Chapter I: Christianity and Islam in Southern Nigeria

I have referred to Christian missionary propaganda in Mohammedan Northern Nigeria. There has now to be considered the question of Christian missionary propaganda in Southern Nigeria, and the corresponding growth therein of Mohammedanism. The relative failure of the one and the admitted success of the other are at present the subject of much debate and give anxious thought to the heads of the Church. The fundamental cause appears to lie in a disinclination to face the fact, however obvious, that a religion which took centuries upon centuries to take root in Europe, owing, very largely, to its ethical demands upon man, cannot hope to establish itself in the now accessible tropical forest regions of West Africa in a few decades, while a religion embodying a distinct advance upon paganism but not involving the complete structural change in native society which the Christian Church exacts, has every chance of doing so. Then, too, there is another question which the ecclesiastical authorities may never, it is true, find it possible frankly to confront, but which laymen, it seems to me, are bound to do—those, at any rate, who are persuaded that the African race is one of the great races of mankind, not intended by the Almighty Architect to disappear from the scene of human affairs. I refer to the physiological requirements, in the present age, of the Nigerian forest peoples in their struggles with the forces of primeval Nature.

All that remains of the Portuguese attempts to Christianize the deltaic region of Nigeria in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are a few names and the addition of crucifixion to native punishments of criminals or happy despatch of sacrificial victims. The chief obstacle to the modern efforts of the Anglo-Saxon in Southern Nigeria and the real explanation of the successful modern efforts of the African Muslim, are to be sought in the appeal respectively made by Christianity and Islam to the patriarchal communities to which they are addressed, and in the methods and character of the respective propaganda. Christianity in West Africa either cannot be divorced, or cannot divorce itself, from Europeanism and the twentieth century. It remains for the people of Nigeria, and of all West Africa, an alien religion taught by aliens who cannot assimilate themselves to the life of the people. Islam, on the other hand, has long ceased to be an alien religion. It is imparted by Africans. It is disseminated by Africans. It has its roots in the soil. It has become a religion of the people, losing much of its rigidity and fanaticism as it works down to the coast absorbing the true negro.

Everything is against Christianity as presented to the Nigerian (I venture to emphasize this), and everything is in favour of Islam, although Christianity, in itself, contains more that should appeal to the Negro character than does Mohammedanism. The conditions of Southern Nigeria are the conditions of the Old Testament. The crying need of the country, as of all western tropical Africa, is the need which is proclaimed in, and stamps itself upon, every page of the book of Genesis, the Divinely ordained requirement—population. Vice plays only a microscopic part in the relationship of sex in Nigeria. Race propagation is the motive force which regulates sexual relationship. The Nigerian, incessantly striving with the destructive agencies of Nature, responds to the instinctive and mysterious call of racial necessity. Infant mortality is terrible. With the Nigerian the reproduction of the species is the paramount, if unanalyzed and, no doubt, uncomprehended obsession. It must continue to be so for a period whose limit will be determined by the rate of his progression in coping with these destructive agencies.

This is not the place to discuss what the attitude of the Christian missionary should be to this paramount racial need, but it is obvious that his insistence upon an acceptance of a sex relationship contrary to the promptings of Nature must present a barrier—one of the greatest, if not the greatest—to the acceptance of the Christian faith, or, perhaps, it would be better to say, of orthodox Christianity. One might be permitted, perhaps, to suggest that those who are disposed to regard the condition of the Nigerian forest-dweller in these matters as calling for hard and rigid regulation, are too prone to forget what Lecky describes as the “appalling amount of moral evil, festering uncontrolled, undiscussed and unalleviated under the fair surface of a decorous society,” in civilized Europe, monogamistic social laws notwithstanding. Sex relationship, whatever its character and whatever the conditions of society or climate, is never, and can never be, free from abuses. West African polygamy contains many ugly sores, and so does the European system.

