Twins Were DOOMED! Missionaries Saved Them From Ancient Cult

[00:00:00]In this suffocating deranged cult of an ideology, one psychotic obsession towered over the lot in sheer monstrosity. The ironclad delusion that twins were a cosmic abomination, a stain demanding total erasure. Soon afterwards, one of the missionaries went full action hero and physically snatched a twin girl from an Ibibio village.

[00:00:22]Yanked her right out of the loving embrace of tradition, shall we call it?

[00:00:27]Dragged her kicking and screaming probably mostly the villagers doing the screaming to safety.

[00:00:34]She survived, grew up, even married one of the assistant teachers at the mission station in Ikot Offiong.

[00:00:41]Happy ending, right? Years afterward, the village elders where she'd been born kept demanding she be handed back so they could finish the job. They wanted her returned from the safety of Creek Town for one reason only, to kill her. One mother, clearly employee of the month in the local parenting awards, tried to kill the infants on the spot, absolutely convinced she'd brought apocalyptic doom on everyone by failing to deliver them pre-murdered.

[00:01:10]The missionary stealth in, hid the kids, and saved the day again. But the town leaders were enraged, convinced their god Ananse, a local spirit believed to live in a sacred spring and punish disobedience with disease and ruin, would wipe them out for allowing the twins to survive.

[00:01:29]And here the story stops being merely historical and becomes moral. And yet, more than a century later, this entire moral showdown is dismissed by modern academics as a trifling misunderstanding. In The Invention of Women, 1997, sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi pompously writes that the very categories blasting the savagery were bogus intrusions foisted by outsiders.

[00:01:56]As she puts it, "As the work and my thinking progressed, I came to realize that the fundamental category woman, which is foundational in Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland prior to its sustained contact with the West. They were bungling concepts, the poor dears, baffling."

[00:02:16]Which brings me to a moral question for you. Are we judging an injustice [music] or disrupting the natural order that exists because it works for those who live within it?