Chapter One - Jousting for Souls

Summary

The British colonial government frustrated European missionaries’ desire to convert Northern Nigeria by curtailing Christian proselytization. This chapter situates missionaries’ tumultuous relationship with the state in the emergence of secularism as an imperial technique of managing religions and religious difference. That technique involved the government’s insistence on its separation from Christian missions, and its indirect rule of the territory through Muslim chiefs. Colonial administrators resolved that paradox–of the state’s rhetoric of separation from Christian missions even while the state remained intimate with Muslim elites–in one of two ways. Some administrators emphasized the superiority of the religious liberty of Muslims over the missionary desire to proselytize; others stressed the imperative for the state to be separate from what remained of the precolonial Sokoto caliphate. As administrators latched on to either argument, so did colonial subjects also deploy either notion to further their agenda. What emerges is a story of a struggle between imperial bureaucrats, Christian missionaries, and Muslim chiefs over the governance of religious difference.

Delivering the keynote at the bicentennial gathering of the Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts on June 19, 1900, Prime Minister of England and Marquess of Salisbury, Lord Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, warned of the dangers of the British government’s alliance with Christian missions in overseas colonial territories.¹ Cecil traced the alliance to the tendency of missionaries to “appeal to the Consul and … the Gunboat” when faced with challenges in the mission field.² The prime minister argued that the entanglement that results from the British Empire perpetuating the ends of missionaries benefitted neither missions nor the imperial cause. In particular, he stressed that the entanglement of missions with the imperial project hinders the missionary venture by “diminish[ing] the purely spiritual aspect and action” of “Christian teaching” and raising suspicion of its religious motives.³ The entanglement was, in his opinion, also detrimental to the imperial project because it portrayed the British Empire as partial to missionary interests, and as consequently failing to live up to its declaration of being a “secular colonial government” in its dominions.⁴ Since the prime minister was delivering his address while the Boxer Rebellion, which featured attacks on Christian missionaries, was ongoing, he was quick to cite the Chinese example. Pointing out that several of the casualties of the revolt were Christian, Cecil asked his missionary audience: “Do you imagine that they are slaughtered simply because the Chinese dislike their religion?” The prime minister went on to respond in the negative: “It is because they and other nations have got the idea that missionary work is a mere instrument of the secular government in order to achieve the objects it has in view. That is a most dangerous and terrible snare.”⁵

This exhortation by the prime minister of an empire on which “the sun never set” was not received with favor by a missionary enterprise whose declared goal was to proselytize to the world.⁶ After all, the global missionary project was the culmination of evangelicalism’s spiritual premise – that Christ died for the world – into a political project whereby “the world must be changed for Christ.”⁷ Muslim Africa had a special place in this missionary design. As a historian, Thomas Prasch aptly points out, “For the late-Victorian missionary enterprise, Islam represented the quintessential Other: the faith that was most resistant, most competitive. And for Victorians, [black] Africa was the obvious arena of contention, the blankest continent on the imperial map.”⁸ Perhaps no territory encapsulated the pull that Black Africa had for Christian missionaries more than Northern Nigeria. Indeed, the area that came to be known as the British Protectorate of Northern Nigeria at the beginning of the twentieth century was home to the famed nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate of Bilad al Sudan (Land of the Blacks). Emerging from the 1804 Sheikh Uthman Dan Fodio-led revolt, Sokoto was “the largest, most heavily populated, most complexly organized and wealthiest system in nineteenth century west Africa.”⁹ Less prominent than Sokoto but no less crucial in shaping the Muslim identity of the area was the Kanem Bornu Empire, portions of which merged with Sokoto to become the British Colonial Protectorate of Northern Nigeria while France and Germany incorporated the remainder of Kanem Bornu into neighboring colonial possessions in the Lake Chad Basin. Northern Nigeria was far from exclusively Muslim; beyond Sokoto and Kanem Bornu, the area featured a variety of tribes practicing diverse religions, populations described in precolonial parlance as the Maguzawa. Yet, the area’s Muslim character was undoubtedly its greatest attraction to Christian missions, especially the influential Church of England-affiliated Church Missionary Society. Muslim Africa’s centrality to the missionary imagination was also rooted in a sense of competition. As the inaugural 1910 international gathering of world missions declared: “the ubiquitous and rapid advance of Islam is the great challenge to urgency in the evangelization of Africa.”¹⁰ Spreading the gospel to Northern Nigeria was therefore of primacy to missions.

For all of Northern Nigeria’s allure, the feverish zeal to evangelize encountered such intense restrictions from the colonial government that the protectorate was quick to attain notoriety as an outlier in the global mission field.¹¹ Those restrictions were so extensive that they were perhaps unparalleled outside of the Arabian Peninsula. Indeed, after over a century of missionary presence in West Africa, only 2.7 percent of the Northern Nigerian population identified as Christian.¹² Moreover, that modest success was almost exclusively recorded among the other Indigenous faith populations to whom the colonial state permitted proselytization, contrary to its aggressive shielding of Muslims from missionary influence.

Colonial restrictions on missionaries are traceable to the imperial anxieties that inspired Prime Minister Cecil’s 1900 speech. Specifically, missionary proselytization threatened the credibility of the British Empire’s assertion, which was so commonplace by the time of Cecil’s address, that it was separate from religion.¹³ That assertion of separation encompassed two claims. The first was that the colonial enterprise was devoid of a civilizing or Christianizing goal, and the second was that the state would not interfere with Indigenous religions.¹⁴ These two notions of separation, which found expression in the “guarantee of non-interference” issued upon Britain’s violent subjugation of Northern Nigeria, gave way to another imperial assurance – that the state was devoted to the religious liberty of colonial subjects. The dual insistence on separation and religious freedom formed the basis of the secular governmentality that came to animate colonial rule.

Crucially, neither the insistence on separation nor the declaration of commitment to religious liberty was principled. As the state invoked the notion of empire’s separation from religion to restrict missions, it emphasized religious liberty in its dealings with Indigenous religions by declaring the religious and cultural autonomy of colonized populations. The state invoked its commitment to the autonomy of Indigenous populations as the bedrock for its turn to governing through Indigenous institutions – indirect rule.¹⁵ Although premised on empire’s separation from Indigenous institutions, indirect rule required the co-option of Indigenous institutions for the colonial project, and consequently called for the interference it appeared to prohibit. To further muddy the waters, colonial administrators’ proclivities informed their understanding of these assurances and, therefore, influenced on-the-ground policies. This meant that the workings of imperial secularism and ultimately, of its corollary, indirect rule, were hardly constant. Even in that incoherence, however, the story of (the earlier decades of) colonial rule was, without doubt, one of an asymmetrical pact with Muslim rulers, and a marginalization of Christian missions. Against the background of the unfolding of imperial secularism as a historically contingent technique of managing religion and religious difference in Northern Nigeria, this chapter presents the struggles that arose from the frustration of missionary efforts in a much-coveted area of colonial Muslim Africa.

