The Role of the Catholic Mission in the Development of Vernacular Literature in Eastern Nigeria

In what has now become a prophetic utterance, Ida C. Ward wrote in 1939 that the development of an Igbo literature would be held up if some specific problems connected with the language were not solved.1 She was referring particularly to the existence of a baffling great number of Igbo dialects, and a lack of uniformity in the orthography used in reducing them to a written form. Forty-six years after her observation, none of these problems has been conclusively solved, and the development of an Igbo literature has not yet come out of the foundation stage. Apart from the Hausa and Yoruba, the Igbo constitute the largest ethnic group in Nigeria. Yet, unfortunately, their language has yet to achieve that special honour. In an attempt to discover what had gone wrong, a consensus of opinions seems to point to the irony in the psychology of the Igbos themselves-a people who, in the past, loved every knowledge, except the knowledge of their language. Parents sent their children to school to learn English, and would not have anything to do with the vernacular. In their case, the observation of some members at the International Mission Conference at Le

Anthropology of religion · Archaeology · Hausa · History of religions · Honour · Igbo · Irony · Languages of Africa · Linguistics · Oral literature · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Vernacular · Yoruba · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Religious Education and Schools

• Igbo historiography

  Open Access•Gloria Chuku•History Compass•2018

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