This was information from Samuel Adjai Crowther’s journal entries when, together with J. C. Taylor, he represented the Church Missionary Society on the third British government sponsored expedition of 1857 to explore the River Niger and expand British trade into the Nigerian hinterland. King Sumo [Usman] Zaki who is reported here to be agreeable to Crowther establishing a Christian mission in Rabba was the emir of a newly reconstituted Nupe emirate under the jurisdiction of the jihadist Sokoto Caliphate. The venue of the visit to Zaki was the “camp at Bida” because the last battles had just concluded that consolidated the emirate in Zaki’s hand after several years of a multipronged series of battles between various factions and contenders to local Nupe throne and Bida was the last war camp from which a final victory was secured. Rabba was the most recent capital of the Nupe kingdom before it was sacked in their recently concluded war and reduced to a small village with an extensive ruin. While Bida eventually became the new capital of the Nupe emirate, when Crowther visited Zaki in September 16, 1857, Zaki’s plan was to relocate from Bida to a rebuilt Rabba and to restore its capital status. Crowther did not think it necessary to delay acting on the assent given by Zaki to establish his mission premises in ruined Rabba. Hence, he visited the town, secured the support of the local chief to select a suitable piece of land as his Mission ground and promptly commenced the erection of preliminary dwellings on it. A mere nine months after he first secured Zaki’s assent to “teach the people the religion of the Anasara, and at the same time introduce trade among them”, Crowther held his first Christian service on Sunday, May 2, 1858—in the capital town of an emirate of the Sokoto Caliphate (Map 1.1).September 16 … we paid an official visit to King Sumo Zaki, a person of about sixty years of age, who received us very cordially. … I introduced myself to him as a mallam sent by the great mallams from the white man’s country, to see the state of the heathen population, and to know the mind of the rulers, whether we might teach the people the religion of the Anasara, and at the same time introduce trade among them. To this he at once gave a full consent, saying that it was all one, we might teach them, and that he would give us a place for a station at Rabba on their return after the rains.1 March 24—Having permission from Ndeshi the chief, I fixed upon a place for the Mission premises, on the cliff” …. He said all the west division of Rabba belonged to him, as chief of the Nupe population; whereas the east division belongs to the Felanis, who are still at the camp at Bida.2 April 12—. … Tonight we slept in our tent, which was pitched on the Mission ground, near the walls of the huts. May 2—Lord’s-day: This is my first Sunday at Rabba on the Mission ground: at half past ten o’clock I kept service, in English, among ourselves.3
Map 1.1
Map of the Upper Niger Mission Area. (Source: Created by Femi Kolapo based on a free outline map of Coastal Nigeria from d-maps.com (https://d-maps.com/carte.php?num_car=1203&lang=en))
This was a significant achievement by Crowther that went uncelebrated by the CMS and has remained largely unnoticed even in contemporary studies of the introduction of evangelical Christianity to Nigeria. Crowther was not the only missionary who aimed at evangelizing among the Muslims of “Central Africa”. Others tried and failed. For instance, David Hinderer of the Yoruba Mission who had arrived Nigeria in 1849 was prepared by the CMS as a missionary to the Muslim Hausa country. CMS missionaries, Adolphus Mann in 1855 and Henry Townsend in 1858, both visited Ilorin, but failed to persuade the emir to open his Muslim country to Christian missionaries.4 Similarly, the Southern American Baptist Mission (SABM) arrived in Nigeria in 1850 with the goal to start a mission among the Nupe and the Hausa, but when William H. Clarke, its missionary, visited Ilorin in 1857, the emir refused him permission to settle in the city.5 The latter unsuccessful attempts by European missionaries all show in clear relief the significance of Crowther’s success in Rabba. Crowther’s mission station in Rabba was however short-lived, as he returned to the Niger the following year only to find that permission to establish in Rabba had been rescinded. He was instructed to proceed a little further south to the Niger-Benue Confluence area to establish his mission. The Gbebe and Lokoja missions were Crowther’s answer to this little setback. After the death of Usman Zaki, Mohammad Masaba, who succeeded as emir granted Crowther permission to establish the Kipo Hill station further up north and, in 1883, Emir Umaru, who succeeded Masaba, consented to Crowther starting a mission a little further north and to the East of the Niger in Katsa. These stations (together with the Onitsha) constituted Crowther’s CMS Upper Niger Mission. While both Onitsha and Gbebe were established in 1857, the station in Lokoja was started in1866.
However, the names Lokoja and Gbebe remain relatively unknown among scholars of missionary Christianity in West Africa. Yet, the establishment of CMS missions at these locations is of historic significance, constituting a major Anglican contribution to Protestant evangelical initiative to introduce Christianity to the Muslims of what was then inappropriately called Central Africa. Crowther’s Upper Niger Mission was the first to directly establish in a fully Islamic state and try to introduce Christianity as well as initiate the communities to modern socioeconomic development in West Africa. None of the classic studies of the introduction of Christianity to Nigeria contain significant stories, not to talk of analyses, of what transpired in these stations during Crowther’s episcopacy, 1857–1890, in the decades before colonial partition. These stations were in the last half of the nineteenth-century the most important “meeting place of Christian and Islamic proclamation [that] deserve more attention than it has yet received”.6 This study fills this gap in the literature of Christianity in Nigeria.