The Encounter of Imperial Ambitions with the Missionary Project

Not a few volumes have attempted to capture the story of missionary disappointments in Northern Nigeria.¹⁶ These works evince differing views on the motivations behind the colonial government’s restrictions on those missions. Andrew Barnes, for example, pinpoints the cultural tensions between colonial administrators and missionaries, particularly the clash between the vision of civilization espoused by colonial administrators, and the Christianizing project of missions.¹⁷ Others, like C. N. Ubah, have argued that emirs (Muslim political authorities) were the primary source of opposition to missions.¹⁸ Yet, others such as the classical authority on Nigerian missions, Emmanuel A. Ayandele, argue that the missionary restrictions were a product of an indirect rule design that sought to placate Muslim vessels of colonial rule by keeping out Christian proselytizers.¹⁹ In spite of more recent attempts to focus on the few instances of missionary breakthrough,²⁰ what is undeniable is that disappointment was the general experience of missions. These histories are useful for what they reveal of the fate of the missionary enterprise. In isolating the missionary question, however, they fail to interrogate the missionary experience for what it reveals of the broader colonial imperative to govern religion and religious difference.

As told in this chapter, the story is indeed one in which missionaries were frustrated by colonial restrictions. More importantly, however, it is an account of a broader struggle in which leading actors – missionaries, colonial administrators, emirs, and other Indigenous elites – wielded ideas on the proper relationship between the state and religion in shifting and incongruent ways. This contestation was precipitated by an enduring governmental technique that entailed the state insisting on its separation from religion even while both the state and religion were irreclaimably entangled.

The state’s entanglement with religion is hardly surprising; after all, studies have drawn attention to the entanglement of religion and politics that secular governmentality entails.²¹ As Hussein Agrama points out, secularism is “a process of defining, managing, and intervening into religious life and sensibility.”²² The entanglement that inevitably results is itself a reflection of the state’s governance of religion and religious difference. The state categorized the religion of the colonized population into two – Muslim and non-Muslim, designating the latter as “pagan.” This bifurcated classification then formed the basis of an elaborate administrative arrangement that stipulated, among other things, where colonial populations could reside, the elites through whom they would be governed, what courts were competent to resolve their disputes, and most importantly for the purpose of this chapter, whether they could be subjected to Christian proselytization. The binary Muslim–non-Muslim classification glossed over complexities in precolonial identity formation. Political wrangling in precolonial Sokoto had widened cleavages among Muslims (such as among those belonging to rival Sufi orders) in a way that questioned the homogenizing lens with which the state viewed that population.²³ Further, precolonial political or juristic discourse did not affix the ethno-religiously diverse non-Muslim communities with the pejorative kafiri (pagan) status with which they came to be treated by the state. Not all of these Maguzawa groups were political subjects of Sokoto; even those subject to caliphate overlordship had been granted jurisdictional autonomy.²⁴ Maguzawa were levied jizyah, a tax symbolizing their acceptance of the sovereignty of the Islamic state, and a levy in lieu of the military obligation binding on Muslim (men) – but lower than the zakat payment binding on all eligible Muslims. Religious faith was therefore closely tied to citizenship and governance in precolonial Northern Nigeria. That preexisting arrangement was incongruent with the grid through which the state came to understand and govern religion and religious difference. That grid, which defined religion as Muslim versus pagan, deepened precolonial difference and created a hierarchy that placed the colonial construct of the ideal Muslim over the colonial formulation of the pagan. In seeking to produce a colonial subject that was neither Muslim nor “pagan,” evangelization threatened these classifications and the regulatory ambitions that motivated them.

Far from an isolated phenomenon in the British rule of Northern Nigeria, therefore, the missionary question can only be apprehended by unraveling the broader institutional context of the colonial governance of religion and religious difference. Accordingly, the account that follows presents the struggles over the state’s restrictions on Christian missions as an encounter between imperial bureaucrats, missionaries, the colonial remains of the caliphate aristocracy, and other Indigenous religious elites over the governance of religious difference. If that encounter culminated in the dismal failure of the Christian missionary project to evangelize Muslims, the defining, deepening, and hierarchizing of religious difference that emerged from its ashes was its lasting legacy.

Secularism, Missionizing, and Late Liberal Imperialism

Cecil’s bicentennial address to the Church Missionary Society was hardly the inaugural declaration of the British Empire’s policy of separation from missions. That colonial policy and the constitutional idea underpinning it – secularism – emerged in mid-nineteenth-century British India.²⁵ The gradual unfolding of the Indian story was nearly paralleled by happenings in the seat of empire, in England. If one is to understand secularism as the statecraft principle of managing religious difference by the dual assertion of state-religion separation and religious freedom,²⁶ then strains of that idea began to emerge in England in the early decades of the nineteenth century. An initial step was the gradual “enfranchisement” of Catholics and dissenters, a process set in motion by a series of legislations, including significantly, the Sacramental Test Act of 1828²⁷ and Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829.²⁸ Enfranchisement meant conferring on these marginalized groups citizenship and equality – rights that Protestants had long enjoyed. Although those legislative reforms meant the recognition of religious diversity and a modicum of liberty, it hardly meant the displacement of the Church of England, which endured as the state church. Other vestiges of church establishment would remain in several areas. This included public education, which had for long included Protestant instruction, a Christian “privilege” that even later vanguards of separation like the future Prime Minister Cecil would insist could not be “interfere[d] with, diminish[ed] or frustrate[d].”²⁹

These features lend credence to Peter van der Veer’s assertion that the enfranchisement of marginalized faiths was not a product of an ideological commitment to the twin principles of secularism, but was instead intended to “shift … political loyalty from religious identity to national [European] identity.”³⁰ In van der Veer’s account, the shift in political loyalty from religious identity to national identity in Europe enabled the creation of a European Christian identity. With this, “the opposition between Britain as a Protestant nation and France as a Catholic nation became less relevant than the opposition between a Christian, civilized nation and colonized peoples without civilized religions.”³¹ Hence, secularism, as enacted in the metropole, was not so much about the state’s separation from religion by expunging it from the public sphere and confining it to the private, within which the state granted subjects religious freedom. Rather, van der Veer argues that secularism entailed religion “creating the public sphere,” and by so doing, it “transformed and molded” this sphere “into a national form.”³² The story of the development of English secularism was, in sum, that of a historically contingent governance project rather than of a neutral and predetermined implementation of the ideas of religious liberty and separation.

Even as the politics of secularism transcended commitment to ideology, that governance idea came to have a tenacious hold over constitutional discourse. In fact, as England was gesturing toward enfranchising marginalized religious groups at home, its empire began to realize that a “separation of church and state” was crucial to governing the jewel of colonial possessions – India.³³ This idea gained traction due to the experience of the Indian Revolt, understood in the upper ranks of the colonial administration as a rebellion against the civilizing mission of the colonial enterprise.³⁴ Although the civilizing mission was hardly synonymous with a Christianizing mission, those two projects were not independent of each other, both in the influence that missions exercised in colonial circles and in the inextricability of the two projects in the estimation of colonized populations. In response, the state not only sought to move from the civilizing project following the Indian Revolt, it also began to insist on its separation from missions and on the religious liberty of colonial populations.³⁵ Indeed, the rebellion inspired the Queen’s 1858 declaration of religious and cultural autonomy for colonial populations.³⁶ The Queen’s declaration also gave way to the shift from direct rule to the adoption of “native” institutions as the indirect vehicle for colonial governance. These dual commitments, therefore, already entailed a tension: on the one hand, empire declared Indigenous religions as autonomous from colonial interference.³⁷ On the other hand, however, colonial rule through “native” institutions necessarily called for interfering with, or at least, “instructing” those institutions.³⁸ Hardly passive bystanders, missionaries and Indigenous colonial subjects began to deploy these notions of separation and religious liberty to advance their projects. In particular, influential evangelists began to mount pressure on the state to distance itself from native religions just as it had affirmed its distance from missions. Far from being unconditionally committed to the notion of separation, what missions prized above all was a return to their original alliance with the state, and failing that, an empire expressing only the barest minimum neutrality toward indigenous religions.³⁹ On the other hand, however, colonial subjects would invoke the Queen’s proclamation of religious and cultural autonomy and indirect rule on the perception of any form of interference.

