Review: Understanding Religious Change in Africa and Europe: Crossing Latitudes. The Christianization of Jukun of Nigeria and Celtic Irish in Early Medieval Europe, by Nathan Irmiya Elawa

Abstract

Scholars investigating processes of conversion and socio-cultural transformation will welcome Nathan Elawa’s ambitious examination of Christian missionary encounters with indigenous religions in medieval Ireland and twentieth-century Nigeria. Elawa compares the gradual process of inculturation of Christianity into pagan Ireland with the radical discontinuity experienced by Jukun Christians who were forced to renounce their core identity in order to receive baptism. A Research Associate at Vancouver School of Theology, Elawa begins by considering relevant studies of missionary contacts before discussing approriate methodologies for studying religions of Africa, which until recently have been framed in Christian or theological terms. He describes Jukun history and society, with its key personage, the Aku Uka, the divine king and chief priest. He then gives equal time to explicating the cultural context of early Ireland, problematizing the notion of what “celtic” means and admitting the difficulties of relying on Christian sources for understanding indigenous customs.Elawa shows how the Jukun concept of personhood, with its attendant emphasis on kinship, presented a challenge to missionaries who opposed polygyny and promoted the nuclear, over the extended, family. Marriage, fosterage, and burial customs also came under censure. In contrast, the monks who missionized Ireland used indigenous language, rituals, symbols, and worldviews to gain local acceptance and tended to make accommodations for existing social structures. Relying on archival research, first-person interviews, secondary sources, and his own observations as a Jukun Christian knowledgeable in three African languages, Nathan Elawa has written an engaging and instructive cross-cultural examination of religious change. He concludes that “when changes to a culture occur on a people’s own terms, they are able to adapt in ways that do not compromise the group’s authenticity” (156). A lesson worth remembering in many contexts.