos, Ìbàdàn, Abẹ́òkúta and Ìwó all developed substantial Muslim populations by peaceful means. This is the strongest single argument against reading the century as a religious war: the religion supposedly imposed by conquest at Ilọrin was simultaneously being adopted by choice in the states resisting Ilọrin.
Two features of Yoruba Islam are worth naming. It coexisted with òrìṣà practice for long periods and in many households rather than replacing it abruptly. And it produced no comparable break with kinship structure, since polygyny and the lineage compound were compatible with it in a way they were not with mission Christianity. That compatibility is part of why Islam's spread required less social rupture and generated less recorded drama, and consequently why it is under-documented relative to Christianity: the missionaries kept journals and the ìmàle did not.
The CMS mission
The Church Missionary Society entered Yorubaland at Badagry in 1842 with Henry Townsend and Thomas Birch Freeman, and moved to Abẹ́òkúta in 1846 . The mission's opening was not a European initiative in origin. Sàró returnees, Yoruba people liberated from slave ships and settled at Freetown, had been travelling back to Abẹ́òkúta and Lagos from the 1830s, and it was their presence and their requests that drew the mission . Yoruba Christianity begins with Yoruba people asking for it.
The central figure is Samuel Àjàyí Crowther. Born around 1807 at Ọ̀ṣogun in Yorubaland, he was captured about age thirteen when his town was raided during the wars, put on a slave ship, and freed in April 1822 when a British patrol intercepted the vessel and landed the captives at Sierra Leone . He was educated there, studied at the CMS College in London, and was ordained in 1843 . In 1864 he was consecrated Bishop of the countries of Western Africa beyond the Queen's dominions, the first African bishop in the Anglican Church .
Crowther's linguistic work is foundational to everything in this corpus. He published the first Yoruba grammar and vocabulary in 1843, a translation of four New Testament books in 1852, and the complete Yoruba Bible was published in 1884 . The written Yoruba language, its standard orthography, and the literary register that carries almost all subsequent Yoruba writing are substantially his work and that of his colleagues.
The translation problem
Crowther faced the question every Bible translator faces, and his answers had permanent consequences.
He rendered the God of the Bible as Ọlọ́run and Ọlọ́dùmarè, and he rendered Satan as Èṣù . The first choice was defensible and is close to standard translation practice: Ọlọ́dùmarè in Yoruba thought is the supreme being, remote from daily affairs, the source of àṣẹ and of destiny, and mapping the biblical God onto that figure has real warrant. The costs were still real. Ọlọ́dùmarè in Yoruba thought is not gendered in the way the biblical God is in English and Hebrew translation practice, and the mission usage attached a masculine and strictly monotheistic reading to a term that had operated differently .
The second choice was not defensible in the same way and it is the origin of a great deal of subsequent damage. Èṣù in Yoruba thought is not an adversary of the supreme being. Èṣù is the messenger and the enforcer of àṣẹ, the one who carries sacrifice to ọ̀run, who tests and disrupts, who stands at the crossroads and at the threshold, and who is indispensable to the functioning of Ifá divination. Èṣù is unpredictable, and Èṣù is not evil, and the two are different categories. Equating Èṣù with Satan imported the entire Christian dualism of God against devil into a system that did not have it, and it made every Yoruba household shrine look, to a newly Christian Yoruba reader of the Yoruba Bible, like devil worship.
This is the specific textual origin of the framing under which many Yoruba Christians were taught that their heritage was demonic. It was a translator's decision, made in the 1840s and 1850s by a Yoruba man who had been enslaved as a child by people from his own region, and it has been carried in print ever since. Naming it is not an attack on Crowther, whose achievement was extraordinary and whose position was impossible. It is a statement of what the Yoruba text actually says versus what the Yoruba words actually mean, which is exactly what a translation rule exists to make visible.
Why people converted
Peel's account, built from the journals of the CMS's African agents, who were themselves Yoruba and were the first literate Yoruba generation, gives several converging reasons .
The wars. Conversion accelerated in a century of catastrophic disorder. The òrìṣà were bound to place, lineage and town, and when towns were destroyed and populations scattered, the institutions that carried òrìṣà practice were disrupted in ways that a portable, book-based religion was not. Displaced people in Abẹ́òkúta and Ìbàdàn were, in a literal sense, away from their shrines.
Literacy. The mission offered reading and writing, in Yoruba and English, and these were immediately valuable. Schooling was the main attraction of the mission for many families long before belief was, and the pattern of sending a child to mission school while the household continued òrìṣà practice was normal.
The ancestor problem inverted. Òrìṣà religion is tied to lineage and to the ancestors of a specific compound. For people whose lineages had been broken up by war and enslavement, that tie was precisely what could not be maintained. Christianity and Islam both offered membership that did not require a functioning lineage.
The returnees. The Sàró and Agùdà arrived already Christian or Muslim, with education, capital and connections, and they were visibly successful. Conversion was associated with a route to that success. This is not cynicism about converts; it is how religious change generally works.
Competition, not replacement. Peel's emphasis is that Christianity and Islam were competing with each other as much as with òrìṣà religion, and Yoruba people chose between them with a good deal of discrimination, sometimes household by household . The near-parity of Christian and Muslim populations in Yorubaland today, unusual anywhere, is the outcome of that competition.
What did not happen: mass forced conversion, destruction of shrines by colonial decree, or prohibition of òrìṣà practice. What did happen: a sustained cultural argument, backed by education, print, money and eventually state prestige, which the mission largely won in the west and south and Islam largely won in the north and in significant urban blocks.