Consequently, not only did religion defy the separationist assertion by maintaining a tenacious hold on public life, but what religious freedom (or, in the language of the Queen’s declaration, “religious autonomy”) meant also continued to be hotly contested. Nevertheless, the classical elements of secularism espoused in liberal political theory – religious liberty and separation – were formally fulfilled.⁴⁰ In deploying these ideas to govern missions and Indigenous religions, the state’s assertions of secularism became, in essence, what van der Veer describes as “the tropes of a state that tried to project itself as playing the role of a transcendent arbiter in a country divided along religious lines.”⁴¹ Secularism, therefore, became an imperial agenda of governing religious differences – rather than a coherent project free of contestations.

Governing Religious Difference: Colonial Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria

The imperial agenda arrived in Northern Nigeria in 1903, the year the British Empire declared its dominion over the Sokoto Caliphate and its contiguous territories, molding these precolonial entities into the British Protectorate of Northern Nigeria.⁴² The restrictions on missionary activity that followed this formal colonization amounted to a shift from the cooperation between imperial and missionary interests that preceded it. In fact, the mid-nineteenth-century origins of the British presence in West Africa lay in the British government’s alliance with overseas missions. The 1841 African Colonization Expedition, which was comprised of British missionaries, scientists, traders, and military officials, ushered in that presence. Setting out the vision of the mission-empire cooperation that inspired the expedition, British evangelical Thomas Foxwell Buxton pronounced: “Let missionaries and schoolmasters … go together … confidence between man and man will be inspired; whilst civilization will advance as the natural effect and Christianity operate as the proximate cause, of this happy change.”⁴³ This cooperation was reflected in the relationship that existed between the West African Frontier Force and British consuls and missions from 1841 through the turn of the twentieth century. With the backing of the imperial army, mission houses enjoyed wide liberties in pursuance of their project, including the exercise of jurisdiction over Africans on the basis of conversion to Christianity.⁴⁴ Moreover, the Berlin Treaty entered into by European colonial powers to delineate their African holdings placed missionaries under “special protection.”⁴⁵ Remarking on the utility of missionary cooperation with imperial interests, C. C. Newton, a Baptist, famously remarked: “War is often a means of opening a door for the gospel to enter a country. A sword of steel often goes beyond a sword of the spirit.”⁴⁶ To be sure, the friendship between missions and the British Empire suffered some strains since missionary efforts did not always enjoy the approval of the British government. Notably, Joseph Chamberlain, secretary of state for the colonies, disapproved of the first Church Missionary Society voyage into the Northern Nigerian hinterland in 1897. Yet, that hardly annulled the empire-missionary alliance; in fact, when the Emir of Kano humiliated the Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries by ordering them out of his domain, the British government-controlled West African Frontier Force was swift to retaliate with a military expedition.⁴⁷

Missionary friendship with the British Empire, however, soured once Britain asserted formal dominion over Northern Nigeria in the early years of the twentieth century. On March 15, 1903, Sokoto fell to the British army, giving way to the declaration of a protectorate. Northern Nigeria was not free of imperial influence before that time. Although the nineteenth-century mission-empire project was mostly present in the southern part of the territory that would become Nigeria, the northern region was not untouched. Christian missions were present among communities contiguous to the Benue River and Niger River that demarcated the region that would come to be known as colonial Northern Nigeria. Moreover, these missions steadily strove to extend their reach to the Muslim hinterland as depicted by the CMS voyage referred to above. The missionary efforts and the backing they enjoyed from the British government – a government understood by Northern Muslim elites to be Christian – only heightened these elites’ sense of a Christian onslaught. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, pamphlets commonly circulated in Northern Nigeria warning “of the attack on Islam by the West” and calling for solidarity with Muslims being subjugated by what was regarded as Christian colonialism.⁴⁸ Early administrators of the Northern Nigerian Protectorate would seek to unsettle these assumptions of the Christian missionary leanings of the British Empire.

On the installation of Muhammadu Attahiru II, the inaugural colonial-era sultan of Sokoto, on March 21, 1903, the head of the British imperial army, Colonel Frederick Lugard, issued a declaration that “government will in no way interfere with the Mohammedan religion. All men are free to worship God as they please.”⁴⁹ Although worded ambiguously, Lugard’s guarantee, which was issued not only to the new sultan but also to all emirs, became a key referent point in the tussle over, among other things, the restrictions on missionary activity that would mark the colonial years.

The Lugard-led administration asserted that the guarantee called for the state’s separation from religion. Moreover, the government argued that the state-religion separation required by the guarantee called for restricting Christian missionary activity.⁵⁰ With regards to the colonized, however, the administration argued that the fulfillment of the guarantee called for governing through precolonial caliphate institutions. While this understanding of the guarantee drew on the separationist notion that the state ought to leave religious matters to Indigenous institutions, it also rested on the idea of religious liberty for colonized populations, which was emphasized since the Queen’s 1858 declaration in the aftermath of the Indian Revolt. As we will see below, the understanding that Lugard’s administration adopted, the sensibilities from which it sprung, and its consequences for everyday administrative choices were not constant across the colonial years. Yet, the governance design that emerged from this rationalization – indirect rule – would persistently center religion and religious difference in administering the colonial population.⁵¹

Articulating the foundations of British indirect rule, Frederick Lugard declared of colonial Africa: “The British Empire … has only one mission – for liberty and self-development on no standardized lines, so that all may feel that their interests and religion are safe under the British flag.” This religious liberty, Lugard went on, called for autonomy: “leaving them [colonized populations] free to manage their own affairs through their own rulers, proportionately to their degree of advancement, under the guidance of the British staff, and subject to the laws and policy of the administration.”⁵² Indirect rule through native institutions was, therefore, intimately linked with notions of the state’s proper constitutional relationship with religion.

This emphasis on religion is not to deny the place of Indigeneity in the colonial encounter and colonial governance. Like elsewhere in the British Empire, Northern Nigerian indirect rule was based on the construction of a racialized identity distinction: the native versus the non-native.⁵³ In the colonial taxonomy, the native was African and “Indigenous” to a society. This was in contradistinction with a native alien who, though African, was considered nonindigenous.⁵⁴ The colonial notion did not reflect historical identities and relations; the historian Yusuf Bala Usman shows it relied on invented theories of origin.⁵⁵ In the colonial schema, the “native’s” identity was opposed to that of the “non-native,” who was technically non-African but typically Caucasian.⁵⁶ Not all “natives” were, however, the same. Persons Indigenous to Southern Nigeria were classified by the state as native but nonindigenous. These nonindigenous natives and native aliens – sub-Saharan Africans who were Indigenous to neither Northern nor Southern Nigeria – were mandated by the colonial government to take residence in sabon guruwa (strangers reservations), usually located on the outskirts of the city far from Indigenous natives.⁵⁷ This process of defining and classifying natives was, therefore, central to colonial indirect rule.⁵⁸

For all the legal and social significance of the construction of Indigeneity and its racial undertones, however, religion had a greater impact on the ordering of the state and took precedence in defining colonial subjects. Even the native versus non-native distinction could be upended by religious classifications. For instance, while non-native Muslims, particularly Arabs, were permitted to reside among natives, native but nonindigenous Christians (Christian Southern Nigerians) and native alien Christians (Christian sub-Saharan Africans) could not. Indeed, colonial governance was based on defining, deepening, and hierarchizing religious difference. As noted earlier, the state glossed over complexities in precolonial identity formations to classify colonial populations as either Muslim or non-Muslim. That classification, in turn, determined residential formations, political administration, and ultimately, jurisdiction.

