Christian Missions in Africa: Using the CMS archive

In this article on the cult of Ogun, J.D.Y. Peel wrote about a CMS missionary's journal entry describing the cult of Ogun-as-snake:

• "A comparative analysis of Ogun in precolonial Yorubaland" / J.D.Y. Peel, in Africa's Ogun : Old World and New / Sandra T. Barnes, ed. 2nd ed. Indiana University Press, 1997. Pages 263-289.

Peel describes the missionary's journal entry as, "the most dramatic account of the cult of Ogun-as-snake", summarizing the entry on page 272.

This passage is annotated by the article's footnote 33 (appearing on p. 284):

Note 33 : "C. Phillips Sr., Journal, 26 Oct. 1855"

Peel's archival sources for this book chapter are drawn mostly from the Church Missionary Society Archive, see the head note (unnumbered), page 283:

Head note : "The documents I have cited are all from the Yoruba Mission, O (incoming papers) series, classified before 1880 under the heading CA 2 (by author) ..."
 

The Penn Libraries offer two digitized collections of Church Missionary Society materials:

• Church Missionary Society Archive. Sourced from the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.
• Church Missionary Society periodicals. Sourced from the Crowther Mission Studies Library, Church Missionary Society and the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birningham.

The notes for Peel's book chapter indicate that these are "Incoming papers" from the Church Missionary Society Archive, so we want to use the first database listed above.

We know that we want to see "Incoming papers" from the Yoruba mission - those files will have CMS shelfmarks CA 2 O.... We know the Yoruba are a Nigerian population, we know the missonary's name as "C. Phillips", and we know that he wrote about an event on 26 October 1855.

Start by searching the CMS Archive for the most distinctive fact -- the missionary's last name: Phillips. The search results return a lot of items. You can reduce this long results list by filtering, first for Module = Church Missionary Society, then for Date =1855. This filtering produces a more manageable search results list.

And there, top of the list is:

• Nigeria : Yoruba : Original papers, missionaries : Charles Phillips. 1852-1858.

When we click on this link, we see more detailed bibliographic information about the file:

• Nigeria: Yoruba: Original papers, missionaries: Charles Phillips. 1852-1858. CMS Archive Part 4: Nigeria: Yoruba, 1844-1880, Reel 73. Church Missionary Society Archive C A 2 O77. Cadbury Research Library.

The CMS Archive digitized from microfilm by Adam Matthew Digital does not offer fulltext searching for handwritten documents, although it does support fulltext searching for many printed and typescript documents. So, you will need to click on the header link, "Download entire document as PDF", to read offline in a PDF reader application.

Browse through the PDF file, looking for Phillips's 26 October 1855 journal entry ... and there it is, on image 49, on the righthand page:

"Oct. 26th Friday. Today, I went to Are to deliver the message brought from Ibadan ...."