Family bonds are equally threatened by Christianity, _as propounded to the Nigerian_, for it trains the child, whether deliberately or otherwise, to look upon his parents as living a life of sin, thus introducing a subversive element into the household. Those who assert the absence of affections and sanctities in Nigerian family life assert that which is untrue. Native authority is likewise menaced, for how can the convert entertain his former respect for rulers whom he has been taught to regard as morally and spiritually his inferiors? These are some of the reasons why Christianity, _as propounded to the Nigerian_, at the opening of the twentieth century, presents itself to him in the light of a hurtful and disintegrating influence. And this creed is proffered either by aliens between whom and the inner life of the people there yawns an unbridgeable gulf, or by denationalized Africans who have become in the eyes of the people, strangers well-nigh as complete as the alien himself, part and parcel of the alien’s machinery. As if these did not constitute sufficient deterrents to the permanency of its footing, the alien race which tenders to the Nigerian this creed—this creed claiming for all men equality before God—is the conquering, controlling, governing race that scorns to admit—because, being an Imperial race, it cannot—equality of racial status with the Nigerian whom it subjugates and controls. Between the race of the converter and that of the would-be convert there gapes an abyss of racial and social inequality which does not lessen, but, if anything, widens with conversion—the colour line.

Finally, there is the lamentable intolerance displayed by Christian proselytizers towards one another. Only the other day I read in a West African newspaper the address of a white American Protestant Bishop, whose sphere of work lies in Africa, to his flock. This episcopalian interpreter of the Gospel of Christian charity to the benighted African is concerned in his address with the downfall of the Portuguese Monarchy and the accession of the Republic which, he says, “opens wide every door leading to Christian work among millions of native Africans.” He proceeds: “Of course Rome howls. On October 13, 1910, among weeping Jesuits, speaking of the new nation, the Pope said ‘A cursed Republic! Yes, I curse it!’ The curse of Balaam against the people of God was turned into a blessing by Jehovah; and so, too, will this blasphemy be turned into a blessing to the struggling people of Portugal.”

Islam, on the other hand, despite its shortcomings, does not, from the Nigerian point of view, demand race suicide of the Nigerian as an accompaniment of conversion. It does not stipulate revolutionary changes in social life, impossible at the present stage of Nigerian development; nor does it undermine family or communal authority. Between the converter and converted there is no abyss. Both are equal, not in theory, but in practice, before God. Both are African; sons of the soil. The doctrine of the brotherhood of man is carried out in practice. Conversion does not mean for the converted a break with his interests, his family, his social life, his respect for the authority of his natural rulers. He is not left stranded, as the Christian Church, having once converted, leaves him, a pitiful, rudderless barque upon a troubled sea. He does not become, through conversion, an alien in thought, in custom, and in outlook; a foreigner in his own land, a citizen of none. He remains African, attached to his country, looking for inspiration inwards, rather than towards an alien civilization across thousands of miles of unknown seas. No one can fail to be impressed with the carriage, the dignity of the Nigerian—indeed, of the West African—Mohammedan; the whole bearing of the man suggests a consciousness of citizenship, a pride of race which seems to say: “We are different, thou and I, but we are _men_.” The spread of Islam in Southern Nigeria which we are witnessing to-day is mainly social in its action. It brings to those with whom it comes in contact a higher status, a loftier conception of man’s place in the universe around him, release from the thraldom of a thousand superstitious fears. It resembles in its progress the annual overflow of the Niger diffusing its waters over the land. The extensive ramifications of internal trade, now greatly fostered by the construction of additional roads and railways and rendered wholly safe by the _pax britannica_, leads to the multiplying of facilities for human intercourse among the various peoples of the Protectorate. The Hausa pushes ever further south his commercial operations. The Delta, and still more the Western Province, yearly attest to the widening area of his activities. Not to be outdone, his trading rival the Yoruba taps in additional numbers the markets of the north. Railway construction finds the Mohammedan labouring side by side with the pagan in the same trench. A sense of security and the increasing circulation of a portable medium of exchange in the shape of silver and nickel coinage attract to the great native markets of the Central Province, such as Onitsha, for example, the tattoed pagan Ibo and his pagan colleagues the Anams, Katundas, and Kukurukus, where they rub shoulders with the Mohammedan Hausa, Nupe, and Igarra. In and around Ibadan, Oyo, and Lagos you meet the Kano and Sokoto trader with his donkeys and pack-bullocks, and even the Tuareg with whom you parted company months before in the far north, travelling on the roads or camping for the night near some local village. The road is at once the club-house and public rendezvous for Nigerian humanity. A vast commingling, a far-reaching fusion unexampled in the history of these peoples is taking place. The expansion of an African religion which, somehow, succeeds in investing the convert with a spiritual and social standing that at once raise him among his fellows, follows as a matter of course. The Mohammedan teacher wanders over the face of the country visiting the centres of human activity, haunting the roads and market-places, unattended, carrying neither purse nor scrip, making no attempt at proselytizing beyond saying his prayers in public, not in a manner to cause obstruction, but quietly in some corner; waiting until people come to him, literally fulfilling the command, “Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money, neither have two coats apiece.” The Mohammedan trader or agriculturist settles in a pagan village, marries pagan women, enters the family and social circle of the community and imparts to it his faith, the women making even readier converts than the men.