Northern Nigeria was zoned into three areas under the colonial religion differentiation scheme. First, there were emirates under the control of emirs. Tagged “Type I areas,” these were predominantly Muslim and consisted of Sokoto, Kano, Borno, Bauchi, and Katsina provinces.⁵⁹ Second were the Type II areas with a mixed religious population that was governed through chiefs who were Muslim but did not have the status of emirs. Although some mixed religious areas had come under the control of the precolonial caliphate after the 1804 revolution and had been governed through Muslim administrators, the state expanded this category. In the colonial years, the Type II (mixed religious) provinces were Adamawa, Niger, Plateau, Ilorin, Zaria, and Benue. The third category, “Type III,” was comprised of areas that were almost exclusively non-Muslim in the precolonial period. Given the expansion of Masu Sarauta (Muslim caliphal political elites) influence, only Kabba fulfilled the colonial-state designation of a pagan area. This territorial classification determined the extent of formal autonomy granted to native chiefs: emirs had the widest scope of powers and autonomy, Muslim chiefs of Type II areas were next, and the Type III area chiefs were at the bottom of the hierarchy. The classification not only determined political administration but also dictated the jurisdiction of laws and courts. “Islamic” law and its system of courts had jurisdiction in Types I and II areas, while customary law and courts operated, subject to restrictions, in Type III areas.⁶⁰ The colonial attitude to missionary proselytization mapped onto the above classifications with the state prohibiting missionary proselytization in Type I areas and in predominantly Muslim segments of Type II areas, while generally permitting missionary activity in non-Muslim segments of Type II areas and in Kabba, the Type III area.⁶¹

It was common for administrators to invoke “order” as a justification for restricting missionary activity. Defending the colonial administration against accusations of “favor[ing]” Islam, Lugard emphasized that the colonial policy centered on “neutrality, tolerance and impartiality in all religious matters.”⁶² Nevertheless, Lugard pointed out that the general rule admitted a “good order” exception.⁶³ By arguing that missionary proselytization was at odds with the requirements of order, administrators contended, in essence, that the missionary demand to proselytize could not be grounded in a claim of religious liberty.

The “order” limitation to missionary religious liberty was championed by colonial administrators rather than the colonized Muslim population. Although certain Muslim elites argued that missionary proselytization came with a risk of unrest, Lugard and subsequent colonial officials took the lead in invoking the order justification.⁶⁴ Following its initial subjugation of Sokoto and its neighboring states, the British Empire sought to avoid the use of force for day-to-day administration. The colonial government did not hesitate to deploy brutal force to cripple real and perceived threats to authority.⁶⁵ Yet, senior administrators tended to reserve force for colonial subjects unallied with the Indigenous officials through whom empire governed. Otherwise, the deployment of force was not only regarded as costly, but also as a threat to governance because it threatened revolt. In fact, Lugard and several officials worried that missionary proselytization in Muslim areas would provoke a violent backlash not by jurists or the Masu Sarauta, but by the general population. These officials were further concerned that the backlash would compel the state to deploy force in defense of Europeans contrary to the general inclination to avoid resort to force.⁶⁶ The officials often cited the Sudan Mahdist War (1881–1898) in support of this concern, although Sudan was hardly analogous to Northern Nigeria.⁶⁷

Certain administrators even invoked “order” to discourage missionary activity among Indigenous religious groups by arguing that missionary influence invited disorder through undermining the legitimacy of the institutions of those communities. These officials pointed to Southern Nigeria to illustrate this point, arguing that missionary influence had weakened the authority of colonial intermediaries, and ultimately, of the state.⁶⁸ As we will observe in the pages that follow, not all officials subscribed to this inclination to shield all colonial subjects from missionary activity. Curiously, however, invocations of “order” would become constant throughout the colonial years, wielded by diverse administrators to delimit what activity came under the scope of religious liberty and state-religion separation and what was exempt from it.

The appeal to “order” was hardly dispassionate. In a critique of postcolonial Egypt’s governance of religious difference, Hussein Agrama points out that secular states affirm “equality, neutrality and impartiality,” while simultaneously privileging “the sentiments and values of the majority” on the grounds that these are “integral to the cohesiveness of society.”⁶⁹ Colonial administrators invoked “order” as an exception to imperial secularism’s commitment to religious liberty and state-religion separation. Yet, the construction of “public order” was central to that technique of governing religion and religious difference. First, the notion of public order affirmed the state’s assertion of separation: the public “secular” sphere, as opposed to the private “religious” sphere, was the space within which the state sought to impose order. Since this assertion of separation was already tenuous given the state’s entanglement with the Masu Sarauta through whom it governed, it is hardly surprising that the colonial notion of public order sought to protect Masu Sarauta sensibilities by preventing proselytization in Muslim areas. In essence, far from being the “exception” that it was framed as, “order” was integral to the colonial construction of religious liberty and state-religion separation. The everyday effectuation of these imperatives was consequently bound up with the needs of colonial administration.

The ideas of religious liberty and state-religion separation did not only suffuse the discourse of colonial administrators, they were also invoked by missionaries to contest the state’s restrictions. A 1915 memorandum issued by the Church Missionary Society General Committee III is demonstrative. Charged by the CMS with “justifying the claim for complete freedom of missionary work,” the Committee made two claims. The first, which called for “Freedom of Conscience,” sought an “official declaration” that “freedom of conscience is granted to all persons in Nigeria.”⁷⁰ By seeking a universal declaration of religious liberty, missionary advocates sought to extend religious freedom privileges beyond the addressees of Lugard’s guarantee. Importantly, the committee stressed that freedom of conscience includes not only the liberty to believe, but also the freedom to convert. Hence, obstacles to conversion were in contravention of religious liberty. This formulation, quite novel at the time, was aimed at guaranteeing the freedom of the proselytized to convert to the faith of the proselytizer.⁷¹ The CMS Committee further argued that the realization of the ideal vision of religious freedom called for dissociating “civil obligations from their religious purpose.”⁷² In an administrative design that tied civil obligations to cultural/religious institutions, the CMS call to demarcate civil obligations from their religious purpose sought to erode the power of Indigenous institutions, particularly, the Masu Sarauta-operated remains of caliphal institutions. The CMS notion of a robust religious liberty regime, therefore, sought to free its target audience from all constraints to Christianization.

