SEUN SANNI A Roman Catholic priest is collecting and saving hundreds of traditional pre-Christian religious artefacts in southeast Nigeria that new converts to Christianity had planned to burn. The collection includes carvings of pagan deities and masks, some of them more than a century old and considered central to the pre-Christian religion of the Igbo people, who traditionally believed them to be sacred and to have supernatural powers. But Christianity is now the dominant faith in the region and many converts burn their artefacts, which the churches say are associated with evil spirits. Reverend Paul Obayi, who is collecting the…