This is why and this is how Islam is propagating itself and taking root in pagan Nigeria without financial outlay, without doles and collecting boxes. One of the oldest of Christian missionaries in Nigeria, a man of venerable appearance and saintly character, who for twenty-five years has laboured with hands as well as with heart and head for moral and material improvement, not of his converts only, but of their unconverted relatives, confessed to me his fear that nothing could stop Islam from absorbing in course of time the whole of West Africa. He was almost disposed reluctantly to allow that in the providence of God, Islam might prove to be intended as the halfway house through the portals of which it was necessary the West African negro should pass in order to lift him out of a sterilizing paganism and make him a fitter vessel to receive in course of time the nobler ideals of the Christian faith. Sir Harry Johnston is right, I think, when he says that “to Negro Africa,” Islam has come “as a great blessing, raising up savages to a state, at any rate of semi-civilization, making them God-fearing, self-respecting, temperate, courageous, and picturesque.” But Islam does more than this; it preserves racial identity. In West Africa, Christianity destroys racial identity. It should not: as taught it does.

“Picturesque,” says Sir Harry Johnston, and there speaks the artist. But the word covers a profound truth. A great deal of the denationalizing or Anglicizing process which is going on and which makes bad Africans and bad Christians, is attributable to the discarding of the national dress. Why cannot the Administration and the missionary societies combine in some practical, positive form, to combat this curse of alien dress? There is absolutely nothing to be said in its favour. The West African looks better in African dress, the robe of the Mohammedan and of many pagan Africans. It is much healthier for him. It is preservative of his racial identity; and that is, perhaps, the most important of all pleas which can be put forward for its retention. With very slight modification—such as one sees among the native staff, and personal servants in many parts of Northern Nigeria—it can be made suitable for any form of labour, literary or otherwise. Clad in his national dress the African has a dignity which in most cases he loses almost entirely when he attires himself in a costume totally unfitted for the country, and hideous at best. Nothing to my mind is more pitiable than to visit school after school in West Africa, filled with little boys and girls and big boys and girls in an alien dress, to see the denationalizing process going on day after day and nothing whatever done to stop it. In the case of the women it is not only dignity and nationalism which are concerned, but decency as well. The national dress of the women in West Africa is classical and graceful, and although leaving more of the body exposed than is usual at home (except in the ballroom) it lacks suggestiveness. It does not accentuate the figure. It emphasizes that racial difference—not inequality, but _difference_—which it is so essential to emphasize. With the substitution of European dress, especially of the prevailing fashion, the West African woman loses much of what she need never lose, and acquires that which is of no profit to her. These things cannot be altered in a day, nor would it be possible in some cases for the present adult generation to go back to African costume. But it would in many cases, and the reform could be at once taken in hand so far as the children are concerned. Government could do much. The missionary societies could do more. The anglicised native community could do most. I believe that if some popular Government official, known and trusted, could be led to appeal, in private conference to the native staff and win them over, the movement once started would spread and have enormously beneficial results. That many members of the anglicised community would be hostile goes without saying—that is the fault of the wretched system everywhere at work. That a body of thoughtful men would not, I am satisfied by the many representations on this very subject personally made to me. I shall always recollect, in particular, the private visit paid to me in one of the great Yoruba towns by one of the leading merchants of the place. A magnificent specimen of an African, dressed in African costume and speaking our language fluently, he came with the usual touching words and gifts, and begged me very earnestly to take up the question of dress with his compatriots.

And, in conclusion, there is another and a very serious handicap upon Christianity in West Africa, in Southern Nigeria especially. Under the native social system, religion and politics—the religious organization and the political organization—go together. It is inconceivable to the native mind that they should be separate or antagonistic. Islam, again, preserves this ingrained conviction. But in West Africa the political and religious organizations of the white man are separate and distinct. The religious organization itself is split up into countless opposing sections. And in Southern Nigeria the section specially identified in the native mind with the white over-lord has for some years past played a discordant note in that white over-lord’s political organization. Its representatives are almost everywhere, and upon many subjects persistently hostile critics of the Administration, begetting unrest and disloyalty to Government. The mass of native opinion concludes there is something rotten in the system presented to it, and the Islamic wave rolls on.