Conquest
British power arrived in stages, each following a war.
Lagos was bombarded in December 1851 in a succession dispute entangled with the slave trade, and Ọba Dòsùnmú signed the Treaty of Cession on 6 August 1861 under threat of bombardment from HMS Prometheus, having resisted eleven days . Lagos became a colony and the base for everything after.
Ijẹ̀bú was invaded in 1892 to break its trade monopoly, and the campaign was a demonstration of the Maxim gun, with several thousand killed . Ijẹ̀bú was annexed to the Southern Nigeria Protectorate . The effect on the other states was decisive: after Ijẹ̀bú, military resistance was understood to be futile.
Governor Gilbert Carter toured Yorubaland in 1893, made treaties with Ọ̀yọ́ and the Ẹ̀gbá, and secured the dispersal of the Kiriji camps on 14 March 1893 under Captain Bower . These treaties were presented as peacemaking and functioned as protectorate agreements. Britain had ended a war it had also, through the Lagos arms trade, helped to sustain, and took the region as the peacemaker.
Abẹ́òkúta retained a recognised independence longest, through the Ẹ̀gbá United Government, until it was abolished in 1914 and the Ẹ̀gbá incorporated. Nigeria itself was created by the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates in the same year.
Indirect rule and what it did
The system Frederick Lugard developed in Northern Nigeria, where he was High Commissioner from 1899 to 1906, was extended south . Its principle was that Britain would govern through existing rulers rather than replace them. Its effect on Yoruba political institutions was severe, and the damage was structural rather than merely a matter of humiliation.
It made the ọba more powerful and less accountable at the same time. Under indirect rule the recognised ruler became the channel for colonial authority, backed by colonial force, collecting colonial taxes. Traditional rulers who had held authority within their domains became subordinate actors in a colonial framework, with legitimacy that had previously come from historical standing and communal consent now mediated by British officials . Toyin Falola's assessment is direct: Yoruba ọba wielded arbitrary powers under indirect rule and many abused their offices . This is the crucial point. The check on a Yoruba ruler had always been internal, a council that could remove him or a body that could refuse to install his choice. Colonial recognition removed that check, because a ruler backed by the District Officer could not be removed by his chiefs. The system that produced an Aláàfin who could be given parrot's eggs produced instead an ọba who could not be touched.
It hollowed out the councils. The Ọ̀yọ́ Mesì, the Òṣùgbó, the town councils and the Ògbóni had been the deliberative and judicial half of the system. Colonial administration dealt with the ruler and treated the councils as advisory at best. Judicial functions moved to Native Courts constituted under colonial ordinance.
It broke the women's side entirely. The Ìyálóde and Ìyálọ́jà held real authority over trade and represented women in council. Colonial administration recognised male chiefs and dealt with them, and the women's title hierarchy lost its channel into government. This is a direct cause of the tax revolts of the 1940s.
It fixed and simplified. Where authority had been plural, as in Abẹ́òkúta with rulers for each Ẹ̀gbá section, the British needed one addressee, and the Aláké became paramount in a way he had not been. Where it had been absent, as in Ìbàdàn with no ọba, the British eventually created one. Where boundaries had been fluid and overlapping, they were drawn and fixed.
Ògbóni was singled out. Ògbóni's judicial and religious authority, its oath-taking, and its capacity to sanction rulers made it a rival jurisdiction, and both colonial administration and mission Christianity treated it as an obstacle. Christians were pressed to leave it. The response was the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity, founded in 1914 by the Anglican clergyman T. A. J. Ogunbiyi as a Christianised version compatible with church membership, which is itself evidence of how much pressure the original institution was under and how much people wanted to keep it. The original Ògbóni and Òṣùgbó survived, but as societies rather than as organs of government.
The making of "Yoruba"
The word Yoruba was originally a Hausa term for the people of Ọ̀yọ́, not a self-designation and not a name covering the whole region. Before the nineteenth century a person's primary identity was Ijẹ̀bú, Ẹ̀gbá, Ìjẹ̀ṣà, Èkìtì, Ọ̀yọ́ or the name of a town.
Peel's argument is that it was through the encounter with Christian missions in the mid-nineteenth century that the Yoruba came to know themselves as a distinct people . The mechanism is concrete and can be listed.
Crowther and the CMS reduced the language to writing and produced a Bible, and a single written standard, based substantially on Ọ̀yọ́ speech, made all these dialects into one language with one name.
The Sàró at Freetown had been thrown together from many Yoruba polities and had discovered their mutual intelligibility in exile, where the distinction between an Ẹ̀gbá and an Ìjẹ̀ṣà mattered far less than the distinction between all of them and everyone else. They came home with a category.
Yoruba-language print, newspapers, and the first Yoruba-authored histories, Johnson's among them, addressed a Yoruba readership and thereby created one.
Colonial administration then made ethnicity administratively real by organising provinces, census categories and the eventual Western Region around it.
And the wars themselves supplied the negative lesson, the Èkìtìparapọ̀ being the proof that combination worked.
None of this makes Yoruba identity artificial or false. All ethnic identities are historically constructed; the question is only when and how. It does mean that "the Yoruba" as a single people with one name is roughly as old as the Yoruba Bible, and that the deeper continuities, in language, in Ifá, in the òrìṣà, in kingship and in the oríkì tradition, are real but were not previously organised under a single ethnic label. Knowing this changes how the older history should be read: as the history of a set of related peoples who later became one, rather than of one people who were always one.