The second CMS proposal set out the missionary vision of the ideal relationship of the state with religion. As with the proposition of religious liberty, however, missionary demand for the colonial government’s distance from religion was hardly disinterested. Rather than a blanket call for the colonial government’s separation from religion, the CMS called for “Non-Introduction into Pagan Districts of Moslem Officials and Islamic forms of Administration.”⁷³ This proposal sought to oust caliphal authority over non-Muslims in Type II areas. As noted earlier, Type II areas were governed through Muslim intermediaries, an arrangement that extended Masu Sarauta control over Indigenous religious communities beyond the precolonial arrangement. The CMS suggested that the arrangement was one that defied the state’s avowed commitment to its separation from religion and autonomy of colonial populations since these Muslim intermediaries “possess[ed] a quasi-religious status.”⁷⁴ As such, governing through Muslim elites was tantamount to establishing Islam in non-Muslim areas. In a tacit acknowledgment of the limits of its influence, the CMS suggested an alternative to its demand to abolish Muslim intermediaries: that the state take “special care” to ensure that “Moslem officials should not abuse their position for the spread of the Moslem religion or the repression of Christianity.”⁷⁵ Together with its idea of religious liberty, the CMS and other prominent missionary groups in the colony would deploy the idea of state-religion separation in furtherance of the proselytization project.

To be sure, missionary advocacy was not limited to calls for state-Islam separation or calls for religious liberty. Ideas of Christian morality were sometimes invoked by both national and international missionary actors. At the 1910 World Missionary Conference, for instance, ecumenical missionaries pointed out that the government’s policy regarding missions in Nigeria was a “disgrace.”⁷⁶ Robert Williams of the CMS declared that he, like “other Christian people” was “ashamed that it could be possible for a Christian Governor of a Christian State to say that a missionary could not enter any city in Northern Nigeria until the permission of the Mohammedan Emir had been obtained.”⁷⁷ Indeed, beyond the missionary desire to evangelize to natives, they were gravely concerned with the “unchristian conduct” of certain administrators. Although they considered these administrators “brave … genial, good natured,” they thought them “utterly ungodly, all living loose lives, all having women brought to them wherever they are,”⁷⁸ as well as with being “excessively violent” toward the local population.⁷⁹ These missionaries contended that Lugardian hostility to missions sprung from their fear that they (the missionaries) would bear information of their immoral lifestyles to England. These moral recriminations were, however, rarely invoked in direct contestations with the colonial administration. Rather, the justifications invoked by missionaries often centered on some notion of religious freedom and/or state-religion separation. Whether missionary advocacy would emphasize separation or religious freedom would depend on colonial practice which was, in fact, a complex amalgam of sensibilities and strategies.

The Practice of Imperial Secularism

Colonial administrators were not always of like mind on the means or ends of colonial rule. There were two main positions on the ideal design of colonial rule, particularly with regard to the state’s relationship with religion. As set out above, Frederick Lugard, the first high commissioner of Northern Nigeria, regarded the success of colonial administration as hinging on an indirect rule design built on noninterference. This idea, which was further developed by Lugard’s adherents in the colonial administration – the Lugardians – emphasized the religious liberty of Muslims, elevated emirate institutions (which survived the caliphate’s destruction) in the hierarchy of Indigenous institutions, and interpreted empire-religion separation as calling for missionary restrictions. The Lugardian design hardly granted Islam or emirate institutions unfettered autonomy; yet, these administrators regarded the formal supremacy of these institutions as grounds for restricting missions.⁸⁰ To Sir Donald Cameron, a later colonial governor, and those who subscribed to his view, native administration required a more direct variant of indirect rule. Calling for reduced powers for all Indigenous chiefs, including emirs, Cameron veered from Lugard’s emphasis on Muslim religious liberty to insist on the state’s neutrality. As understood by Cameron, state neutrality called for eliminating the privileged status of emirate institutions, including the shielding of Muslims from missionary influence. These two views on state-religion relations and colonial administration had different consequences for Christian missions. Further, they evinced different conceptions of what constituted missionary proselytization, with Lugard’s being more expansive than Cameron’s. Yet, neither the Lugard nor the latter Cameron phase featured constancy. It was the residents in each province, and ultimately, the district commissioners, who gave life to colonial policy. Many of these officials remained Lugardians even after Lugardians lost power in the central administration. Although attitudes are generalizable enough to permit an analysis of colonial practice, individual differences among colonial administrators meant that uniformity was elusive. These variations did not only intensify the struggles, but they also provided important tools in jousting for the souls of colonial subjects.

Lugard’s Years of Authority

As the progenitor of Northern Nigeria indirect rule, Frederick Lugard⁸¹ was considered the “High Priest” of that form of colonial governance. Missionaries conferred this appellation on him as a criticism of what they regarded as his undue adulation of native institutions. As Henry G. Farrant, missionary of the Sudan United Mission (SUM) and secretary of the Annual Meeting of Northern Nigerian Missions put it, officials like Lugard saw their primary role as “conservators” of native institution, thereby assuming the role of “Priests rather than administrators.”⁸² Lugard’s fascination arose from an Orientalist interest in the exotic “other.” Capturing this adulation for native institutions, Walter Richard Samuel Miller, a CMS missionary who had attained notoriety for his unrestrained criticism of the state’s alliance with Muslim emirs complained: “There is more remaining of the old bourgeoisie spirit among the white people in Northern Nigeria than probably anywhere else in the colonies! A perfectly medieval conception of Kingship and chieftainship exists.”⁸³ Lugard’s fascination did not extend to Indigenous religious groups. Islam, in his view, was the highest standard of civilization attainable by Africans. Although Lugard considered Islam as being “incapable of the highest development,” he argued that the religion’s “limitations … suit[ed] the limitations of the people.”⁸⁴ In particular, Lugard stressed Islam’s “civilizing effect” on “pagans” and in particular, the religion’s promotion of “a higher standard of life and decency, a better social organization and tribal cohesion and a well-defined code of justice.”⁸⁵ Lugard, therefore, regarded Islam as ideal for Africa and Africans.

In comparison, Lugard considered Christianity unsuitable. He highlighted Christianity’s “more abstruse tenets, its stricter code of morality, its exaltation of peace and humility, its recognition of brotherhood with the slave” as unappealing “to the temperament of the negro.”⁸⁶ Lugard argued that these features of Christianity produced in converts an “attitude of intolerance” toward native ways.⁸⁷ In particular, Lugard worried about Christian missions “weakening the authority of the Moslem Religion,” thereby threatening the sanctity of “real Africa.”⁸⁸ Lugard nevertheless cultivated the friendship of missionaries of the CMS. After all, he had missionary roots himself – his mother had worked for the CMS in India, and his father, although not a missionary, had been a chaplain in the East Indian Company; Lugard himself had first gone to India in the service of the church. In Northern Nigeria, Lugard’s missionary friends strongly urged him to accompany colonial rule through emirate institutions with a Christian civilizational project. Notably, Walter Miller, who had close ties to Lugard, set out such a proposal in a 1903 letter wherein Miller suggested replacing Islamic education with missionary education, exempting parents of pupils from taxation, and taxing polygamists, among other things.⁸⁹ In concluding the letter, Miller emphasized that “the great hope for this country is the spread of Christianity in it.” In his reply, Lugard indicated his agreement with Miller’s vision. Lugard, however, pointed out that the actualization of Miller’s idea was hindered by a shortage of officials. Lugard wrote: “if we had unlimited money … and could flood the country with European officers, no doubt we could do much in a short time.”⁹⁰ At the inception of colonial rule, the 320,000-square-mile protectorate with 8.7 million population had only 104 European colonial administrators.⁹¹ The manpower shortage would continue into later colonial years even if it would be slightly ameliorated. As such, Lugard’s attachment to caliphal institutions and the Masu Sarauta, the elite class through which they were governed, did not merely stem from an Orientalist fascination. It was also necessitated by administrative exigency.

