To systemically and gradually thrust monogamy on Igbo people via the enterprise of Christianity, John Christopher Taylor established the first boarding school in Igboland on November 18, 1858 at Ọnịcha. The first entrants were all girls. No boys. The boys despised the new religion and watched the girls engage in a practice (of living and waking up within the mission compound) they found strange. Taylor, when writing to his superiors in Britain and asking for funds and cloths, called the girls “boarders”. That’s where the name “boarder” originated in Igboland. It was in the same boarding activities that some of the girls were abused as slaves by one of the missionaries from Sierra Leone.
Towards the end of the 19th century (1895) when the whites had taken over the missionfield and had pushed away the blacks who founded it including Bishop Ajayi Crowther, Miss Edith Warner, a British young woman in her late 20s, had revived the girl’s school which was grossly penetrated by merchants and ship men (Europeans and locals) as to abuse the girls sexually. But she was eager to move it away from Ọnịcha to avoid the porosity that lent it to abuse. Iyi-Enu in Ogidi became the answer. The girls school was transfered to Ogidi for a while and from there to Úgwú Ọgba in Ogbunike where it became St Monica’s. Within the years of movement from Ọnịcha to Ogidi and finally to Ogbunike, a reasonable number of girls were raised strictly for monogamy (one man-one woman), to be housewives to the new church teachers and pastors and converts, and to cook in certain ways they never knew before then. Aside these, they were taught sewing and mending of cloths. They weren’t taught Math or or other meaningful subjects. Other girls school were opened around the same time at Idumuje-Ugboko across the Niger River of the Western Igbo. By 1904, marriages according to one man-one woman mantra was gaining ground and the girls were inspired to be eager to covet and dress in white bridal gowns and marry “according to the teachings of Christ”.
Edith Warner spent many years raising the girls this way who would later become our great grand mothers and grandmothers in future. I also suspect that many ways of cooking were also tampered with during this incubating periods as the girls were taught to add one thing or another. Yes, Edith Warner also them how to cook, not minding that they were cooking in their parents house before Warner came.
I have more details on this to share but I just laid out these summaries so that the Igbo women claiming elsewhere that “the Bible said that God made it one man, one wife” should realise that they are ignorant and are only regurgitating what they learned from churches as children. The Igbo never knew anything about one man, one wife until 1857 when the enterprise of Christianity came began in their land via Ọnịcha. And the narrative gained root just about this time last century.
References: Missionary Enterprise and Rivalry in Igboland by F K Ekechi, Edith Warner of the Niger by G T Basden and Missionary Education in Igboland by S Onyeidu.
Chijioke Ngobili
