Dinsel Değişimde Kadın-Yoruba PDF

Gender in Yoruba Religious Change
Author(s): J. D. Y. Peel
Source: Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 32, Fasc. 2, The Politics of Mission (May, 2002), pp.
136-166
Published by: BRILL
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GENDER IN YORUBA RELIGIOUS CHANGE'
BY
J. D. Y. PEEL
(School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the relevance of gender to the reception of Christianity and
to early church life in nineteenth-century Yorubaland. These were profoundly
shaped by the gender conceptions prevalent in indigenous society and religion.
Though the indigenous gods (orisa)lacked gender as a fixed or intrinsic attribute,
gender conceptions were projected on to them. Witchcraft was mostly attributed
to women both as its victims and as its perpetrators, and with men and ancestral
cults chiefly responsible for its control. There was an overlap between the social
placement of witches and Christian converts, both being relatively marginal. Religious
practice was also strongly gendered, with women preponderant in the cult of most
orisa,but men in the main oracular cult, Ifa. Women found something of an equiv-
alent in the cult of Ori, or personal destiny. The missions initially met their read-
iest response among young men, who were less tied to the orisacults than women
were. By the second generation the balance shifted, as male prestige values were
incompatible with full church membership and women came more to the fore in
congregational life. As an aspect of this, the church took on many of the con-
cerns that the orisa cults had offered women-a token of this being the honorific
use of the term 'mother'. In the end it is less gender per se than the gender/age
conjunction that is critical.
It has long been evident that women are the mainstay of church life
throughout Africa, and that Christianity is integral to the agendas of
millions of African women.2 So it is perhaps surprising that, with some
exceptions,3 the relations between religion and gender in Africa have
not been given more substantial attention. It seems that students of African
religion have been more interested in linking it with other variables,
such as politics and ethnicity, while feminist scholars have been drawn
to explore the operation of gender in social fields other than religion.
Still, since the 1980s, a growing number of works have addressed top-
ics such as the role of women missionaries, women's activities within
the churches and-the big, all-embracing question, though not my con-
cern here-how Christianity has affected the status and prospects of
? Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002 Journal of Religionin Africa, 32.2
Also available on line - www.brill.nl

Genderin YorubaReligiousChange 137
African women in the longer term. The effects of Christianity are more
evident for the colonial period, when in fields like health and education
missions often came close to being delegated agents of colonial policy.
But an over-emphasis on the close (though contingent) linkage of missions
and colonialism may actually obscure the processes of religious accom-
modation that affected the status of women. By contrast, the Yoruba
case presented here relates almost entirely to the period before formal
colonization in the 1890s, when the missions still had to make their
way amid a cluster of smallish independent polities and succeeded in
converting (in any sense) only a small minority of Yoruba.4 The mate-
rial is drawn chiefly from the archives of the Church Missionary Society,
and particularly from the copious journals written by its 'native agents'.
It was an unusual feature of the CMS Yoruba Mission that, right from
its outset, its missionaries included many Yoruba, the special quality of
whose testimony is enhanced by the fact that they were at once reli-
gious outsiders and socio-culturalinsiders to the world that they describe.5
To define the topic here as the 'mission impact on women', follow-
ing Bowie, Kirkwood and Ardener (1993) in their valuable collection
of readings, suggests a somewhat passive view of the evangelized (which
is surely far from their intention). Looking back from the present,
Afrofeminists like Amadiume (1987) and Oyewumi (1997) are led to
construct a somewhat similar narrative: under colonial conditions a
Euro-patriarchal ideology, supported by mission teaching, stamps itself
forcefullyon indigenous gender regimes which were more female-friendly.
But if we begin the analysis at the earliest period of religious encounter,
before the massive weight of material advantage swung decisively behind
the missions, we have little choice but to treat it as much more a two-
way process of mutual assimilationthan a one-way 'impact' or imposition.
Conversion, particularly before the colonial period, really was a matter
of choice, in which Africans weighed its costs and benefits as applied
to them in their life situations; and their practice and understanding
of Christianity were deeply informed by criteria grounded in their pre-
conversion religious culture. This being so, the shaping of women's lives
by Christianity has to be related back to the criteria which underlay
conversion; and that in turn to the articulations of gender and religion
that the missions found in place. It has to be a story of continuity as
well as rupture, of African as well as missionary agency.
These issues are raised rather sharply in Oyeronke Oyewumi's recent
book, The Inventionof Women,which presents the challenging thesis that
gender did not exist in pre-colonial Yoruba culture, but was projected
onto it by the West. She maintains that the Yoruba terms okunrinand

138 J. D. Y. Peel
obinrin,unlike their supposed English equivalents 'man' and 'woman',

did not denote gender, since there was no carry-over from biological
difference to sex-linked differentials of value, power, status or social
role. It takes an unusual feminist to argue that 'because obinrindid not
constitute a social category, they had no collective interest as a group'
(Oyewumi 1997: 61); and the virtual gender-exceptionalism that she
claims for the Yoruba is the more remarkable since they attached a
very strong cultural value to the complementary physiological capaci-
ties of women and men to bimo('bear/beget children') This is not the
place to mount a systematic critique of Oyewumi's argument, and its
empirical inadequacy for nineteenth-centuryYoruba will, I trust, become
sufficiently clear. But it is helpful to touch on two of its features, in
relation to the present argument.
The first is its strongly culturalist bias. Oyewumi starts from the fact
that many basic categories in Yoruba are not gendered where Euro-
pean ones are (e.g., egbon,'senior sibling', and aburo,'junior sibling', vs.
'brother' and 'sister'), and she takes issue with the insinuation of gen-
der in translation where it is not implicit in Yoruba (e.g., oko,'hus-
band', can be applied to women qua members of the lineage that a
wife marries into; or oba, usually rendered 'king', but more appropri-
ately 'ruler', since there have been female oba, at least in legend). But
she jumps too easily from such lexical items, taken as fixed cultural
deposits, to infer real prevailing attitudes. So against her assertion that
'a notion of gendering work did not exist in the indigenous Yoruba
conception' (Oyewumi 1977: 65), there are clear Yoruba voices which
express the sexual division of labour as a normative reality, such as the
Rev. Daniel Olubi's critical comment on the Ikale of the far south-east
that 'their women as men cultivate the ground'6 (in contrast with what
was acceptable among Egba and 'Yoruba Proper'); or those Egba men
in the early 1840s, who responded indignantly to British pressure to
trade in palm oil rather than slaves: 'How is that-is not a woman to
sell palm oil, how can a man sell oil like a woman?'7 And there is
another level of reality beyond this: actual patterns of behaviour, which
we may infer from the myriad mundane observations of the CMS jour-
nalists. Indeed, unless we treat the relationship between cultural cate-
gories and social practice as contingent and variable, rather than seek
to read practice directly off culture, we will hardly be able to address
the issue of the impact of Christianity on African women's lives.
Yet in other respects the radicalism of Oyewumi's approach has real
heuristic value. Though her claim that Yoruba does not 'do gender [but]
does seniority instead' goes much too far, she is right to stress the

in Yoruba
Gender Change
Religious 139
crucial importance of age and seniority (which earlier feminists tended

to underplay). But though seniority can override gender, it usually works
as a co-ordinate, rather than as an alternative, to it. For example, where
a norm of virilocal marriage goes with the rule that relative seniority
within the compound is determined not by actual age but the length
of one's attachment to it, women are subject to a form of seniority-
discrimination from which men are immune: if Yoruba life is set on a
status gradient based on seniority, then women are forced back to square
one when they marry. As we shall see, the vulnerability of young
women-especially of new wives before they had a child-is frequently
documented in the CMS journals. But still a great merit of Oyewumi's
emphasis on seniority is that it serves to warn us against adopting too
homogeneous a view of gender or detaching gender from the other
subject-positionsthat Yoruba women occupy, such as slave/free, native/
stranger, mother/non-mother, and above all the gradations of age and
seniority.
thegods
Gendering
In Yoruba religion, the sense that the gods (orisa)were essentially
'other' than human beings was crucially qualified by the extent to which
devotees might be strongly identified with their deities (Barber 1981).
So we need to examine gender differentials, not just as they were evi-
dent in religious practice but as they were projected onto the gods
themselves. Here Oyewumi's gender-skepticismis an ideal starting-point,
since intrinsically orisawere simply powers, spirits or forces, to which
gender was a secondary attribution. Hence, as she says, 'not all the
orisawere thought of in gendered terms' or were regarded as male in
some places or contexts and female in others (Oyewumi 1997: 140).
Yet there was a strong inclination to project gender onto them, and,
if we can discern some of the principles involved, this will shed light
on the moral and social qualities that they associated with either sex.
Gender is thus inescapably reintroduced to the analysis.
The impulse to endow deities with gender follows from wanting to
think of them as persons. Any spiritual power which the Yoruba believe
directly affects their lives and environment, and with which they there-
fore need to deal, mustin some sense be imagined as a person; for how
otherwise is it possible to relate to it, to assuage its manifested anger
or to solicit its future goodwill? A Supreme Being that is held to be
otiosusneed not be regarded as a person;8 but as soon as humans think
it is possible to deal directly with Him/Her/It, God has to be thought