Only brief overviews of Crowther’s Niger Mission and merely tidbits of information on the Upper Niger mission stations are available in the literature of the introduction of Christianity to Nigeria. Elizabeth Isichie’s survey of Christianity in Africa, which is wide-ranging in its coverage, representing every region of Africa that has a history to tell of the career of Christianity, Christian missions, and missionaries, mentions the Niger Mission only very briefly. Isichie traced the mission’s history up to the 1889–90 crisis when the younger European missionaries wrested control of it from Crowther. She noted that the “Niger Mission’s decline began in 1879, when a European was placed in charge of its ‘temporalities’, and was complete when Crowther died in 1891, and was replaced by an Englishman.” She concluded that “by 1883, the mission was in ruins: ‘nearly a total clearance [haven been made] of its members … by disconnection, dismissal and resignation’” by the new policies and actions of the newly arrived European missionaries.7 Adrian Hasting also briefly traced out the tragic history of the crash of Crowther’s episcopacy on the Niger, noting that “there was anyway very little to save. The diocese was really not a viable entity to survive the Bishop’s death.”8 Bengt Sundkler’s equally wide-ranging overview of growth and development of the Church as an African institution followed the same pattern. Abeokuta, Lagos, Brass, and Onitsha were the familiar names of mission stations in Nigeria that were mentioned. The Upper Niger mission churches at Lokoja and Gbebe and the station at Kippo Hill have generally remained unstudied. They did not receive meaningful mention even in the acclaimed classic study by J. F. A. Ajayi of the creation of a new modernizing elite for modern Nigeria as an important outcome of the missionary factor in the country’s history.9 Other important studies of the activities of the CMS and other missions in Nigeria, because they are focused on specific peoples or regions of Nigeria, like the Igbo speaking areas, the Calabar area and the Niger Delta, and the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria have virtually nothing to say about the Upper Niger Missions.10 A most recent study by Olufemi Vaughan of the evolution of modern Nigeria examines how the intersection of Islam, Christianity, and indigenous religions have played a significant role in the “construction” of the country and in how the sociocultural and political temperament of its various geopolitical regions are currently constituted.11 The interesting book’s brief take on precolonial CMS activities has nothing on the upper Niger Mission, as pivotal as that mission was in getting the two foreign religions to encounter each other more directly for the first time in Nigeria. Lokoja is mentioned only once, and only in reference to it as the first British Consulate in northern Nigeria there rather than due to its importance as a CMS mission station and a place of religious significance in the study of Nigeria’s religious history.12 Neither Gbebe nor Kippo Hill or Katsa were mentioned at all.
On the other hand, far beyond any done in major modern historical studies on Christianity in Nigeria, the century-old hagiography on Crowther by Jesse Page, since it followed Crowther’s journey and activities as a missionary has more details on missionary activities of Crowther and some of his agents in these towns. Expectedly, for a hagiography, it reproduced significant incidents between the Muslim and the majority non-Muslim members of the communities engaging with the mission and its converts in these station towns.13 But these mission stations were the bases that gave character to Crowther’s ministry on the upper Niger. They eventually came to symbolize what Crowther’s traducers characterized as the failure of his mission and methods among Muslims. It was at Gbebe and Lokoja that the jihadist Sokoto caliphate, through its constituent member, the Nupe Emirate, first directly interacted in a formal structured manner with Christianity and with Christian missionaries, devising subterfuges, strategies, and policies to protect the interest of the Islamic communities and its jihad during the encounter.
I am also concerned in this study with filling a second minor historiographical gap in the literature of the introduction of Christianity to Nigeria. Much of the discussion, both missionary and scholarly, that have assessed Crowther’s episcopacy and that especially those concluded that Crowther’s native agents lacked Christian spirituality and were given to materializing religion did not investigate the local manifestation of these agents’ Christian proselytization practice. The evaluation of the CMS headquarters based on the submission of the Sudan Mission members, the main critics of Crowther’s Niger Mission, and the more recent evaluation done by G. O. M. Tasie were not based on analyses of the long-term missionary activities of the agents on the ground. Also, no extant studies have included analyses of how that this was perhaps the Mission where we have the utmost realization or implementation of Henry Venn’s intent of developing a self-governing Church. Neither in Sierra Leone nor in India did the establishment and operation of a Native Pastorate develop outside of the complete direction of a European or without some guidance from a colonial bishop. As Henry Venn noted regarding the appointment of Crowther as an Anglican bishop and the consequent creation of the Niger Mission as his sea, it was a major development that fulfilled his cardinal goal for the CMS of creating native Church governments in mission fields,
the crowning success of the native ministry is the appointment of a negro minister to be a Bishop of the United C...