English-speaking Protestant missionaries of the early twentieth century expected to have free range in British imperial domains. British colonial authorities, for their part, were generally content to let missionaries wander. But Northern Nigeria was an exception. There, British authorities grappled with a perennial fear that Muslims would find rule by foreign Christians so objectionable, regardless of how ‘indirect’ it tried to be, that they would rise in jihad. Convinced that Christian missionaries would inflame matters by proselytizing among Muslims, authorities tried to deflect missionaries from Northern Nigeria. When they showed up anyway, authorities urged them to settle in Sabon Gari, a new district of Kano that was developing as an enclave for foreigners. Missionaries would have none of it; they insisted not only on coming, but on spreading out as they wanted.
Shobana Shankar recounts this fascinating history with regard to the three Protestant missions that became active in Northern Nigeria: the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the Sudan United Mission (SUM), and the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM). She focuses on the period from 1899, when the CMS reached Zaria, through the 1960s, including decolonization and the Biafran or Nigerian Civil War. Her sources are impressive. Besides using mission and British government archives, Shankar conducted interviews in 2001 and 2002 with dozens of people who had encountered missionaries in schools, orphanages, leprosaria (in a region where leprosy was endemic), itinerant medical clinics, and elsewhere. From these sources she reconstructed what missionaries did, and how Northern Nigerians worked with, built upon, or reacted to their efforts.
By 1900, nearly a century after the jihads of ‘Uthman dan Fodio, Islamization in Northern Nigeria was still a work in progress. Moreover, relations were somewhat fluid between slaves, ex-slaves, and free people; between locals and immigrants (including migrants from French-controlled Chad); and, between Muslims, quasi-Muslims, and non-Muslims (like the rural-dwelling Maguzawa Hausa ‘pagans’). In this milieu, missionaries believed that many people, Muslims included, were receptive to their messages.
Weighing up the evidence, Shankar agrees that many Muslims in Northern Nigeria did prove open to the Christian missionaries, though without necessarily converting. Some liked the Bibles that missionaries published, studied it with the Qur'an, and embraced elements of Christian belief. Shankar calls such people ‘Muslim Christians’ or ‘crypto-Christians’; missionaries called them ‘secret believers’. Others, like the Sardauna of Sokoto and future Nigerian premier, Ahmadu Bello, simply maintained cordial relations with local Christians and missionaries – in his case as a customer at the SIM bookshop in Gusau, where he regularly bought paper and pens.
Even more Muslim people liked the missionaries’ medical, agricultural, and educational know-how; for example, they appreciated missionaries’ ways of treating diseases like pneumonia and syphilis (increasingly from the 1940s with antibiotics), of planting crops and running farms, and their vocational and literacy-based schools. In fact, Muslim elites sometimes sent subordinates to Christian missions with the idea that they could learn skills and return to share them. People used a Hausa word to describe the foreign literacy and learning of the missionaries: they called it boko and it was powerful stuff.
The power of boko notwithstanding, missionary Christianity materially benefitted Northern Nigerian men more than women. In a place where Muslim polygyny (and sometimes slave concubinage) was common, the missionaries’ insistence on monogamous marriage alienated women who looked to other wives for companionship and household labor sharing. Christian marriage meant more work for a wife. Nor were women as likely as men to translate boko into wage-paying jobs; professional opportunities for females remained extremely limited. Northern Nigerian Christian women also reported to Shankar that they faced stigmas, including the assumption among Muslims that they had to be of recent slave or ‘pagan’ ancestry, because no woman would have ‘voluntarily chosen the more marginal religion’ (that is, Christianity) over Islam. Ladi Joe, a rare Northern female Christian schoolteacher, told Shankar in 2001 that she felt stigmatized, too, as ‘a symbol of foreign values imposed on Muslim societies’ (p. 134).
Northern Nigerian society may have tolerated some mixing in Christian and Muslim identities during the first half of the twentieth century. But the politics of decolonization – and above all, the ethnic and regional polarizations that the Biafran War brought to the fore – froze boundaries. So did government schools, which began in the 1960s to require separate study of ‘IRK’ (Islamic Religious Knowledge) among Muslim children and ‘CRK’ (Christian Religious Knowledge) among Christians. This academic division arguably placed Muslim and Christian schoolchildren on opposite sides of an invisible fence.
Although anti-Christian jihads never materialized during the early twentieth century, the fears of British colonial authorities may not have been wholly unfounded. Consider the militant Islamist group, Boko Haram, which now operates in Northern Nigeria and which has reportedly abducted more than 2,000 girls and women since 2014. Boko Haram means ‘Western learning forbidden’, suggesting the group's visceral opposition to the kind of boko that Christian missionaries in the region did so much to spread, and its special ire for boko in the service of females.
Christian missionaries were few, and the number of their fully-fledged Northern Nigerian converts was small. But as Shobana Shankar suggests in this richly detailed and rigorously researched study, Christians exerted a far-reaching impact on Northern Nigerian society, and added heat to debates about religion, social organization, and gender roles that boil today.