Long before Lugard came to be labeled the “High Priest” of indirect rule for his zeal for emirate institutions and his restrictions on Christian missions, missionaries had begun to worry about the fate of the missionary enterprise under indirect rule. Prior to the commencement of formal colonial rule in 1903, Christian missionaries began advocating for empire to directly govern through a close cooperation with missionaries. Accustomed to their alliance with empire for much of the nineteenth century, missionaries dreaded the prospect of indirect rule through Muslim emirs. To force the hand of empire even before the conquest of Sokoto, the 1897 edition of the Anglican Church Missionary Society Intelligencer reported that the caliphal governance was to be “superseded by the direct exercise of British Authority.”⁹² Through these efforts, missions tried to forestall indirect rule.

When advocacy for direct administration failed, missionaries campaigned for the exclusion of caliphal elites from governance. Notably, missionaries suggested that the precolonial caliphate’s Islamic identity was tied to the dominance of the Fulani ethnic group and argued that the Revolt of 1804 that had brought the caliphate into existence was a Fulani insurgency that displaced Hausa elites. Missionaries preferred Hausas not only because they regarded Muslims of that ethnicity as intellectually superior to Fulanis, but also because they considered Hausas to be “lax” in faith and open to conversion.⁹³ As early as 1891, missionaries allied with the Royal Nigeria Company to form the Hausa Association to not only study Hausa culture but also to advocate the overthrow of Fulanis and restoration of Hausas to power.⁹⁴ The ethnic dichotomy advanced by missionaries was tenuous, not least of all due to the hyphenation of Hausa-Fulani elite identity in the aftermath of the early nineteenth-century inception of the Sokoto Caliphate.⁹⁵ Nevertheless, missionaries insisted on the distinction, and when indirect rule became inevitable, missionaries advocated that Hausas be appointed in place of Fulani emirs, stressing that “the Fulani is not, will not be and cannot ever be loyal to the British Government.”⁹⁶ Although the demand to displace caliphal aristocrats was unsuccessful, it ushered in calls for separating the state from the Muslim faith.

Governor Lugard was adamant that the 1903 guarantee of noninterference conferred religious liberty on Muslims and excluded missionary proselytization. Lugard persuaded senior officials like Colonial Secretary Chamberlain to adopt this meaning by arguing that only such an interpretation could dispel emirs’ suspicion that the British Empire retained its nineteenth-century alliance with missionaries. The concern that the Masu Sarauta operated from an assumption that missionaries were indistinguishable from the colonial government would weigh on Lugard heavily during his years as administrator just as that worry had featured prominently in Salisbury’s bicentennial address to the CMS.

Lugard’s concern was not misplaced. As noted earlier, Muslim elites perceived the colonial encounter as a religious encounter. In a 1902 letter written to Lugard while the British army was advancing upon Sokoto, Sultan Muhammadu Attahiru I declared: “Between us and you there are no dealings except as between Mussulumans and Unbelievers.”⁹⁷ Discussing with a prominent journalist sympathetic to Lugard years later, the emir of Kano, Muhammad Abbas, argued that proselytization was more than an invitation to voluntarily convert since it exerted undue pressure on Muslims due to the “prestige all white men have.”⁹⁸ Evincing a desire to protect Muslims from such coercion, Lugard stressed that “it would be a misuse of the power and authority of the Government” to request that the Masu Sarauta accept missions.⁹⁹ Lugard further argued that “if they [missions] were established by the order of the Government, the people have some cause to disbelieve the emphatic pledges I have given that their religion shall in no way be interfered with.”¹⁰⁰ Given elites’ understanding of the colonial encounter as a religious confrontation between Islam and Christianity, Lugard feared that a loss of faith in his 1903 guarantee could signal the end of empire’s hold over the territory without resort to force.

Deploying the ideas of (Muslim) religious liberty, the imperative to separate the colonial government from the missionary project, and the demands of order, Lugard imposed extensive restrictions on missionary activity in areas that had a significant Muslim population. To proselytize in these (Type I and II) areas, missionaries had to apply to the colonial resident officer for a permit. Official guidelines required that these residents forward applications to emirs for consideration. In practice, however, residents denied applications without forwarding them to emirs, arguing that to do so would exert undue pressure on emirs and contravene the state’s commitment to liberty.

Lugard, however, made an exception in the sphere of education wherein he permitted missionary activity other than those involving direct attempts to convert. In fact, Lugard’s ostensible deference to the Masu Sarauta did not translate into an aversion to Western education. That attitude was informed by the need to generate manpower; Lugard approved of limited educational instruction in order to provide “satisfied clerks, capable officials and loyal Emirs.”¹⁰¹ Lugard was, therefore, not antithetical to missionary education for Muslims, although he remained averse to Christian religious instruction. This attitude is also demonstrated by Lugard’s approach to the mission-Masu Sarauta dispute over the guardianship of former slaves following the abolition of domestic slavery.¹⁰² The colonial government, under Lugard, asserted custody over the freed slaves and set up a Freed Slaves Home for that purpose. Lugard then expressed his willingness to employ a CMS employee as the matron of the home if that missionary would exclude religious education from the curriculum. The CMS could not, however, accept Lugard’s condition without a special waiver from its Home Office in England. The CMS Home Office did not grant that waiver although it would later assume a tactical posture and grant a waiver for similar institutions in Zaria and Bida.¹⁰³ With the support of the British colonial secretary, Lord Elgin, Lugard issued grants to missions schools that did not provide religious instruction.¹⁰⁴ These restrictions on mission education did not apply to areas populated by adherents of Indigenous religions, although in those (Type III) areas, the provision of religious instruction precluded mission schools from government funding. With the restrictions on religious instruction, Lugard’s embrace of missionary education was hardly conducive to proselytization.

If Lugard’s years of authority were hardly idyllic for the missionary enterprise, Lugard’s successors would come to espouse a notion of Masu Sarauta religious liberty and state-mission separation that would subject missions to extensive constraints that were unprecedented even in the light of Lugard’s practice.

Lugardians and the Missionary Encounter

Lugard’s ideas found many adherents in the colonial administration, the earliest and most ardent of which were Governor Percy Girouard and Lieutenant Governor Charles Temple.¹⁰⁵ These officials, the Lugardians, instituted a form of indirect rule that was so centered on the Masu Sarauta that Lugard’s biographer, Margery Perham, named it “ultra indirect rule.”¹⁰⁶ Acknowledging the deviation from Lugard’s invention, Girouard informed Lugard that he had inherited a “direct” system of administration from him and had changed it to an “indirect” one.¹⁰⁷ Lugardians espoused a notion of religious liberty for the Muslim vessels of rule that prohibited any form of missionary activity. Although these ideas were sourced from Lugard’s manuals for colonial administrators, Political Memoranda and The Dual Mandate, they were applied without the measured flexibility and limited camaraderie (with missions) that marked Lugard’s tenure.¹⁰⁸ So intense were restrictions of the Lugardian years that Thomas Alvarez, secretary of the CMS in Northern Nigeria, commented in 1912 that there had come to exist “a definite policy – unprecedented in the last 60 years – to keep Christian missionaries out of a British protectorate.”¹⁰⁹ In missionary estimation, the Lugardian years were the pinnacle of missionary repression.

