Nigeria, March 3 -- Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature, William Butler Yeats, aptly put it in his famous The Second Coming. When things fall apart, wrote Yeats, not only can't the centre hold, even the falcon cannot hear the falconer. I find a corollary in this cause and effects thesis offered by Yeats in the narration of Reverend Richard Henry Stone. Stone was one of the earliest American missionaries to come to Africa during the nineteenth century. He was a representative of the Southern Baptist Convention and spent quality time among the people of Western Nigeria. Stone lived in Ijaye, Abeokuta, and Lagos and, in the process, travelling to places he called Ibadan, "Lahlookpon (Lalupon), Ewo (Iwo), Ogb...