Missionary Archives as Contested Heritage: Provenance, Decolonization, and the Politics of Knowledge Production in Nigerian Church History

Abstrak

This paper examines the politics of knowledge production in Nigerian church history, focusing on the provenance, preservation, and accessibility of missionary archives. It argues that the physical location of these collections in European repositories, combined with their colonial-era systems of classification and description, continues to shape what can be known about Nigerian Christianity and how that knowledge is produced. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from archival studies, including Stoler's (2010) concept of "reading along the grain" and Staphorst's (2025) analysis of the coloniality of archival being, the paper analyses the provenance histories of key collections, including the Church Missionary Society archives at the University of Birmingham, the Sudan United Mission collections at the University of Edinburgh, and the records of the Methodist Missionary Society held in London. It examines the destruction of locally-held church records during the Nigerian Civil War and the subsequent dependence of Nigerian scholars on metropolitan archives. The paper argues that decolonizing Nigerian church history requires not only greater access to existing collections but a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between archives, historians, and the communities from which archival materials were taken. It concludes by proposing a research agenda for collaborative archival practice, including digitization, repatriation of digital copies, and the development of indigenous archival methodologies.