Missionary Knowledge and the State in Colonial Nigeria: How G.T. Basden Became an Expert

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Periodical article

Title:	Missionary Knowledge and the State in Colonial Nigeria: How G.T. Basden Became an Expert
Author:	Van den Bersselaar, Dmitri
Year:	2006
Periodical:	History in Africa
Volume:	33
Pages:	433-450
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Nigeria
Subjects:	missions anthropology Igbo experts colonial administration Religion and Witchcraft colonialism History and Exploration Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
About person:	George Thomas Basden
External link:	http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/history_in_africa/v033/33.1bersselaar02.pdf
Abstract:	This paper explores the work and career of George Thomas Basden, who joined the Church Missionary Society (CMS) Niger Mission in 1900, and who became recognized as an expert on the Igbo people of Nigeria. It examines the intersections of academic anthropological, missionary, and colonial knowledge production in an attempt to understand why it took so long for Basden's missionary knowledge to be recognized as expertise that would be useful to the colonial State. A crisis of colonial knowledge forced the Nigerian government to look for expertise outside the restricted circle of colonial knowledge production in the late 1920s. This led to the recognition and encapsulation by the colonial State of the expert knowledge of a range of non-government experts, including Basden, but did not stretch so far as to include the possibility of suitable African experts. Ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]