140 J. D. . Peel
of as one. Now it is not easy to imagine a person in concrete terms

without attributing a particular sex to them, and (in societies with gen-
der) this in turn will inevitably become a vehicle upon which further
moral and social qualities will ride; or, conversely, the moral qualities
that one wishes to attribute to a deity may suggest its gender. A perfect
vignette of such a process occurs in the journal of William Allen, an
African catechist. One night in May 1859 a large rock crashed down
from one of the hills in Abeokuta, narrowly missing a children's play
area. Such a forceful irruption from the wild into the settled sphere
was exactly what was expected of a new orisa,and the local people at
once recognized it as one, crying 'orasani, orisa ni!' And because the
rock had behaved protectively towards the children, they also identified
it as female-a 'motherly rock', insisted one of the women at the
scene-and made ready to confirm mutual good relations by sacrificing
an animal to her (REMT: 98).
It seems likely that this kind of thinking influenced the gender
identification of the major established orisa:river deities, like Osun and
Yemoja, being generally regarded as female, for their coolness and
fecundity, and fierce or destructive deities like Ogun (iron and war),
Sopona or Babaluaye (smallpox), Esu or Babaode (tricks and confusion)
and Sango (lightning) as male. The female identity of some orisa was
further fixed by their being regarded as wives of male orisa:as Oya
(tornado) is of Sango, or Yemoja of Ogun or Sango. Furthermore,
granted the high degree of identification between gods and their devo-
tees, it is not surprising that an orisa connected with a craft or occu-
pation would be imagined to share the gender of all or most of its
practitioners: Ososi or Obalogun as deities of hunters, Osanyin of heal-
ers, Ifa or Orunmila of babalawo.
But other considerations still came in. Though farming throughout
most of Yoruba country was a male activity, Orisa Oko ('deity of the
farm') was far from being unambiguously male, and its devotees, as
they crop up in the CMS journals, are nearly always female-which
(as will be shortly be described) must be connected with the fact that
s/he was associated with a famous witchcraft purification ordeal. In
fact one would be hard put to insist that any deity's gender was unal-
terably fixed, if we note what Marc Schiltz (1985) found at Iganna,
where what seems one of the most male of orisa, namely Sango, is
locally considered the 'wife' of Ara, a local thunder deity, because she
came later to the town. In general, it may be seen that devotees pro-
ject their needs onto orisa, one of the most prominent of these being
for protection against dangers and enemies. With a degree of gender

Genderin rorubaReligiousChange 141
stereotyping, these 'male' qualities of strength and ferocity would fit

with the fact that, though orisaare variously male or female, and typ-
ically have both female and male devotees, their priests and possessed
devotees-male as well as female-are generically termed their 'yawo
or 'wives' (Matory 1994). So even an orisa like Osun, who is usually
represented as exuberantly female, had a 'male' potentiality too.
So far we have been talking about the attribution of gender, that is
of moral or social qualities associated with either sex; but the gender-
ing of orisamight also come about through the direct attribution of a
sexual identity. If cosmogony is based on a generative rather than a
creative principle, then its source must be sexually female as well as
male. Here Oyewumi is surely on the right track in suggesting that
modern representations of Yoruba cosmology have been much influ-
enced by the determination of missionary theologians-Idowu (1962)
not excluded-to assimilate indigenous ideas of God to Christian ones.
In this they carried on from Muslims, who first pressed the idea of a
single creator God upon the Yoruba. But the traces of an older, alter-
native conception are clearly present, especially in areas remote from
the core region of Yoruba Islam in northern Oyo, such as Awori coun-
try to the south-west or Ondo to the south-east. Here Orisawas used
to refer to the Supreme Being as well as to lesser deities, and God was
represented as ancestor as well as creator. Oduduwa was God qua ances-
tor, male or unspecified in the south-east, but emphatically female in
the south-west, where she had a great cult centre at Ado Odo. Here
Oduduwa was closely linked with Obatala, in terms which vary in detail
(as they appear in reports by African Christians or Europeans):identified
with Obatala (as in Crowther's 'the great goddess Obbatalla, also called
Oduduwa'), or 'wife of Obatala', or the female half of an androgynous
earth/sky deity (Ellis 1894: 41-43; Lucas 1948: 93-95). This is surely
the same divine couple-Yemowo/Orisa-that Olabiyi Yai sees as the
originals of the Dahomean Supreme Being in two persons, Mawu/Lisa
(Yai 1993: 241-64).
So it is precisely because the orisaintrinsically lack gender that they
may be treated as a screen upon which the Yoruba project their concep-
tions of it. The very instability and uncertainty of the resultant gender
attributions indicates, not the irrelevance of gender, but the cross-
pressures that lie behind them: what an orisaseems to be telling humans
through the manner of its epiphany, what worshippers want from an
orisa, what they conceive its function to be within a spiritual economy
modelled on the earthly one.

142 7. D. Y. Peel
Womenand witchcraft
One area where the gender specificitiesof the spiritual realm show up
most clearly is that sphere of malign agency that has come to be labelled
'witchcraft'. While both sexes were affected by it as notional victims,
women were typically represented as its perpetrators, so it was women
who, in being punished as witches, were the real victims of witchcraft
as a cultural institution. Since witches, like or.sa,were largely constructed
through the projection of gender attributes, witchcraft thus forms a con-
venient bridge between religion as projection and as practice. The earliest
generalaccount of Yoruba witchcraft is given us by an Egba catechist
returned to Abeokuta in 1846, right at the outset of the mission:
Witchcraft is of various descriptions among the Africans; and it is universally be-
lieved that there are certain individuals who possess supernatural powers, who are
able to transform themselves into the shape of some bird, and fly invisibly in the
night to suck the blood of individuals whom they wish to destroy; that they are
a body or company in any country they live, they are the cause of almost all the
deaths of adults, infants and abortions among females; and that they are palm oil
suckers. Therefore many African women are afraid of trading with palm oil for
fear they should be destroyed by wizards and witches; these live as cannibals....
There are pretenders who are said to be witch catchers, who are often hired
to do so. Others profess to know remedies to prevent their attacking any person.
Therefore this is part of the cause why so many Africans are tying different sorts
of vanities [charms] about themselves and [their] children.9
The terminology in which the CMS journalists referred to malign

spiritual agency is not entirely consistent or clear, as regards either gen-
der or content; and these difficulties are compounded by the fact that
they rarely used Yoruba terms for it (aje, 'witchcraft', I think not at
all). In the above account, the gender of witches is not specified, and
women only appear in it-more specifically than men do-as victims
of them, along with their children.0l Yet in virtually all concrete cases
in the CMS journals where individuals are identified as witches, they
are women. Sometimes the expression 'witches and wizards' is used, as
if to imply that 'wizards' were simply male witches; but the content
appears different, in that 'wizards' practise an acquired art or skill to
evil ends, rather than work harm through an inherent mystical power,
as the typical female witch was supposed to do. (In other words, the
nineteenth-century Yoruba evidence appears to fit fairly well Evans-
Pritchard's classic distinction between witchcraft and sorcery, which in
turn substantially aligns with female and male practices of mystical evil.)
The one male who is reported to have confessed at the shrine of Orisa
Owo at Ota, whose usual targets were female witches, was a sorcerer
who enumerated all the people he had killed 'by his evil arts'."

in Toruba
Gender Religious
Change 143
The 20-odd cases of female witches cover a broad span of ages from
a handful described as old, through many who were evidently in the
middle years of marriage and child-bearing, to a mere girl, ejected from
her compound on account of her contracting yaws and forced to beg
around the town, whose witchcraft had been inferred from the cir-
cumstance of both of her parents dying prematurely.12 At the opposite
pole was the Christian whom 'all her heathen relatives had forsaken...
because she could not have been so old as to survive her generation
unless she was a witch'.13Implicit here is one of the basic driving ideas
of witchcraft: of the furtive transfer to oneself of the life-substance of
another, usually within one's immediate social environment. It is hinted
at more directly in what was said about another woman accused as a
witch, that she had grown corpulent by sucking blood.'4 The classic
witchcraft situation involved rivalry between co-wives, with the health
and welfare of women and their children within the compound as its
main focus. In one case at Abeokuta a Christian wife of a pagan hus-
band was accused of causing the sickness of a co-wife; the husband
asked the accused's relatives to take her away; when the pastor went
to see the sick wife, the people asked him to beg the alleged witch to
spare her; and happily the co-wife recovered.'5 Needless to say, belief
in the agency of witches remained strong among Christian converts: a
young wife, who died after six days in labour, was heard to the end
appealing to 'country doctors' to deliver her from witches.16Here, no
co-wife was involved, but, when witchcraft was suspected, suspicion
would always fall first on someone close at hand within the compound.17
In cases like this, witchcraft was a projection of the emotions of envy
and malice that flowed between women who were in close daily rela-
tions of co-operation, rivalry and mutual comparison. That witchcraft
was largely assumed to be a woman-to-woman business is suggested by
the scare provoked at Ado Awaye in 1875 by a male devotee of the
goddess Oya, who turned up to declare that she needed propitiation
lest an unknown female witch within the town harm the other women
there: Oya wanted a goat, a fat hen, 15 strings of cowries and four
large kolas, which the women had trouble in raising, for Ado was a
small, poor place.18 This may, in fact, have been a racket,19but, even
if it was, it had to depend on a story that the women could believe.
But the actions of a man-albeit a devotee of Oya (and hence, if
we follow Matory's analysis, in relation to his orisa a 'wife')-in pro-
voking the episode at Ado Awaye, prompts the question: if women
were predominantly the victims of witchcraft, how and where did men
come into it? There was a strong gender bias in social arrangements

