Women and the Christian Missionary Encounter in the Jos Plateau Area of British Nigeria

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Abstract

Women were assigned domestic duties within the European Christian enterprise, of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in Africa. As such, Christian women were trained in the art of ‘domestic science’ and ‘devout domesticity’. European Christian women who conveyed this gendered role to Africa were expected, not only to fulfil this mandate by being good Christian wives and mothers but, to impart the knowledge and skills that they possessed on African Christian women converts. Despite the gendered roles assigned to women, in the Christian missionary enterprise of the late period of European rule in Africa, a dominant perspective in the scholarship of the encounter argues that women participants did not restrict themselves to the domestic functions that were given to them. This perspective further argues that Christian women surpassed their gendered social expectations, of being good wives and mothers, by selectively deploying their agency in ways that both made sense to them and gave them a sense of fulfilment as individuals and as groups.2 This work supports this assertion by drawing on examples, from the functions that different categories of Christian women participants carried out, in the Christian missionary encounter that occurred in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole and the Jos Plateau area in particular during the period of British rule in Nigeria.