The red dust of the nineteenth century was thicker than the centuries before, choked with the smoke of collapsing empires and the frantic prayers of the displaced. The Oyo Empire, once the sun around which the Yoruba world revolved, was fracturing. From its ruins, a young Yoruba boy named Ajayi was rescued from a slave ship and taken to Sierra Leone.
In 1827, the founding of Fourah Bay College in Freetown changed the gravity of West Africa. Among its first students was Ajayi, now baptized as Samuel Ajayi Crowther. To the Adesina lineage, still clinging to the remnants of their ancestral dignity in the interior, Crowther was a miracle—a man who had mastered the "spirit-language" of the English and returned with a book that claimed to hold the voice of God.
By the 1850s, the rivalry took on a new, intellectual shape: the Missionary Revolution.
Crowther did not just bring the Bible; he brought the alphabet. When he led the Niger Expedition to Onitsha in 1857, he carried a Yoruba’s perspective into the heart of the Igbo nation. The Okonkwo of that era, a fierce traditionalist in Onitsha, watched with suspicion as this "Yoruba Bishop" stepped off the steamship Dayspring.
"Why does a man from the West come to tell us how to speak to our ancestors?" the elders grumbled.
But Crowther did something the Igbos did not expect. He did not ask them to speak Yoruba or English; he handed them the first Igbo Primer. He had used his linguistic training to decode the Igbo tongue into Western script. To the Adesina family, who had already begun sending their sons to the CMS Grammar School in Lagos (founded in 1859), education was a shield against the British. They were the first doctors, the first lawyers, the first clerks. They looked at the Igbos of the mid-1800s as "latecomers" to the modern world—a forest people still bound by the old oracles.
The Okonkwos, however, were quick students. After the initial shock of the missionaries, a realization swept through the Igbo heartland like a tidal wave: The pen is the new machete.
While the Yoruba elite were consolidating their power in the civil service of the budding colony, the Igbos began a frantic, obsessive pursuit of Western schooling. They didn't just want to learn; they wanted to overtake. The rivalry was no longer about who had the largest farm or the most bronze rings; it was about who could produce the most graduates from Fourah Bay.
Chapter 3: The Iron Cage
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