A REVIEW OF THE IGBO-AFRICAN KOLA NUT AS A ‘TYPE’ OF HOLY COMMUNION: IGWEBUIKE AND THE MISSIONARY MISSING LINK

Abstract

The title of this article naturally commands widespread interest from scholars in
the area of comparative religion and missiology. This is particularly so especially
in Africa where Christianity is still struggling to settle itself as the authentic
religion of the people, just like it did in some parts of Europe and the Middle
East.
Christianity’s encounter with the indigenous religion of the Africans has
provoked divergent reactions and interpretations from scholars of various hues.
According to Nwadialor (2018), “Ever since Christianity made its first attempt to
be established in African soil, there have been varieties of indigenous response
ranging from resistance at the early stages; acceptance through colonial
imposition and social evangelism; through the breakaway movements in the 19th
centuries coinciding with political and cultural nationalism; to the development
in the late 19th century and early 20th century of prophetic movements; and the
recent emergence of neo-Pentecostal Christianity†(p. 1). Missiologists have also
echoed this trend in time perspective, Prof Kanu has added his voice to this
range of analyses. His paper examined kola nut as an Igbo tradition ritual and
compared it with the ritual of the Eucharist in Christian religion. The paper
echoes Njiku (2005) argument that the dominant adoption of the oral techniques
and forms of storage for the theology of the Traditional Religions was partly
responsible for the reduced visibility of the theology of the Traditional Religions.
The paper further argues that the white missionaries who pioneered missionary
enterprise in Africa were overwhelmed by the prevailing superiority complex of
Europeans of the time, which informed their inability to understudy the theology
of African Traditional Religion with the view to finding its usefulness for a better
understanding and acceptance of Christianity. This sentiment, the paper argues,
manifested in the missionaries’ view of African people and their culture,
reducing everything to be the extension of satanic kingdom that needed a
redemption that must come in form of imposition of Euro-Christian worldview