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  • Missionary Knowledge and the State in Colonial Nigeria:On How G. T. Basden Became an Expert*
  • Dmitri van den Bersselaar

I

Between 1931 and 1937, the Anglican missionary G. T. Basden represented the Igbo people on the Nigerian Legislative Council. The Igbo had not elected Basden as their representative; he had been appointed by the colonial government. Basden's appointment seems remarkable. In 1923 the Legislative Council had been expanded to include seats for Unofficial Members, representing a number of Nigerian areas, with the expressed aim of increasing African representation on the Council.1 In selecting Basden the government went against their original intention that the representative of the Igbo area would be a Nigerian. However, the government decided that there was no "suitable" African candidate available, and that the appointment of a recognized European expert on the Igbo was an acceptable alternative.2 This choice throws light on a number of features of the Nigerian colonial state in 1930s, including the limitations of African representation and the definition of what would make a "suitable" African candidate. [End Page 433]

In this paper I am concerned with the question of how Basden became recognized as an expert by the colonial government and also, more generally, with the linkages between colonial administrations' knowledge requirements and missionary knowledge production. Missionary-produced knowledge occupied a central, but also somewhat awkward position in colonial society. On the one hand, colonial governments and missions shared a number of common assumptions and expectations about African peoples.3 On the other hand, there also existed tensions between missions and government, partly reflecting differing missionary and administrative priorities, which means that the missionary expert was not often recognized as such.

To understand the role of missionary knowledge in colonial society, I ask the questions of how and when "knowing something" was turned into expertise? How was knowledge disseminated, and when and why was it acknowledged as such? I will do this through the examination of the work of one expert: the Venerable Doctor Archdeacon George Thomas Basden, who was an Anglican missionary, author of Among the Ibos of Nigeria, member of the Legislative Council of Nigeria, expert witness in a number of court cases, and advisor to the Nigerian colonial government on a range of issues. However, Basden was also controversial within the mission organization to which he belonged, partly because of his personal style, but also because he was perceived as being a partisan to one specific sub-group within the larger Igbo people. At the same time, Western-style educated Igbo used and valued his publications as a source of information on Igbo traditional law and custom.

The analysis in this paper centers on the process through which Basden emerged as an expert straddling the spheres of missionary enterprise, ethnography, and colonial administration. This exploration of one missionary's route to "expert-ness" not only provides an insight into the usefulness of Basden's writing as a source for historians today, but it also offers general starting points for using the work of colonial-era missionary experts as historical sources. This contribution is part of a set of articles on the production, dissemination, and reception of expertise in colonial Africa, published together in this issue of History in Africa. I refer to my introduction to these papers for a brief contextualization of colonial knowledge and expertise.4 [End Page 434]

II

George Thomas Basden was born in 1873 and joined the Church Missionary Society (CMS) Niger Mission as a clergyman in 1900. At the time of his arrival, the CMS Niger Mission was based in the trading town of Onitsha, situated on the River Niger in southeast Nigeria. It had only very few mission stations and these were situated in the vicinity of Onitsha and along the Niger. Although the CMS had been operating in southeast Nigeria for more than forty years, it had achieved only limited geographical expansion and had made relatively few converts. This was about to change with the establishment of British colonial administration in the area. The colonial military activities were greeted with some enthusiasm by CMS missionaries, who expected that the eventual defeat of African resistance would result in the opening...

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