Missions and Indigenous Chiefs in Nineteenth-Century Yorubaland: Ijaye and the Diplomacy for Religious Conversion.

An underexplored aspect of the adventures of Christian missions in precolonial Africa has led to the unnuanced association of the emergence of African churches with European colonialism. Although there were overlapping dynamics in the two European movements of mission and colonialism, the reality of Christian missions' entries into African indigenous societies was not as simple as it might appear at a cursory glance. This article is interested in an underexplored aspect of African church historiography: the critical role of African chiefs in the success or otherwise of missionary exertions in African communities. The article investigates the mission encounter in Ijaye, one of such communities, to demonstrate the complexity of the negotiation for the planting of Christianity in nineteenth-century Yorubaland. The bottom line is that African ruling elites were no pushovers in the planting of Christianity in their domains. They astutely determined the prospects and the outcomes of the foreign initiatives for themselves and their societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]