144 J. D. Y. Peel
for the detection and punishment of witches. Though the CMS papers
do not yield clear evidence of parties of male witch-finders, like the
Alatinga of the 1950s (Morton-Williams 1956), the actions of the man
at Ado suggests something of them: arriving from the outside with an
impressive spiritual mandate, he appealed to endemic local fears, and
extracted resources from the locals to deal with them. At Abeokuta in
1846 accused women were tested by the ordeal of'the red water', prob-
ably an infusion of sasswood bark.20But the most celebrated oracle was
that based at Orisa Oko's shrine at Irawo in the remote north-west,
which drew suspects from all over central Yorubaland. If a woman was
cleared by it, she became a devotee of the orisa,publicly distinguished
by red and white beads worn above her forehead. So prized was cult
membership-for it carried both prestige and social privileges-that it
was passed down in families, but always its first acquisition 'originated
from the accusation of witchcraft and sorcery'.21It is not surprising
that, with its witch-free cachet, Orisa Oko was noted for a cult mem-
bership that was both tenaciously loyal and overwhelmingly female.
In central and western Yorubaland, the routine punishment of witches
was in the hands of the cults of the ancestors: principally Egungun
among the Oyo-Yoruba, and Oro among the Egba. Since it was elders
who stood closest to the ancestors and the cults were dominated by
men,22 they operated as enforcers of a patriarchal-gerontocratic order.
Oro at Abeokuta was held to be 'a secret between man and man' (and
during the persecution of 1849, one of the standard charges against
male converts was that they divulged the secrets of Oro to women);
while Egungun at Ibadan was described as 'a thing which the Yorubas
take to govern the town and their wives'.23The brute fact of gender
control was most evident when Oro 'came out' in the town on such
occasions as chiefs' funerals, assemblies to decide issues of war and
peace, consultations of Ifa on affairs of state, major public sacrifices
etc.; for then women had to stay indoors, underpain of death.A woman
who called on the name of Oro three times faced the death penalty,
and it was said that women sometimes did it to end their lives.24Before
these 'confinements', we learn from an incident in 1850, the Oro people
went around calling out 'pakpok pakoko':a word glossed in Abraham's
Dictionaryas referring to the spirits of criminals executed by Oro, includ-
ing witches.25Once at Ota, Oro came out during the day to hang the
skeleton of a woman executed for witchcraft to a tree by the market,
causing many women to flee to the mission compound, where they
stayed till nightfall.26At Ota and Ifonyin witches were killed at night

by Oro under the form of a spirit simply known as Oloru ('the being
of the night').27
Nowhere were witchcraft fears more evident than in the south-west-
in Egbado, Ota, Badagry, the market towns of the lagoon and its imme-
diate hinterland-which may well be related to strains arising from the
transition in mid-century from slaves to palm oil as the staple item of
overseas trade. Ota had its own witch-finding shrine, of the orisaof the
Owo river. In James White's highly critical view, its victims might be
picked on because they were envied for their wealth, or had offended
cult members, or were suspected witches. The latter, he felt, were often
'distracted persons or persons under the sense of guilt or fear', like a
woman 'labouring under some mental uneasiness' over a supposed
offence against an orisa. Another was a confused old woman, already
reputed a witch, who entered the shrine and confessed she'd killed sev-
eral people.28 A striking feature of the operation of Orisa Owo was,
while the cult officials who carried out the sentence were men,29 the
presiding priest was a woman, simply known as Iya ('Mother')-who
once protested furiously at the mission's attempt, with the support of
the town chiefs, to save a witch.
The significance of this priestess, so designated, raises questions about
the complicity of powerful women in the control of those other more
marginal women who were stigmatized as witches, that cannot be fully
answered on the basis of White's information about nineteenth-century
Ota. So the interpretation that follows has to be more speculative. In
general, one might say that while the legitimate taking of life was a
matter for men (as warriors, hunters, sacrificers, executors of criminals
and witches etc.), the most essential feature of women was that they
gave life: motherhood was the supreme realization of their gender. The
obscenity of witches was that they were women who killed; and their
most characteristic target was other women, especially in the repro-
ductive careers. The contradiction in the Owo cult was barely resolved:
the actually killing of its victims was carried out by men, but still it
was authorized by Mother. Now Mother's ambivalence-a killer of
witches, but like a witch in killing-finds something of a parallel else-
where in the religion of Ota and the south-west: in the person of Iyanla
('Great Mother') in the Gelede cult. Though White was the first per-
son to describe the Gelede masquerade,30 he neither touched on its
character as a cult for assuaging the witchcraft potential of women, nor
suggested how it related to Orisa Owo or Oloru, the two other forces
deployed in Ota against witches. Modern studies of Gelede, however,

146 J. D. t. Peel
though they focus on its performance and iconography rather than its
anti-witchcraft function, do show how its central sacred figure, Iyanla
or Great Mother, is also the supreme witch (Drewal and Drewal 1983:
22-25). One of her masks has a sharp blood-red beak, indicating the
eye oru or 'bird of night'; while another depicts her with a long beard,
indicating the great age which (as we have seen above) might in itself
be taken as a sign of being a witch. Iyanla is honoured both as the
embodiment of female mystical power, the source of human life, and
as supremely a witch, the force which most threatens it: in the end
only such a being could keep witchcraft in check.
It would seem that the attribution of witch status might come about
in two opposite ways: from signs read as indicating either the ffects of
having acted as one, such as (in three of the cases cited above) extreme
old age, orphan-hood and corpulence; or else the dispositionto act as
one, as with the envy or malice presumed of an unsuccessful, isolated
or childless woman. The marginality of many accused witches must
also have made it more probable that any initial suspicion would lead
on to eventual conviction, which the support of a strong kin group
might have been able to prevent. In one case at Badagry, two out of
three condemned witches had their sentences commuted because their
relatives paid an indemnity instead, while in another the enemies of a
witch sought to weaken her first by trying to get her sons sold away
into slavery.31Now social marginality was also a factor that strongly
disposed people towards the mission: migrants, strangers, slaves and
many cases of woman seeking a solution to their childlessness. Both
practically and symbolically, it is difficult to resist the inference that
there was an overlap or association between the two categories of social
outsider-an overlap that our African clerical witnesses (though they
disclose in passing the odd case of Christians being regarded as witches)
would not want to stress. At least at Abeokuta in the early years, the
antagonism of Oro, the custodian of the established moral order, was
common to both: Oro was the great scourge of witches, and Christians,
by refusing to participate in Oro, were (in Samuel Crowther's words)
'given up as outcasts of the people'.32
practiceof Yorubareligion
Thegendered
Here again, we have both categorical evidence, in the form of gen-
eralizations made by informed African observers about the religious
inclinations of men and women, and statistical evidence, in the form
of a very large number of concrete observations about the practice of

