Ibeno, AKS: First Qua Iboe Church built by the Rev Sammuel Bill in 1887 with materials imported from Liverpool. This marked the begining of the Qua Iboe Missions in Nigeria. What a Godly heritage picture credits John Ekpo

Classical

Holy Bible Used By rev. Samuel bill in 1887

Qua Iboe Church Central School, Upenekang,Ibeno, built 1912.

GENDER, SCIENCE AND EMPIRE: THE QUA IBOE MISSION, 1887-1900

Elaine Doyle

In 1927, Samuel Alexander Bill, on furlough from the Qua Iboe mission in
south-eastern Nigeria, spoke to an audience in Belfast about his first experiences of
missionary life. He remembered, with some warmth and good humour, his early
struggles to establish the mission in the late 1880s, in remote and sometimes
inhospitable surroundings. A handwritten copy of his speech survives in the mission
archives at PRONI, Belfast. It is peppered with personable details and anecdotes, one
of which is sampled below. Bill explained:

[b] I forgot to say that about building the church, when we had the frame work up,
the women came, and their part of the work was to cover over with clay, and
smooth it over with their hands. The boys would not touch that, because it was
not their work. It was women’s work, so we must get women, so it was a job
getting the women to put this clay on this house.
There was a chief called Egbo Egbo at that time, he was not a Christian,
but he was an inquirer, and he had 10 or 11 wives, and this man used to come
very often to the Mission House, and so we spoke to him about getting the walls
covered over with clay or mud. He was building a new house not far from the
Mission House for himself, and he had got the house nearly finished, but he did
not know how to make a door, and so I said, if you send your wives to put the
mud on our house, I will make the doors for your house, so Egbo Egbo was very
glad, and thought this was a good bargain, and so he sent his wives to put the
mud on he walls, and I went to make his doors. It did not take me very long,
and they thought he had made a very bad bargain, and that it was not nearly so
much as he had done for me.1 [/b]

Bill told the story in passing, as a slight but droll digression from the main thrust
of his speech. However, given the theme of this collection, it carries particular
interest. This brief tale brings together interlocking anxieties of gender and science, as
they were played out in an imperial context. Consider the concerns at the root of this
story.
One finds the protagonist, Bill, negotiating gender roles in a society he is
unfamiliar with; only women may cover the frame with clay. So too, however less
prominent, gender underwrites his own role in the story. By his telling, Bill had both
impressed the local population by his carpentry, and easily outwitted them. Bill chose
to cast himself in a conspicuously powerful role, and one in which his own abilities as
1
‘Early days in Qua Iboe’ – speech by Samuel A. Bill [1927], D/3301/HA/1, Public Record Office of
Northern Ireland [PRONI].

read the full article @ https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/QUEST/FileStore/Issue3GRFSpecial/Filetoupload,55493,en.pdf

wow!ujoinme,thank u for this.this is my church.though i've never been to this place b4,but hopefully i will go there b4 this year runs out when i'm chance.ujoinme u too much.
samuel bill did alot to us