Young converts: Christian missions, gender and youth in Onitsha, Nigeria 1880-1929

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Church Missionary Society missionaries, both of African and European descent, became interested in gaining converts among Igbo-speaking women in southeastern Nigeria. Schooling was an integral part of the conversion process. This article contends that separate body/mind disciplines for lgbo "youth" were not only based in European gender categories but helped to develop a separate category of personhood among Igbo themselves: ndi kris, the Christian people, who marked gender dichotomies differently than their unmissionized compatriots. The article discusses what the development of this socially separate, gendered, and youthful category of persons meant for Igbo society, and offers a way to consider how gender is necessarily part of the historical construction of "youth" in colonial contexts.