Genderin TorubaReligiousChange 147
individuals. The main generalization is that there was a clear gender

distinction in religious practice: the orasamainly engaging the attention
of women, and Ifa of men. At Abeokuta in 1850, alarmed at a wave
of conversions, the chiefs announced a clamp-down on Christian activ-
ity, to hold 'till every woman has again made her orisa, and every man
his Ifa.' An African pastor, Daniel Coker, wrote of Ido island near
Lagos in 1873: 'The women worship Songo and Agba, they are more
ignorant than the men. The men do not worship any god, they hold
Ifa in great reverence and believe in charms for protection and suc-
cess in their ways.' A woman's need for the orisawas particularlyempha-
sized at her marriage: 'Before marriage takes place sacrifices must be
made to the gods by whose auspices she is supposed to have been born
and protected; the young woman must also purchase some gods to wor-
ship in her husband's house in order to get children, wealth and peace',
wrote Crowther from Abeokuta in 1848. It was even expected that the
prospective husband should help to equip his fianc6e in this way to
show his care of her: a young Christian inquirer was told by his prospec-
tive father-in-law that the engagement was off unless he took up his
own Ifa again and bought orisafor his fiancee (REMY: 103).
This generalization exaggerates, of course: many men wereactive in
orisaworship and some were well known for it (like Erubami, 'a zeal-
ous idolater and man of great note' at Ota, who became a Christian);
they might be possessed by them and serve as priests; the titled heads
of cults of civic importance were usually men. But it still fits well with
the clear impression given by the observations of the CMS authors in
aggregate, that women in general were much more actively engaged
in the worship of the oria than men were, whether in domestic ritu-
als within the compound or in more public arenas. It was above all
the women of the compound who were responsible for cherishing the
orisawho looked after the welfare of them and their children: we get
glimpses of it in the picture of a house in Abeokuta where the evan-
gelist sees 'the idols put into two lines and the piazza beautifully adorned
with cowries' by the women, or of a woman at Ota whose parlour
(which she shares with her little boy) is full of her various orisa, chief
among them Sango. A dual reciprocity was set up, between husbands
and wives, and orisa and worshippers: the husband provided his wife
with orisato protect her and her children, and she in turn ensured the
welfare (and indeed the very future) of his lineage by worshipping them.
We may infer a further aspect to the high profile of women in orisa
worship. As in some other indigenous religions of West Africa, such as
the Akan (see Gilbert 1989), the spiritualbeings addressed by the Yoruba

148 7. D. Y. Peel
fell into two main categories, ancestors and deities. The cult of ances-
tors was strictly a business for their descendants, the lineage members,
the co-resident adult members of which were mostly male (since by the
norm of virilocal marriage the females would have moved as wives to
other compounds). But the worship of orisa (even with those regarded
as 'family gods') was essentially associational rather than ascriptive; cult
groups actively sought to recruit new members, though they then used
a quasi-kinship idiom-all devotees were 'children' of their orsa-to
draw them into the cult fellowship. This was thus a means by which
the wives of the compound, women of diverse origins and some of
them slaves, but all starting from the lowly and vulnerable status of a
new wife, were able both to build themselves up as individuals and to
create bonds of solidarity among themselves. Samuel Pearse, a Yoruba
pastor, chanced upon a gathering of Sango devotees in a compound
at Badagry: there were twenty or more of them, all apparently women
and of different ages; they were preparing a feast in honour of their
god, and some showed their dislike of Pearse's intrusion by making a
great clatter to drown out his words.33
Outside the compound gates, in the public spaces of the town, women
again preponderated in the worship of the orisa.This was most evident
on a day-to-day basis in the way that devotees would go round the town
with an image of their orisa(or in the case of Ogun with a python in
which he was manifest), receiving offerings from passers-by in return
for a blessing in the god's name (Peel 1997: 271-75). Somemen are
reported doing this-once, it seems, a man and his wife-but in the
great majority of cases it was women, with devotees of the trickster
god, Esu, especially prominent. In one case a band of no fewer than
fourteen female devotees of Sopona visited the Egba farm-town of
Osiele, splitting up to collect money for their services and meeting up
at the end of the day. At public festivals too, the companies of devotees,
if their sex is mentioned, are nearly always said to be women-as with
the Obatala women who sang and danced all night at a festival in Ondo
in 1875, till one of them was possessed by the god and prophesied; or
at the vigil of Oke'badan in Ibadan, when 'all the religious females spend
the whole night singing and dancing over town' (REMT: 104-10).
If women generally were much more active in the worship of orisa,
what of the alleged male attachment of the oracular cult, Ifa? The
Yoruba had multiple sources of oracular guidance, most of them asso-
ciated with one or another orisa who spoke through the mouth of a
priestess or devotee, whether female or male (as with the Obatala oracle
mentioned above). But Ifa was set apart from such oracles in several

in Yoruba
Gender Change
Religious 149
ways. Its keynote was control, not inspiration: instead of surrender to

trance or possession, the babalawodepended on his mastery of a tech-
nique and its accompanying corpus of knowledge. Anyone who regards
this as a male stereotype will not be surprised that virtually all baba-
lawo were men. We cannot say a hundred per cent of them were, since
female Ifa diviners have been noted, at least in the twentieth century;
but so unusual was it that none of the dozens of babalawowho crop
up in the CMS journals was a woman.34Ideologically too, Ifa saw itself
as hegemonic within the orisa system: it represented its own god,
Orunmila, as having a special relationship with Olodumare, or God
Almighty, who was regarded as the source of its guidance. So it is
hardly surprising that the babalawo,as a body of male religious profes-
sionals, won a degree of respect, refused to the possession-priests of
other orisa,from the two other bodies of male professionals who offered
themselves as interpretersof God's will in nineteenth-centuryYorubaland.
Of the mutual regard of Christian pastors and babalawoI have written
elsewhere (Peel 1991). More striking still is the report from Abeokuta
in 1877 that individual babalawoand alufa or Qur'anic specialists each
sought out a working partner from the other profession, so that they
could reciprocally draw on one another's expertise in difficult matters
of divination (REMY:115). It almost goes without saying that the Muslim
alufa were wholly and categorically a male profession.
The modern literature on Ifa concentrates very largely on its char-
acter as a system of divination, and as a cultural archive of Yoruba
wisdom. But this leaves out what was one of its most widely diffused
functions in nineteenth-century Yoruba life, which was as a protective
cult for men: this is what the CMS authors had in mind when they
wrote-no doubt with someexaggeration-of every man having his Ifa.
Men were initiated into Ifa, particularly at the turning-points of early
life, and received a set of dedicated palm-nuts (ikin),which were kept
in a small vessel and served as a material icon of Ifa's protective power.
From a handful of cases reported in the CMS papers, it appears that
women had access to this power through their husbands. So in a small
Ijesha town in 1888, a woman on her return from the farm is seen to
go straight before greeting anyone to prostrate to her husband's Ifa to
thank it for her safety; and when the wife of a man at Ota fails to
conceive, the husband spends much money to have himselfinitiated into
Ifa, and then performs the necessary sacrifices on her account. The
only case where a woman is reported as having her own dedicated ikin
concerns a wife of the famous Brazilian babalawo,Philip Jose Meffre,
but he still seems to have kept charge of it for her, along with his son's

150 7. D. Y. Peel
Ifa: a patriarch looking after his own people.35This use of Ifa as a pro-
tective charm for its owner was the model for Muslim and Christian
analogues, in the amulets (tira),consisting of scraps of paper with Qur'anic
verses sewn into a leather pouch; or the treatment of the Yoruba Primer
(Iwe ABD) as a kind of Christian charm.
These portable devices for individual protection answered to the anx-
ieties which were inevitably created by the disruption, insecurity and
displacement that were such marked features of the life-worlds of nine-
teenth-century Yoruba people. But since women were equally subject
to these pressures as men, we are led to ask what did women rely on,
if the Ifa cult of personal security was barely open to them. A good part
of the answer appears to be the cult of Ori (literally 'head') or personal
destiny, whose icon was a small circular box (igba Ori), made of stiff
calico covered all over with cowries. Any (wo)man's Ori was considered
so unique to her that the igba Oriwas broken up at her death. Yet Ori
itself was considered as an orisa,and like Ifa implied a special relation-
ship with the Supreme Being-now as Creator (Eleda)or 'bestower of
destiny' (onipin)alluding to the belief that each individual before their
(re)birth knelt before God to choose their destiny or 'portion' (ipin).A
woman once interrupted an evangelist's outdoor preaching in Ibadan,
to say that even if they forsook the rest of their ornsa,they would still
keep 'Ori the head', for it was 'their god and maker'.36
The functional equivalence of Ori and Ifa as pre-eminently portable
cults for personal security-in contrast to the other orisa cults, which
were more attached to place and often embodied in bulky images
comes out clearly in Samuel Johnson's satisfied comment on his jour-
ney from Ibadan to the Kiriji camp in 1880: that none of the pagans
in his party had consulted their Ifa or 'worshipped their head', but
joined in Christian prayers instead. The likelihood that Ori was espe-
cially appreciated when one was away from home is supported by com-
ments from elsewhere: at Badagry it was described in 1850 as 'a Lagos
fashion'; and at Abeokuta in 1883 it was said to be much worshipped
by Ijaye people (who had fled there after the sack of their own town
in 1862). This last observer, J. A. Lahanmi (himself an Egba), went on
to generalize that almost every woman had her Ori beside her other
gods; and that men mostly had no representation of it-i.e. the cowrie-
covered igba Oni-but just made sacrifice to their head when they felt
they needed to. This testimony of Ori as an especially female cult fits
with the aggregate evidence about the worship of Ori: three quarters
of the references to it in the CMS journals are expressly to its wor-
ship by women, sometimes wealthy traders, such as Osu Daropale, 'an

