Irish missionary enterprise in Nigeria, 1885-1975
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on largely unexplored archival and published sources in Ireland, France, Britain, United States of America, Canada, Germany and Nigeria, this dissertation presents the first transnational survey of Irish missionary activity in Nigeria from 1885 to 1975. Four missionary orders – two females and two male – are used as a window on the varied aspects of Irish missionary work in Nigeria: The Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary, the Medical Missionaries of Mary, the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost Fathers/Spiritans) and the Society of African Missions (SMA). Five chapters contextualize the evangelical mission of the four Irish societies within the pre-existing African Traditional Religion, Protestantism, and Islam in Nigerian societies. The dissertation analyses how the missionaries’ Catholicism and Irishness influenced their colonial encounters with the Nigerian peoples and the British colonial administration. It explores how Irish missions used education, health and welfare provision as evangelisation strategies and assesses the Nigerian reception to them. This dissertation provides Nigerian perspectives on culture, indigenous knowledge systems, midwifery, community development, acculturation, ethnocentrism, inter-group relations, superficial absorption of foreign religions, and resistance. Finally, it investigates the influence and legacy of Irish missionary endeavour on the people of Nigeria and Ireland. This work argues that the intricate trajectory of Irish missionary endeavour in Nigeria has been characterized by triumphalism, racism, pecksniffianism, defensive spirituality, anti-colonial struggle, social power, and intellectual insecurity. It challenges a historiographical tradition that tends to neglect the contributions of the British colonial administration, Nigerians, and international organisations to the material progress of Irish missions in Nigeria. A study of this nature draws on and contributes to the histories of missions, religious identities, history of medicine and diseases, education in sub-Saharan Africa, welfarism, religious pluralism, ecumenism, gender and sexuality, Nigeria-Ireland relations, and church-state relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".