Paper short abstract:

The Church of England’s CMS missionaries on the Niger River (Nigeria) from the 1850s actively denounced religious objects of their hosts but also fetishisied and sacralised their own “missionary” spaces, architecture, European imports, and books in their efforts to convert the people.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will argue that while the Church of England's CMS missionaries on the Niger River in what is now Nigeria were engaged in active denunciation of the local religious objects of people they wanted to convert, they were also actively engaged in fetishising and sacralising their own "missionary" spaces, architecture, European exotic imports, and books. Journals and reports of the missionaries include disparaging statements about traditional ritual objects and cases of destruction by or surrender of such materials to the missionaries. This studied antagonism to traditional religious objects was a major means by which these missionaries in mid-19th century Niger area projected the worth of missionary Christianity that they advocated and measured its influence against traditional religions. Further up north on confluence of the Niger with the Benue, "Muslim" dress code, identity and religion intersected significantly. Here also, the interrogation and

demarcation of boundaries between on the one hand, "Mohammedan", and on the other, "Christian" and "pagan" dress came to underline missionary Christian proselytization. Thus, denunciation and contestation of local and Muslim sacred objects and "fetish" and (re)constitutioning of materials associated with the missions and the missionaries as sacred and solemn were significant paradoxical trends that characterised the encounter between the CMS missionaries and the Africans among whom they were stationed.