Genderin TorubaReligiousChange 151
influential women here [Badagry] but... of dissolute character', to

whom all the local European and Brazilian traders would send pre-
sents on her feast day.37 (One is intrigued to know more.)
But the most singular case of a women's attachment to the cult of
Ori involved an elderly Egba Christian in 1853:
As Elizabeth Lutonbi lay on her deathbed, her non-Christian relatives schemed
with the Ogboni to frustrate her desire for a Christian burial. Her funeral prop-
erly required the participation of a pagan daughter, who lived forty miles away
at Ota, so her grand-daughter (whose father was an Ogboni chief) tied an amulet
round the wrist of the dying woman to detain her in life till the daughter could
return to bury her. The old lady told another daughter, a Christian, to take the
amulet off. When her speech failed, the grand-daughter came in to her room and
'began to adore and worship her head by making offerings and saying "Dear
mother, fail not to send me children, without delay, as soon as you are gone" . . .'.
The CMS journalist-an Egba himself-explains this by noting that the grand-
daughter was childless, and there was the belief that while aged grandparents still
lived, their grand-children 'can never be in a prolific state'.38
The granddaughter is swayed by the same thinking that led very old
people to be considered witches because their longevity had had to be
achieved at the expense of others. Yet she still feels able to worship
her grandmother's Ori, which though intimately connected to her is
itself a distinct entity. It is like an empowering shadow: it has given
strength and protection to its human counterpart, but will go when she
does, so it is only to be invoked while the old lady is still alive. At the
same time, the granddaughter anticipates favourable treatment from
her grandmother after her death, when she will have become an ances-
tor. But this crucial transition depends on her receiving a proper funeral,
which was why (as we shall shortly see) burial palavers were such a
bitter source of contention between Christians and their pagan relatives.
Genderin the reception

of Christianity
So far, no systematic comparative picture has emerged as to the
ways in which patterns of Christian conversion in Africa were inflected
by gender. An older stereotype held that, being male-dominated orga-
nizations like their parent churches, missions were most concerned to
address themselves to men; that men were most ready to respond to
them; and that their efforts served mainly to maintain or even enhance
the position of men in society. This is certainly the position taken by
Oyewumi with respect to the Yoruba (1997: 137), and it is against this
sort of view that several of the contributors to Bowie, Kirkwood and
Ardener's collection seek to give women, whether as missionaries or as
converts, their proper place in narratives of mission and church life.

152 7. D. Y. Peel
For it now seems widely agreed that, as the Comaroffs (1991: 240) put
it for southern Africa, 'the gospel... seems to have had a much greater
and quicker impact on females than on males'. Hastings (1989) makes
the case for Africa at large, that women were initially more drawn to
Christianity than men, starting from Samuel Crowther's baptism of his
mother at Abeokuta in 1846, which somehow is made to seem para-
digmatic, and going on to a range of others drawn from all over the
continent. But the evidence he adduces is too patchy, his style of argu-
ment too pointilliste,to establish the case he wants to make, and one is
disconcerted that where he meets the contrary, as in the early years of
mission in Buganda, he is so ready to treat it as an exception to the
rule, or even to call the evidence into doubt.
So it must be doubted whether there is great point in trying to deter-
mine at an empirical level whether Christian missions in general have
appealed more to women or to men, by aggregating data from situations
at different times and places across Africa as a whole. Since that ap-
proach must necessarily override contextual specificities, it seems better
to proceed more analytically, by seeking those structures or principles
that operate to produce empirical outcomes in concrete cases. In the
Yoruba case (and no doubt in others too), it is well to hold two analytical
guidelines well in mind: that gender does not usually figure as an iso-
lated factor, but in combination with other social attributes; and that
it does not exists as a factor outside time, but as one whose significance
is likely to change and develop, particularly as missions grow from their
early 'days of small things' into well-established congregations.
The evangelistic efforts of the Yoruba Mission-public preaching
about the town, 'itinerations' through the district, visits to individual
compounds etc.-were equally addressed to women as to men. Indeed,
some missionariesfelt that especial attention ought to be paid to women,
because of their influence in the early education of children.39But still,
there soon developed a fair consensus that women were more resistant
to their preaching than men. In early days at Abeokuta, Samuel Crow-
ther commented on 'the superstitious fears of parents, especially the
mothers, that their children should no longer worship the country fashion
to whom they imagine the children owe their births and preserva-
tion. ..'James White found the same at Ota in 1859-'The male pop-
ulation... are more disposed to listen to the preaching of the Gospel
than the female, who are too bigotted [sic] and deep-rooted in their
superstitious belief'; and he exemplifies it with the case of a young
male convert under pressure from his beautiful wife-there appear to
have been as yet no children-to abandon his new religion. A few

Gender
in Yoruba
Religious
Change 153
years later, White was especially pleased to have converted a woman

'since it is a rare thing for the female population of [Ota] to attend
the things of God, and they are the obstacles in the way of the male
population'. Even Ogunbona, the mission's great patron at Abeokuta
and all but Christian in his own religious practice, could not stop the
orisa devotions of his wives, which were closely bound in with their
view of what was good for their children.
The overall picture is clear: women were very strongly attached to
the orisa cults, whose cardinal contribution was to ensure their repro-
ductive health and success; and which also provided them with the
fellowship of the cult-group which they greatly valued. So it is hardly
surprising that it was women whom the orisa had failed-that is sick
or childless women, or those whose children had died-who figured so
largely as 'inquirers', as the casual visitors to mission compounds were
known. But even these might not stay: White mentions the case of one
woman who started to attend after having had no fewer than eleven
abiku(children who come in a series, only to die some while after birth),
continued to come for two years but drifted away again, even though
her surviving child had reached the age of three.
These generalizations and illustrative cases are supported by the
sparse figures which we have for the early years of the mission. Women
were far fewer than men in Hinderer's class of 109 candidates early
in 1849. In 1850 Thomas King baptized 24 men (by implication no
women), several of whom had been persecuted or fined by the Ogboni
for their decision to become Christian. From Ondo a unique docu-
ment, Charles Phillips's 'An Account of the Candidates who are bap-
tised at Ode Ondo on Whitsunday, May 13, 1883'-which gives name,
origin, age, previous cult and brief biography of the first batch of con-
verts-paints a similar picture. Only four out of the eleven first con-
verts there were women, and three of these were strangers, two being
redeemed slaves who were mission dependents; but six out of the seven
male converts were Ondo natives (REMY: 235).
Most of this first wave of male converts were also young men, many
of them presumptively unmarried and so of all people the most free
(at least for a few years) from the nexus of concerns around marriage
and reproduction. They were most likely drawn to a more diffuse
empowerment-expressed above all in writing and the technical prod-
ucts-that were connected with these powerful strangers and their claim
to have the means 'to make the country good'. This interest of young
men shares the same orientation to the outside and to the future that
led the Ologun or war-chiefs to be the first patrons of the mission,

154 J. D. T. Peel
while the Ogboni chiefs, whose primary concern was always with inter-
nal order and the reproduction of the community, were a focus of
opposition to them. But though the war-chiefs were prepared to be
patrons of the mission, the social cost of conversion for such high-status
polygamists was too high for them to regard it as a personal option.
The initial interest of young men in Christianity was shown in a typ-
ical and gender-specific way: they would sometimes, in the early years
of the mission, come round in a company (egbe)-once as many as
forty-to look at the curiosities in the mission compound and to talk
to the missionaries. This is never reported for women; nor would it be
feasible, because by then they were married, without the leisure of
unmarried young men. Women's spare associational energies largely
went into orisa cult-groups, and if they called in to the mission com-
pound to seek solutions to their problems it was in ones or twos.
So far some of the patterns of attraction; but what of the costs? What
comes first to mind are the most severe sanctions, namely persecution
(see too McKenzie 1977 and Iliffe 1984). Except for the two waves of
publicly sponsored persecution at Abeokuta (in 1849-50 and in 1867),
the great bulk of it was endured at the hands of close relatives, partic-
ularly parents, husbands or in-laws, and to a much lesser extent neigh-
bours. It took many forms: flogging and beating, seizure or damage of
clothes or property, confinement in the compound (often in chains or
stocks) or expulsion from it, economic boycott, denial of routine forms
of neighbourly assistance, charges of divulging Oro or Egungun secrets
or, worst of all, of attempting to poison or causing the death of relatives.
Yet despite its brutalities, persecution had a real social point. It was
directed to defend the social order from the threat posed by Christianity
at the two critical points of its cycle of reproduction: birth and death,
of which the first bore chiefly on women, the latter on men.
Most references to persecution-about three quarters of reported
cases-concern women, young women in particular: mothers of babies,
betrothed women, and adolescent girls. It was not just that young
women were more susceptible than others to pressure from their elders,
but that they were responsible for discharging a key (and it seemed
threatened) social function: the worship of the orisato ensure the repro-
duction of the lineage. So when Christianity drew women away from
this duty, it could only be seen as a blow struck at the vitals of the
family. A notorious case occurred in the early days of the Ibadan mis-
sion, when two girls, who had joined the baptismal class, were beaten
by their fathers 'for refusing to take part in the usual sacrifice mak-
ing'. A year later, the girls (one of them by now married) ran off to

