Christian and Igbo Religious Systems: The New Interface

Across the world, the decolonisation question rages with all sorts of projects designed to confront the aftermath of the colonial encounter. Many Western cultural institutions and individuals holding artefacts from Africa for instance are returning them through different initiatives. But some people in many of the communities where the artefacts were originally taken from, have a different agenda in dealing with colonial legacies. Rather than bemoan the disruptions that came with colonialism, they appropriate them into their local traditions or draw on indigenous system to sustain received practices. To develop this point, I draw on what the engagement with the N. W. Thomas archive by local audiences in selected Nigerian communities reveals about the mingling of Pentecostalism and local religious system. The Thomas collections comprise photographs, artefacts, audio recordings and botanical specimens which the British Government anthropologist gathered during his anthropological surveys in Nigeria and Sierra Leone (1909-1915). Through the [Re:]Entanglements project that revisits the Thomas archive, the colonial materials reach local communities where they enter a new realm of knowledge production. Rather than be viewed as repudiated colonial historical documents, they open up histories of how local and received religious practices come together.