Ikenga and other Igbo ritual items, French Catholic Mission

Ikenga and other Igbo religious items, French Catholic Mission, perhaps from converts, many artefacts ended up in European museums and private collections this way, not directly looted or bought, but given up and sold and collected in Europe. Friederich, R.P (1916). RAAI Yale University.

The missionary is a revolutionary and he has to be so, for to preach and plant Christianity means to make a frontal attack on the beliefs, the customs, the apprehensions of life and the world, and by implication (because tribal religions are primarily social realities) on the social structures and bases of primitive society. The missionary enterprise need not be ashamed of this, because colonial administrations, planters, merchants, Western penetration, etc., perform a much more severe and destructive attack. Missions, however, imply the well-considered appeal to all peoples to transplant and transfer their life-foundations into a totally different spiritual soil, and so they must be revolutionary.

– International Missionary Council spokesman, c. 1938. "The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World," p. 342.