in orubaReligious
Gender Change 155
Abeokuta and their families complained to the Bale of the mission tak-
ing away their wives and children. Whatever had drawn the girls to
Christianity, the complaint of their families was fundamental, that it
was a menace to their very future. Feelings about family sacrifices might
run very high: when the wife of an Egungun devotee at Ibadan refused
to eat her portion of the kola after a sacrifice to Ori, he threatened to
kill both himself and her (REMY: 235-6).
In contrast to this endemic, familial persecution mostly directed at
young women, stands the public persecution that burst out at Abeokuta
in 1849, soon after the first real surge of accessions to Christianity, in
which young males predominated. The immediate trigger was the death
of one Idimi, who had been disowned by his wife and family for his
conversion. During his last illness, he had been taken to the mission
house to be cared for and was buried in the churchyard, rather than
in his family compound. Though the family accepted this, the Christian
burial angered the Ogboni because it cut them out from their usual
role in funerals, and the next day a good number of local Christians
were seized and put in chains by order of the Ogboni chiefs. They
were whipped, fined and then released, but by then the movement had
started to spread to some other townships in Abeokuta. Upwards of
200 converts in all, the great majority of them men, suffered during
the two-to-three months that the persecution lasted. What brought it
to an end was the opposition to it of the mission's influential patrons
among the Ologun (war-chiefs), who appreciated the risk to Abeokuta
if it alienated its European allies.
But the Ogboni were committed to the established values of the local
community, and the nub of their anxiety, as it was reported from the
Ogboni house, was that: 'these book people refuse to obey us by no
more making those country fashions which we have received from our
fathers, they even expose them, we are their fathers, they are our chil-
dren, we justly punish our children for this their disobedience.' This
note of patriarchal panic was also picked up by the missionaries in the
streets: 'old people began to curse us, but several young persons would
bless us'. And it was not just the young in general, but young menespe-
cially that the elders were concerned about, as witness the indicative
charge that the converts had been revealing the secrets of the ances-
tral cult of Oro to women.Critical to the role of the Ogboni was that
they presided over funerals, the rites of passage through which elders
became ancestors. And here we see that it was no accident that the
flashpoint of the whole episode was the burial of a convert in the
churchyard. Disputes over where and how Christians should be buried

156 J7.D. . Peel
would flare up repeatedly for many years to come. The mission wanted
converts to be buried in 'holy ground', separated from their pagan kin
but united with their fellow believers.As the Yoruba saw it, this amounted
to abandoning the bodies of their kin, who should be intimately avail-
able to their descendants in a domestic grave, to the bush, the place
for criminals and the untimely dead. The relatives of an elderly female
convert who died at Abeokuta in 1853 'would not suffer [her] body...
to be taken away by the oiboes ['Europeans', but used of African clergy
too] and to be interred in the [cemetery] which they called thrown to
the bush'. But behind this lay an issue of the greatest moment for the
old Yoruba order, since by separating the dead from their descendants
Christian burial custom challenged the very process of social repro-
duction, in its moral as in its physical aspect (REMT: 237).
If men showed serious signs of interest in Christianity, they were
often subject to another form of control, more subtle in its operation
than outright persecution, and certainly more effective: the pressure of
their friends. In 1874 a young man at Ota threw his Ifa and Esu care-
lessly to the ground to show White that he had given up their wor-
ship, but when asked why he did not come to church, confessed 'It is
through shame of my companions'. At Ondo in 1879 a man who had
promised Young that he would come to church 'said he was waiting
for his companions and they disappointed him; and he considered it a
disrespect to him for going alone; as such he thinks his companions
will make a mock of him' (REMT: 238). The paradox here is that,
though young men were to the fore among the first wave of Christian
converts, Christianity as a cultural system was soon seen to be deeply
inimical to the expectations that the community held of them, alike of
their public role and their personal futures, which was to be the front-
line defence of the community in war, and through success in it, to
graduate to the status of polygamous elders. These were the values
which young men's egbe upheld through the powerful sanction of peer-
group pressure. It would only be in the 1890s, after the colonial take-
over had rendered war redundant and made it evident that possession
of European skills were henceforth the key both to communal and per-
sonal advance, that young men's egbewould reverse their role, and
instead spearhead mass movements towards Christianity. The Abeokuta
persecution of 1849 was, in effect, the snuffing-out of such an incipient
mass-movement-but one that was premature by nearly half a century.
However, it was not at Abeokuta but at Ibadan where the difficulty
of reconciling Christianity and the beauidealof the male career showed
up most acutely. The first lay leader of Ibadan Christians, James

Oderinde, met it from a neighbour whom he almost persuaded to join

him as a baptismal candidate; but the man put him off since 'he feared
shame from his company in the war'. The gender values implied here
were made explicit in the report that in 1878 many young Christianswere
persuaded to go to war, against their pastors' injunctions, 'on account
of frequent charges of cowardice and womanliness[my italics] from hea-
thens' [REMT: 138]. The image that Christianity acquired as a 'wom-
anly' religion is confirmed in oral traditionscurrent about David Kukomi,
the most prominent convert of nineteenth-centuryIbadan, a warrior who
(quite exceptionally) was ready to renounce all but one of his seventeen
wives in order to be baptized. According to his great-granddaughter,
Mrs Kemi Morgan, his initial response to Christian preaching was that
its stories were only fit for 'women and girls', and he wouldn't allow
his sons to go and hear the local missionary, David Hinderer, until he
was won over by a personal encounter.40But the difficulties continued
after conversion, into the second generation. Soon after Oderinde's death
in 1877, his two sons John and Abel showed signs of wanting to repu-
diate Christianity; and eventually turned to Islam, which was much
more compatible with Yoruba values of manliness. It was the women
of the family-the sons' mother andJohn's first wife (for after he became
Muslim, he married others)-who remained Christian, for they were
not subject to the same social pressures that weighed on men.
So the import of gender for Christian adherence changed over time-
both as individuals aged, and as the church matured. In its earliest
days Christianity at Abeokuta had rather the nature of a youth move-
ment-just like later waves of religious renewal, such as Aladura in the
1930s or 'Born-again' Christians today. In fact, sympathetic older peo-
ple often expressly told missionaries that Christianity was a thing for
the future and the young: 'our children must learn the Word of God,
but we old people are too old for changing our fashions'. While both
sexes might be attracted to Christianity, young men were initially more
able to act on their preference, since they were less subject to the con-
tinuous domestic controls that operated on young women. It was intense
pressure from their peers which later, when the cultural demands of
Christianity became clearer, affected young men. But then age shifted
the terms of the trade-offs available to either sex in opposite directions.
As they got older, men were drawn into commitments which raised
the costs of conversion greatly: above all polygamy, which was an
absolute bar to baptism. Women, however, were not debarred by being
a partner in a polygamous (i.e. typical) marriage.41Moreover, as they
completed their child-rearing years, many women entered a phase of

158 J. D. Y. Peel
greater freedom and opportunity than they had known before, as social
controls over them were loosened. As a result, while senior men of
high social standing-like Oderinde or Kukomi-were the rarest cate-
gory of convert, a significant number of mature women exercised the
option to became Christian. We can infer this from the relative fre-
quency with which they seem to have been the subject of burial palavers:
when their pagan children and families wanted to reclaim them from
the Christians to give them a customary burial in the family house.
The outstanding case of this was Matilda Suada at Abeokuta, who
died in 1876. Her conversion in 1860 had come as a great surprise-
we have no idea as to what gave rise to it-since she was wealthy and
came of a good family; but her mother, the richest woman in Ikereku
township, was furious and drove her out. Matilda was a great bene-
factor of Ikija church, and as her pastor nicely put it, 'anything that
was done... that required money was done under her Matronage...
she was a Dorcas to heathens and Christians'. Her funeral was attended
by hundreds, both Christians and pagans; some of the church women
were so smitten in their grief that they injured themselves by violently
throwing themselves to the ground. Her grown-up oldest son, Ogun
(who was not a Christian, unlike her youngest, Moses), was responsi-
ble for the funeral; and though he agreed that she would have wanted
a Christian burial, felt that if he insisted on it, 'my companions will
forever abuse me and the reproach will be too much for me, inasmuch
as I live among them'. So it was; but a few years later Ogun helped
to build the new Ikereku church, and later to attend it, being per-
suaded by the pastor that it would be idolatrous to offer a sacrifice to
his deceased mother (REMY: 240-41).
Matilda, though herself a convert, belonged to the second genera-
tion of Yoruba Christianity, when the churches had come to include
a full spread of young and old, male and female members, though still
with a strong bias among new converts toward strangers: slaves or free
migrants. A kind of social anomaly became normal within congrega-
tions, arising from the fact that so many of the second generation of
male Christians, the sons of converts whose baptism had been condi-
tional upon their monogamy-'the greater part of our strong and brave
men', 'our young men of high standing' as their pastors ruefully put it
at Abeokuta in 1882 (REMY:269)-reverted to the polygamous norm
of the wider society. As a result, though they still attended services
and prayer meetings, they were debarred from communion; and full
church membership was limited to women and to monogamous men,
typically of lower status (including many slaves and strangers). This

