Collecting Abeokuta: Tracing the provenance of Egba material culture from the Church Missionary Society Yoruba Mission

The Reverend Henry Townsend (1815–1886) was a missionary of the Church Missionary Society who worked in the city-state of Abeokuta, in present day southwestern Nigeria, from 1846 to 1876. While there he gathered artifacts, some of which are now in the collection of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, in Exeter, England. This article is a study of part of this material culture, its trajectory from Abeokuta to Britain in the 1840s, and its use to create narratives of political power and Christian conversion in the context of the nineteenth century missionary encounter.