Socio-Economic Transformations in Nigeria: The Role of Church Missionary Society (CMS) Schools and Social Stigmatization in Onitsha Province, 1904 – 1975

Abstract

The missionary education curriculum had been hotly debated among African scholars. They argued that they taught subjects which subverted African indigenous knowledge and culture. Thus, in their haste to produce court clerks, interpreters and catechists, they produced alienated Africans who looked down on their culture and tradition as “barbaric and heathen.” However, at the outset of the missionary educational establishment, the pioneer students were largely stigmatized. This was attributable to two factors: first, because the children sent out to study the ways of the white man were lazy. Second, many rich farmers sent out their slave’s children to test the intention of the white men who largely subdued them through force of arms. The social ostracism suffered by these pioneers of western education in Onitsha Province is unknown in scholarship. It is this gap in scholarship that this paper intends to fill. Employing qualitative and quantitative methods of historical inquiry through the use of primary and extant secondary sources, the study interrogates the different problems and confrontations encountered by the missionaries during the British heydays in Onitsha. The paper will also examine the colonial schools and their contribution to the development of the present-day Onitsha megacity. The cultural imperialism theory of Herbert Schiller complemented by the social exclusion theory advanced by Rene Lenoir will be appropriated for this purpose. The research concludes that the physical and social stigma experienced by these pioneers later formed the bedrock of professional bodies in Onitsha urban city today.

Keywords

• cms
• missionary schools
• colonial boys
• onitsha
• cultural imperialism
• stigmatization