in Toruba
Gender Change
Religious 159
anomaly would give a major impetus to the African Church movement

in the 1890s, which sanctioned polygamy for laymen and so restored
high-status men to the heart of the congregation (Webster 1964).
Conversely, the limitation on them in the mission churches must have
tended to enlarge the opportunity for wealthy women like Matilda
Suada to play key roles in church life. Indeed, it is very likely that the
fellowship of the orisa cults, so important in the social life of women,
provided a model that the churches had to emulate, if they were to
offer women anything of comparable satisfaction.
A connection between orisaand Christian devotion was strongly evi-
dent in the case of Maria Ekidan, who first enters the record in 1856
when she came from her village to hand in her idols to Thomas King
at Abeokuta:
She was, 'if not a priestess... generally acknowledged as a leader... and a great
instigator by her stimulating songs to those possessed by the imaginary demon'. She
was childless, and 'frequently did she go to the market, if not daily, with her Eleg-
bara [image of Esu] to collect cowries from the people by imploring those blessings
on others which she sought in vain to obtain from these things herself'. When her
husband became a baptismal candidate, she opposed him. She had also visited Akere,
the famous priestess of Yemoja [the river deity of Abeokuta] 'for her beneficial
and prolific waters', and it may have been her disappointment here which inclined
her to Christianity. Some people taunted her: 'Have you taken so much cowries
from us in the market, and after all do you go and take book [become Christian] ...
you must restore our cowries back...' She replied that she had not received one
thirtieth of what the orisa had consumed from her in sacrifices.42
Over a year later she was baptized as Maria, the name the Christians
gave her, because the story of her repentance reminded them of Mary
Magdalene. Later she moved as a petty trader down to Badagry, where
she died in 1874. She called herself Elese('sinner') and OmoAlanu('child
of mercy'), but it was another name given her-Mammy Oniwasu
('preacher')-which says most about her leading role in the congrega-
tion: good works, settling disputes, preaching.43
So it is not surprising that this period of the second generation-
that is the 1870s and 1880s for the older stations like Abeokuta, Ibadan
and Lagos-saw women involved as never before in evangelism. There
were as yet no professional women missionaries, just the wives of male
missionaries, a few of whom we know to have been significant in Chris-
tian outreach: women like Anna Hinderer among Europeans or Anne,
the first wife of James White of Ota, born of Igbo parents in Sierra
Leone. Yet in 1876 a company of women from Breadfruit church-
'some of [them]... elderly women and... acquainted with the cruel
history of the country', wrote their pastor James Johnson44-caused a
stir by going round to preach with authority to the Lagos chiefs. In

160 J. D. Y. Peel
1880 at Ibadan two women, Phoebe Lufowora and Dorcas Fawe, were
formally appointed as public preachers. When Phoebe died in 1887,
she got an affectionate tribute in her pastor's journal:
Though married to a pagan, she was assiduous in attending Sunday school. She
was too old to learn to read but she was proud of her prayer book, which some-
one would open at the right page for her during service. At Christmas, she would
invite the schoolchildren round for a treat, and they would sing to her.45
This suggests how central women had become to the life of local
churches, with their social and 'spiritual' sides blending indistinguish-
ably into one another. It helps to explain why a Muslim friend asked
James Okuseinde, pastor of Ogunpa church at Ibadan in 1877: 'how it
is possible that we draw women to church while their husbands do not
join'.46There is some patchy, but telling, statistical evidence of this fem-
inization of the church at the same period. Figures for adult baptisms
during the mid-1870s at Abeokuta show twice as many women becoming
Christians as men.47While we don't have comparable figures for Ibadan,
the two towns can be compared at the same period on another indi-
cator: the proportions of boys and girls attending school. Usually schools
had a higher enrolment of boys, but still at Abeokuta girls were not
far short of half the total; while at Ibadan, where the apostasy of men
amid talk of Christianity as 'womanly' was so much more pronounced
than at Abeokuta, more than two thirds of the pupils were girls.48
One thing that did come strongly through from traditional Yoruba
culture was the idiom of motherhood in which female leadership in the
church was expressed. Two instances might be given. To this day, the
term 'mother-in-Israel' is applied to senior women in the congregation,
such as Matilda Suada. Of its precise origin I am uncertain, but an
early use of it (and apparently the only one in the CMS archive) was
by Kukomi's son Robert Oyebode, then a teacher, to refer to his own
mother.49 She had left Kukomi while Oyebode was still an infant and
gone to Oriba, a small town on the lagoon, to trade. Oyebode had
long wanted to bring her back to Ibadan but she was a 'mother in
Israel' to the local people, and had many debts owed to her there; and
'was partly in fear of what had separated her most unwillingly from
her children for these 30 odd years'. Whatever this was-and it is hard
to put out of one's mind the sort of domestic conflicts which gener-
ated witchcraft accusations50-this enigmatic story is eloquent of the
vicissitudes of Yoruba women's lives in the Nineteenth Century.
Then there was the remarkable testimony that James White gave to
the memory of his late wife Anne, a woman of an intense and active
evangelical piety. In a letter to the CMS Secretary, Henry Venn, he

in Yoruba
Gender Religious
Change 161
described her as 'a faithful and affectionate wife, a competent associ-

ate, an able assistant, a tender Mother, and above all a devoted and
conscientious Christian', a woman whose 'amiable disposition' was yet
combined with 'straightforwardnessand faithfulness in reproving vice';
and-his eulogy rising to a crescendo-'she [was] indeed a Mother in
the strictest sense of the word-a mother to her household-a mother
to the Otta church-nay, the heathen themselves style her the mother
of all Otta'.51 Here the Victorian ideal of the Christian wife, the help-
meet of her husband within the framework of a singular marriage, is
combined with a Yoruba emphasis on her status as mother, the para-
digm of realized female potential. It is a fine irony that someone as
fierce in his condemnation of idolatry as White was should end up
invoking the opinion of the 'heathen' to prove the regard in which his
wife was held in the community. And one cannot but wonder whether
his use of the phrase 'mother of all Otta' does not allude, at least sub-
liminally, to that other Mother known throughout the town, the scourge
of witches, the priestess of Orisa Owo.
The growing appeal of Christianity to Yoruba women, who had once
been the sex more resistant to it, strongly implies that it had taken
on-or rather, been made by women to take on-some of the char-
acter of orisa cults, in offering both an important social facility for
women and answers to their medico-spiritual needs. Yet still there was
a major shortfall, which may be put down to evangelicalism's restraint
of pneuma(whether male or female) by dogma(always male). So women
(especially wealthy ones) could be highly influential members of the
congregation, and they might be active in preaching the Word; but
they could not themselves be vehicles of divine power, in the manner
of the woman whom Samuel Johnson met at Osogbo in 1883, 'pos-
sessed with the spirit of divination' and treated with 'respect, or should
I say dread... venerated as a god' by those about her [REMY: 104].
Not until the Aladura movement burst on Lagos in 1925 with the vision
of a seventeen-year-old woman did the Yoruba tradition of female reli-
gious inspiration re-surface within Christianity. And even the Aladura
churches have not fully or evenly realized their potential to promote a
greater degree of gender equality in the religious sphere (Crumbley
1989, 1992).
Conclusion
It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into the question of how
far Christianity may have enhanced or depressed the status of Yoruba

