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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 the historical record for information about twin abomination and twin murder, taking into account the paradoxical nature of twinship not only for Igbo-speakers but for the missionaries who wished to convert the Igbo and stamp out what they called "the demon superstition." (Twinship, West Africa, colonialism, missionization, avoidance behaviors)
It is one of the many ironies of late-twentieth-century modernity that the African woman celebrated in Houston, Texas, in 1998 for giving birth to the first set of living octuplets should be an Igbo-speaker from southeastern Nigeria.' The Igbo have been represented as one of the West African cases par excellence of a society that, in the 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 the anthropological canon, was the exposure or suffocation of multiple neonates, whose bodies were then disposed of in the ojoo ofia ("bad bush") outside Igbo towns.
One reason the Igbo case of twin abomination became so well known is that the custom was much discussed and publicized during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Europeans who were considered knowledgeable about the continent. Indeed, eradicating twin killing became one of the great mission causes in southeastern Nigeria, inspiring the work of almost every outside missionary, of every denomination, from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s, when the practice seems to have been largely discontinued. Women missionaries were especially drawn to this work, and some, like the famous Mary Slessor of Calabar, made entire careers out of their crusades to obliterate the practices associated with abominated twin births.
Just as multiple births (umu ejime) were considered by Igbo-speaking peoples an abomination (nso ant) against Ala/Ani, the earth deity, and liable for severe sanctions on both parents (especially mothers) and children, twin killing was an abomination against the Christian God in the eyes of the missions. The taking of what was perceived by missionaries to be innocent human life, tied as...