The transition from the era of the sword to the era of the book was marked by the scent of ink and the salt spray of Freetown. By the mid-1800s, the world of the Adesinas and Okonkwos had been fractured by the slave trade and then stitched back together by the fervor of the abolitionists.
In 1827, the foundation of Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone created a new breed of African. Among them was a young Yoruba man, rescued from a slave ship, who would become the pivot upon which history turned: Samuel Ajayi Crowther.
In the Yoruba heartland, the Adesina of this generation—now a trader named Dele—witnessed the "Missionary Revolution" with a mixture of awe and calculation. When Crowther returned to Yorubaland, he didn't just bring a foreign god; he brought the alphabet. In 1859, the first secondary school, CMS Grammar School, was founded in Lagos. Dele enrolled his son immediately. To the Yoruba, the "Book" was a new form of Ifa—a secret code that allowed one to speak to the colonial masters in their own tongue, to negotiate taxes, and to secure land.
To the East, the Okonkwos remained suspicious. The Igbo generation of the 1850s, led by a stern patriarch named Ifeanyi, saw the missionaries as a threat to the Omenala—the sacred traditions of the land. When Ajayi Crowther arrived in Onitsha in 1857 to establish the Niger Mission, it was a Yoruba man who stood before the Igbo elders, translating the Bible into a language they barely recognized as their own.
"Why should we learn the scratches of a bird on a white leaf?" Ifeanyi asked, watching the mission boys chant their ABCs. To the Igbo of that decade, power was still measured in the size of one’s yam barns and the number of one’s titles. They did not yet realize that the Yoruba were building a lead that would last nearly a century.
The rivalry intensified through a "Competition of Enlightenment." While the Yoruba elite were becoming doctors and lawyers in the 1880s—the "Saro" aristocracy of Lagos—the Igbos were only just beginning to realize that the mission school was the new forge of the
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