Lugardians often justified their unrivalled restrictions on missions as a necessary consequence of the 1903 guarantee’s requirement of Muslims’ religious liberty and state separation from Christian missions. Far from a self-evident reading of the guarantee, however, that understanding was inspired by Lugardian hostility to Christian missions. Girouard, for instance, was of the view that the missionary project produced “half civilized” populations such as the Southern Nigerian Christian converts he and fellow Lugardians despised.¹¹⁰ Temple, the most infamous Lugardian in missionary circles, regarded Christianization as a “mistaken philanthropy” that violated indirect rule’s mission of “assist[ing] the native to develop that civilization which he can himself evolve.”¹¹¹ Temple further argued that doing such would ultimately result in the “overthrow and abolition of native institutions by a misguided paternal government.”¹¹² Another Lugardian and Giroaurd’s successor, Hesketh Bell, pointed out to the Royal African Society in 1911: “We want … no transmogrification of the dignified and courteous Moslem into a trouser burlesque with a veneer of European Civilization.”¹¹³ Already discernible in everyday colonial correspondence, the roots of this intense Lugardian hostility to missions were laid bare in an October 19, 1911 letter to the archbishop of Canterbury by Edmund Dene Morel, publisher of West Africa Magazine. Although Morel was not a colonial administrator, he had close ties with Lugardians and sympathized with their views. In the letter to the archbishop and Church of England principal, Morel accused missionaries of seeking to “subvert the entire fabric of native society” by introducing ideas that undermined native institutions such as limitations on polygamy.¹¹⁴ Christianity, Morel argued in another context, had a “denationalizing effect” by encouraging Indigenous peoples to change their culture. Morel described the Christian produced by this denationalization, as a “hybrid, … neither one thing nor another.”¹¹⁵ In comparison, Morel argued that Islam “intensifies the spirit of nationality, … imbuing his spirit with a robust faith in himself and in his race.”¹¹⁶ Morel further compared the devotion of the African Muslim with the laxity of the European Christian, declaring: “there is more evidence of spiritual influence out here, than in our great congested cities.”¹¹⁷ Morel, like Lugardians, therefore insisted that the devotion of the African was better addressed to the “God of Africa” than to the “God of Europe” being promoted by missions.¹¹⁸

So intent were Lugardians on frustrating the missionary project that it was under Lugardian authority that the Sabon Gari system was institutionalized in Northern Nigeria. Designed by Resident Charles Temple during the tenure of Governor Girouard, the Sabon Gari system kept missionaries and nonindigenous Africans out of Muslim areas. This residential segregation system was targeted at shielding Muslims from the influence of missionaries and Christianized Africans (especially Southern Nigerians), and it restricted nonindigenous Africans to the Sabon Guruwa and missionaries to government reservations.¹¹⁹

Lugardian aversion to missionary work among Muslims extended to missionary education.¹²⁰ The few mission schools established during Lugard’s tenure were forced out of operation, and by 1916, the CMS school in Zaria was the only mission school in a Muslim area.¹²¹ As if to prevent the establishment of another, an Education Ordinance was enacted that year, prohibiting grants-in-aid to Muslim-area mission schools that did predate the Ordinance.¹²² That prohibition was officially repealed in response to missionary advocacy¹²³; in practice, however, Lugardians continued to keep missions out of Muslim areas. To fill the void left by the prohibition of mission education, Girouard established a Department of Education in 1910, ushering in the era of government-owned and operated schools.¹²⁴ Those schools relied on government grants; however, since colonial revenue depended on taxes, grants were minimal with the consequence that few schools were established in Types I and II areas. Even in the absence of missions, great care was taken to avoid Europeanizing pupils, and contrary to Lugard’s vision of an education that would produce administrative staff, Lugardians sought to train colonial subjects in their own ways. Government education in Muslim areas, therefore, meant Islamic education in the Hausa language. Unlike the situation in Muslim areas, mission schools in Type III areas provided unrestricted education alongside Christian religious instructions. Indeed, by the time a latter colonial governor, Hugh Clifford, would assume office in August 1919, he would bemoan the fact that “after two decades of British occupation,” Muslim Northern Nigeria had “not yet produced a single native … sufficiently educated to enable him to fill the most minor clerical post in the office of any government department.”¹²⁵ Those disparities were rooted in Lugardian insistence on shielding Muslims from missions.

Although Lugardian restrictions centered on predominantly Muslim areas, their anti-missionary attitude also manifested among Indigenous religious groups. As Girouard observed in 1908, “Personally, I should like to see the missions withdraw entirely from the Northern States, for the best missionary … will be the high-minded, clean living British Resident.”¹²⁶ Two cases of restrictions among non-Muslim communities attained notoriety.

The first involved the imprisonment of the Chief of Tong, a village classified as a sub-unit of Garam town.¹²⁷ Under the instructions of the Chief of Garam, the Tong Chief was imprisoned for thirty days for permitting missionary activity in Tong contrary to the Garam Chief’s express directives. Missionaries’ pleas to the colonial district officer, Mr. Smith, to secure the Tong Chief’s release were unsuccessful. Further, although Smith averred at the ensuing trial that “everyone had freedom of conscience,” he did not comment on Tong’s pretrial imprisonment or reprimand the Garam Chief.¹²⁸ Neither did Smith intervene in the Garam Chief’s punishment of the Tong Chief following the court’s release of the latter from detention. When the Tong Chief responded by attempting to petition the colonial government for a general religious freedom declaration and autonomy from Garam, the Garam Chief ordered the arrest and beating of Tong residents. Both the district officer and the colonial resident continued to maintain their silence, refusing to intervene even when Tong residents ultimately fled their village in fear of reprisal attacks.

Another case involved Tuwam, a village under the supervisory authority of Kabwir. As a punishment for the refusal of the Tuwam Headman and villagers to perform a “heathen rite in connection with tilling,” the Kabwir Chief imposed a penalty – that the Headman offer “a sacrifice to the spirits” in expiation.¹²⁹ The Headman of Tuwam refused, citing his Christian faith. With the intervention of CMS missionaries, the Headman appealed to the resident, who referred the matter to Governor Hesketh Bell. After eight months of silence, Bell responded that he was “not prepared to interfere with native customs even though they appear to us to be unreasonable and superstitious as long as they are not repugnant to humanity.”¹³⁰ Here, as in the Tong case, Lugardians argued that interference constrained the religious liberty of natives and was at odds with indirect rule.

The constant refrain of missionaries in the Lugardian years, as in Lugard’s era, was the proposal of a constitutional arrangement in which the state would be favorably disposed to the Christianization project. In response to the common situation presented in cases such as Tuwam, the CMS called for the dissociation of culture from religion.¹³¹ That argument was premised on missionaries’ resignation to indirect rule’s reliance on Indigenous elites. Nevertheless, the CMS argued that elite authority ought to be rooted in culture rather than religion, stressing that enforcement of social laws and customs amounted to a violation of “religious toleration” when those obligations are associated with religion.¹³² In sum, missionaries did not only call for religious liberty for the targets of their proselytization, but they also sought the colonial government’s distance from competing faiths. Nevertheless, ambiguities inherent in those ideas of ordering state-religion relations made it plausible for Lugardians to deploy the same concepts to impose unparalleled restrictions on missions.

The Cameron Years

The upper echelons of the colonial administration saw a definite break from Lugardian policy with the inception of Donald Cameron’s tenure in 1931. Cameron was not the first to depart from Lugardian indirect rule. Hugh Clifford (governor 1919–1925) first set out the ideas that would form the cornerstone of Cameron’s governance ideology. However, Clifford’s bid to sway the Colonial Office from Lugardian ideals was unsuccessful, and Lugardian thought commanded the support of senior officials of the British Empire until the inception of Cameron’s tenure as governor.

