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The representation of Igbo peoples as practitioners of twin abomination is very much part of a historical process in which missionary and colonial interest in twin killing as a sign of African atavism played a significant role. This article explores historical record for information about twin abomination and twin murder, taking into account paradoxical nature of twinship not only for Igbo-speakers but for missionaries who wished to convert Igbo and stamp out what they called the demon superstition. (Twinship, West Africa, colonialism, missionization, avoidance behaviors) It is one of many ironies of late-twentieth-century modernity that African woman celebrated in Houston, Texas, in 1998 for giving birth to first set of living octuplets should be an Igbo-speaker from southeastern Nigeria.(2) The Igbo have been represented as one of West African cases par excellence of a society that, in immediate precolonial period at least, not only abominated twins and other multiple births but actively attempted to eradicate them through twin murder. Twin murder, as it entered anthropological canon, was exposure or suffocation of multiple neonates, whose bodies were then disposed of in ojoo ofia (bad bush) outside Igbo towns. One reason Igbo case of twin abomination became so well known is that custom was much discussed and publicized during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Europeans who were considered knowledgeable about continent. Indeed, eradicating twin killing became one of great mission causes in southeastern Nigeria, inspiring work of almost every outside missionary, of every denomination, from late nineteenth century into 1930s, when practice seems to have been largely discontinued. Women missionaries were especially drawn to this work, and some, like famous Mary Slessor of Calabar, made entire careers out of their crusades to obliterate practices associated with abominated twin births. Just as multiple births (umu ejime) were considered by Igbo-speaking peoples an abomination (nso ani) against Ala/Ani, earth deity, and liable for severe sanctions on both parents (especially mothers) and children, twin killing was an abomination against Christian God in eyes of missions. The taking of what was perceived by missionaries to be innocent human life, tied as it clearly was to indigenous religious beliefs as well as to non-Western understandings of gender, elicited an intensely emotional response from European and African evangelists alike. The intensity of this response was not unlike contemporary debates about abortion and rhetorical battles raged along similar lines (e.g., Ginsberg 1990; Petchesky 1997). That is, value of twinship was only partially at issue; more important for debate over fate of twins was agreeing on boundaries of human existence, what criteria denoted humanity itself. Because of two opposing positions taken toward this philosophical, cosmological, and theological question, multiple births necessarily constituted a nexus for protracted struggle between missionaries and their would-be Igbo converts. This article explores how terms of this reformist struggle were defined and redefined in one southeastern Nigerian town, Onitsha, during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout this period, Onitsha indigenes insisted on understanding multiple births through lens of their own cosmology, and made that insistence material by practices that actively subverted mission interests, even while seeming to acquiesce to them. Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries (both African and European) for their own part vowed to fight the demon superstition not only through physical salvation of twin bodies but through spiritual salvation of twins, their parents, and other kin. It is important to recognize that master narrative of Igbo twin murder did not always fit exotic and sensationalist stories of unbridled twin murder and heroic twin salvation told by missionaries. …
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