ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the underlying assumptions were translated into university courses, beginning with the teaching of African Traditional Religion in the first Religious Studies department of its kind at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria to the full course in Indigenous Religions currently operating in the University of Edinburgh. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) was founded as The Society for Missions to Africa and the East to enable the Church of England to expand its evangelistic mission in lands which had not yet been christianized. The academic study of Indigenous Religions thus in one fundamental sense is rooted in the missionary movement, which helps to explain why academic programmes in Indigenous Religions often were initiated within departments with close connections to mission studies. African Traditional Religion as a separate category was introduced first into an academic syllabus under the influence of E. Geoffrey Parrinder, lecturer in new field called 'Religious Studies' at the University College Ibadan in Nigeria.