162 7. D. t. Peel
women in the longer term. For what it is worth, my inclination would

be to go along with LaRay Denzer's view that there were gains in
some areas and losses in others. This may not be a very exciting con-
clusion, it but does valuably direct us to examine processes of change
in specific areas of life, rather than rush to a premature general ver-
dict. As to Oyewumi's contention that it was colonialism that intro-
duced the Yoruba to patriarchy, I hope I have sufficiently shown that
there is abundant evidence that many aspects of nineteenth-century
Yoruba life were profoundly shaped by gender, not least in the prac-
tice of traditional religion and hence, in part, in the reception of
Christianity. So what occurred on the terrain of religious change was
that one system of patriarchy met another. Yet they were very different
kinds of patriarchy, the one communitarian and military-clientelist, the
other bourgeois and individualist, and in negotiating a compromise they
did create some space for subordinate groups to assert themselves. One
of the most immediate and lasting benefits that Christianity, with the
support of colonial law, brought to women was the effective freedom
to choose their own marriage partners; but it brought it to them as a
by-product of its individualism, which translated into a support foryoung
people against local patriarchy. We see old-style Yoruba patriarchy hav-
ing its last fling in the attempts of elders, in the first decade or so of
colonial rule, to compel young women to marry the men their lineage
elders had betrothed them to, rather than the young Christians or Lagos
returnees to whom they were attracted (REMY:245). We may be inter-
ested in the 'mission impact on women', but it is the gender/age con-
junction that has to engage our immediate attention.
NOTES
1. This paper is in a sense a response to LaRay Denzer's comment on a draft chap-

ter of my ReligiousEncounterand the Making of the oruba (Peel 2000), dealing with the
social context of nineteenth-century Yorubaland, that it failed to address the topic of
gender in any systematic way. Where the material used here is drawn from the book,
I have referred the reader to it (citing it in the text as REMT) rather than to the orig-
inal sources, since these will generally be much less accessible.
An earlier version of the paper was presented at a panel organized by Kristin Mann
at the African Studies Association annual conference at Nashville, November 2000. To
her, to Sandra Barnes, Edna Bay, Toyin Falola, Jacob Olupona and others present at
that session, and also to Deborah Gaitskell, Andrea Cornwall and Hermione Harris for
their comments on later drafts, I am very grateful.
2. 'The average Anglican [in the world] is a 24-year old African woman', said the
SundayTimes(London), 15 March 2001: a reference for which I am indebted to Hermione
Harris.

Genderin rorubaReligiousChange 163
3. E.g. on southern Africa, such as Gaitskell 1997 (and other essays) or Landau 1995.
4. The literature on Yoruba women is large, diverse and contested. Denzer's 1994
review essay provides a judicious assessment of the historical literature up to 1993.
Notable subsequent studies include Matory 1994, Cornwall 1996, Johnson-Odim and
Mba 1997, and Oyewumi 1997.
5. For discussion of the nature and reliability of this source material, see Peel 1996:
70-94 and Peel 2000: 9-22.
6. D. Olubi, Journal, 13 December 1879.
7. Cited by R. Law 1995: 205.
8. This was what the Egba pastor Charles Phillips said of conceptions of Olorun,
the Supreme Being associated with the sky, as they were among the Ondo (Peel 2000:
117-18).
9. W. Marsh, Journal to 31 March 1846, Abeokuta.
10. The most substantial general discussions of Yoruba witchcraft beliefs are to be
found in Parrinder 1970 and Hallen and Sodipo 1986: 86-118. The character of witches
that one is led to infer from the CMS journals stands much closer to the picture drawn
by Parrinder than the one Hallen and Sodipo derive from their moder oniseguninfor-
mants. But since so much of their discussion hinges on what the term ajereally means,
it is not easy to say how the CMS journalists' various references to 'witches' bear on it.
11. J. White, Journal, 25 April 1856, Ota.
12. J. White, Journal, 17 February 1864, Ota.
13. S. Pearse, Annual Letter, 13 October 1874, Badagry.
14. I. Smith, Journal, 18 March 1849, Badagry.
15. J. A. Lahanmi, Journal, 19 August 1883.
16. D. Olubi, Journal, 22 January 1876, Ibadan.
17. B. A. Oyetade, writing about Yoruba conceptions of 'enemies' (ota), quotes a
telling proverb (Biku ile o pani, tode o le pani, 'If death from inside the house does not
kill you, death from outside will not kill you').
18. S. W. Doherty, A. F. Foster, Journals, 23 February 1875.
19. As in a similar case when Sango devotees arrived in Ondo during a smallpox
epidemic in 1879, and collected animals from people to propitiate the disease (Peel
1996: 88-90).
20. W. Marsh, Journal to 31 March 1846.
21. T. King, Journals, 2 April 1852 and 23 June 1861; cf. too H. Townsend, Journal,
16 March, 1855, also at Abeokuta.
22. At Abeokuta (reported the Egba pastor Thomas King, Journal, 18 February 1854),
Oro was so male-oriented that, while women participated in the annual festivals as wor-
shippers, only male ancestors received worship, except in the Owu section of the town.
The Owu were not strictly Egba-culturally closer to the Oyo in fact-but joined up
with the three groups of Egba at Abeokuta as refugees in the 1830s.
23. S. A. Crowther to H. Venn, 4 November 1848, a letter which is largely about
Oro; W. S. Alien, Journal, 23 May 1870. Here Crowther was an Oyo reporting Egba
custom, Allen an Egba reporting Oyo custom.
24. J. A. Maser, Journal, 8 March 1855.
25. T. King, Journal, 12 April 1850.
26. C. A. Gollmer, Journal, 30 March 1854.
27. J. White, Journal, 16 December 1856; [A. Shanu], 'A Review of Evangelistic
Tours, 1879', in file of V. Faulkner, CA2/O 37/134.
28. J. White, Report for half-year ending 25 March 1865, Annual Letter for 1878.
29. They were Odiwo,who killed the victim with a club; Asogunwho decapitated her;
Eramo,who carried her head; and Afakowho dragged her body in disgrace around the
streets.
30. J. White, Journals, 31 December 1855, 13 January 1871.
31. S. Pearse, Journal, 5 April 1862; Smith, loc. cit.

164 7. D. T. Peel
32. S. A. Crowther, Journal for quarter ending 25 September 1849.

33. S. Pearse, Journal, 12 November 1863.
34. Maupoil (1943: 153-1540 gives several cases, commenting: 'Bien que theorique-
ment reserv6e aux hommes, la fonction de bokono[babalawo]peut se trouver exercee par
une femme dont l'intelligence et le charactere virils s'accordent avec l'6tude et la pra-
tique de Fa'. ProfessorJacob Olupona has pointed out to me that woman, usually orisa
priestesses, have been more commonly practitioners of the lesser but related erindilogun
or 'sixteen cowries' system (described in Bascom 1980).
35. S. Pearse, Journal, 1 January 1863.
36. W. S. Allen, Journal, 25 October 1868.
37. S. Pearse, Journal, 2 April 1863.
38. T. King, Journal, 27 October 1853.
39. A. C. Mann, Journal, July-September 1853. Mann was one of the Basel-trained
Germans recruited by the CMS, and refers to the lectures on pastoral theology given
by his teacher, W. Hoffmann.
40. Interview with the late Mrs Kemi Morgan, 23 November 1994.
41. Birgit Meyer, in a comment on an earlier draft, wondered at the full admission
of later wives in polygamous marriages, comparing it with their exclusion in the main
missions active among the Ghanaian Ewe. CMS inclusiveness on this point was evi-
dently due to pressure from Samuel Crowther, arguing against Bishop Weeks of Sierra
Leone (see his letter to Venn, 3 January 1857, cited in Ajayi 1965: 105-106).
42. T. King, Journals, 11 April 1856; 4 January 1857. On the Yemoja priestess, see
McKenzie 1975 and Peel 2000: 20-22.
43. S. Pearse, Annual Letter, 13 October 1874.
44. J. Johnson to CMS Secretary, 2 September 1876.
45. D. Olubi, Journal, 9-10 July 1880; F. L. Akiele, Journal, 29 January 1887.
46. J. Okuseinde. Journal, 28 June 1877.
47. D. Williams (pastor of Ake church), Annual Letters for 1873, 1875 and 1879.
Actual figures: 32 men, 64 women.
48. D. Williams, Annual Letters, 1872-78: average annual attendance, 95 boys to 81
girls. D. Olubi, Annual letters, 1872-79: average annual attendance, 25 boys to 41 girls.
49. R. S. Oyebode, Journal, 20 January 1888.
50. I drew a blank when I raised the story with Oyebode's great-niece,Mrs Kemi Morgan.
51. J. White to Venn, 6 June 1867.
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Gender in Yoruba Religious Change

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obinrin,unlike their supposed English equivalents 'man' and 'woman',

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crucial importance of age and seniority (which earlier feminists tended

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of as one. Now it is not easy to imagine a person in concrete terms

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stereotyping, these 'male' qualities of strength and ferocity would fit

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The terminology in which the CMS journalists referred to malign

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individuals. The main generalization is that there was a clear gender

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ways. Its keynote was control, not inspiration: instead of surrender to

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influential women here [Badagry] but... of dissolute character', to

Genderin the reception

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years later, White was especially pleased to have converted a woman

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Oderinde, met it from a neighbour whom he almost persuaded to join

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anomaly would give a major impetus to the African Church movement

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described her as 'a faithful and affectionate wife, a competent associ-

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women in the longer term. For what it is worth, my inclination would

1. This paper is in a sense a response to LaRay Denzer's comment on a draft chap-

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32. S. A. Crowther, Journal for quarter ending 25 September 1849.

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Cornwall, Andrea Ella

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