Contrary to Lugardian distaste for the Christianized population that missionary proselytization had produced in Southern Nigeria, Cameron (and before him, Clifford) regarded Southern Nigeria as an ideal. Unlike Northern Nigeria, Southern Nigerian colonial administration was less reliant on Indigenous chiefs even in those areas where the colonial government formally ruled through these elites. That design, coupled with the nineteenth-century history of mission-empire alliance in Southern Nigeria, produced a colonial policy in which missionaries operated freely and recorded much success. Cameron also expressed great admiration for the colonial subjects that half a century of missionary activity had produced in Southern Nigeria and noted that “to be a good African and a good chief depended … upon the man becoming a Christian.”¹³³ Cameron was, therefore, no Lugardian adulator of emirs and Islamic institutions. Instead, Cameron regarded indirect rule as “a means and not an end”¹³⁴ and insisted that emirs (and other colonial intermediaries) were merely “instruments.”¹³⁵ Moreover, Cameron opined that these instruments and the colonial subjects they administered were “primitive and ignorant,”¹³⁶ and argued that exposure to “western civilization” was necessary.¹³⁷ Cameron’s outlook, therefore, favored missionary access not only to adherents of Indigenous religions, but also to Muslims.

Cameron put forth a notion of state-religion relations that advanced this project of Christianizing the native. To Cameron, Clifford, and those administrators who shared their ideals, the 1903 guarantee called for the state’s neutrality with regards to religious matters. Cameron likened the Lugardian policy to the drawing of a “curtain” over Muslim Northern Nigeria, shielding it from the benefits of Western civilization, including Christianity.¹³⁸ Instead, Cameron advocated for a posture of neutrality that withdrew that curtain.¹³⁹ This connoted the government’s complete separation from and noninterference with native religions or missions. Since Cameron actively sought the making of a Christianized subject, that notion of neutrality was hardly dispassionate. Indeed, Cameron’s approach earned him praise within missionary circles with the colonial governor being described not only as the “master of indirect administration and not its servant,”¹⁴⁰ but also as espousing a governance principle with “solid roots in Christian theology.”¹⁴¹ At a 1927 meeting sought by the secretary of the International Missionary Council, Joseph Houldsworth Oldham,¹⁴² Graeme Thomson (a successor to Clifford) agreed to grant missions access to Muslim areas. Invoking the ideas of neutrality already declared by Clifford, Thomson declared that the government would not exert pressure on emirs to allow missionary work in their territories. At the same time, however, Thomson assured the missionaries that the government would neither “induce” emirs to refuse permission nor represent that the government was averse to emirs’ approval of missionary activity.¹⁴³ Thomson further pointed out that the government intended to “educate the Emirs to an understanding and recognition of the principles of religious toleration which are characteristic of Western civilization.”¹⁴⁴ The policy change, which was ultimately approved by the secretary of state for the colonies, was not announced to the Masu Sarauta and its knowledge was limited to colonial administrators and missionaries.

As it turned out, more than a change at the upper echelons of the administration was needed to facilitate missionary access. Several residents and district officers continued to harbor Lugardian attitudes toward missions. Given the autonomy conferred upon residents (and ultimately district officers) in the Lugardian years, those administrators had the latitude to block missionary access. So powerful were residents in the Lugardian years that when the CMS Home Office had appealed to secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Crewe, in January 1909, Crewe had declined to intervene, citing “the repeated and unanimous opinion of all the responsible Residents … that any extension of missionary enterprise … would … be undesirable and even dangerous.”¹⁴⁵ That expansive authority of residents survived the Lugardian years, thwarting the efforts of Cameron and other senior administrators who sought to ease missionary restrictions.

Lugardians had lost the cultural argument about the better fit of Islam for Africans by the Cameron years. With that loss, the argument about the supremacy of Masu Sarauta religious liberty had become less convincing. Nevertheless, Lugardians continued to have a weapon in their arsenal: the demands of “order.” These officials argued that to permit proselytization was to invite disorder. In a state that could not afford a standing army, the order argument caught the attention of senior administrators. When Thomson approved the long-desired CMS mission station in Kano, he conditioned the approval on two order-based factors. First, Thomson imposed a restriction on preaching in public areas by mandating an endorsement on the Certificates of Occupancy that in predominantly Muslim areas, missionaries would refrain from “preach[ing] in public places or carry[ing] out house to house visitations.”¹⁴⁶ Second, the government sought to regulate missionary appointments. In particular, Thomson sought an undertaking that the CMS agree to withdraw Miller if that missionary was stationed in Kano and his activities became “in the least objectionable” to the emir, who had an “extreme distrust” of the missionary.¹⁴⁷ Miller’s lack of popularity was hardly secret; the missionary was regarded with disfavor due to his harsh criticism of Islam, and the Masu Sarauta.¹⁴⁸ Nevertheless, the CMS declined to accept the restriction and was thus precluded from proceeding with the Kano station. The order argument, therefore, continued to serve as an invaluable tool to pursue the agenda of Lugardians.

So powerful a hold did the “order” argument have that even Cameron would come to wield that notion. While the colonial governor continued to promote a vision of a Christianized Nigeria, he acknowledged that the process of educating emirs on “western ideas of religious toleration” “must necessarily be slow.”¹⁴⁹ Cameron favored missionary liberty, but the practical demands of administration urged caution. Consequently, certain missionary restrictions existed during Cameron’s tenure. Prior to granting missionaries authorization to preach in public, the governor had to be satisfied that there was “no active hostility … apparent amongst the Moslems.”¹⁵⁰ Further, public preaching near markets or mosques remained completely prohibited. House-to-house visitation, which missionaries preferred, continued to be prohibited in the Cameron years. However, that prohibition was not a blanket one as visitation was permitted upon “prior invitation.”¹⁵¹ Cameron’s loosening of restrictions was itself reflected in the changed meaning of proselytization. While the Lugardian conception of proselytization encompassed all forms of missionary presence in Muslim areas and unrestrained missionary activity among adherents of Indigenous faiths, the Cameron conception was narrower. That understanding of proselytization centered on “preaching near marketplaces or mosques,” “engaging in unwelcome house to house visitation,” and “pressure brought to bear on another person to accept another faith.”¹⁵² The changed interpretation of proselytization loosened certain restrictions on missions.

The new conception of proselytization was of particular benefit to missions in the domain of education and medical services in Muslim areas. However, missionary access to those fields was not unfettered. When a Sudan United Mission lepers’ settlement was established in Maiduguri and a Church Missionary Society lepers’ settlement was set up in Zaria, they were prohibited from proselytizing to Muslims and preaching publicly to anyone.¹⁵³ There were also restrictions in missionary provision of services. Further, the colonial government sought to insert a provision that Muslim parents could not consent to their children under 18 years receiving “religious instruction” and designating the emir as the only competent authority to consent to such religious instruction.¹⁵⁴ The colonial government was, however, compelled to reverse course when SUM attorney and secretary of the Annual Meeting of Representatives of Missions in Northern Nigeria, H. G. Farrant, compared the policy with the “spirit which in Germany and communist Russia has destroyed personal liberty and made the state the dictator of ideas.”¹⁵⁵ The government then replaced the clause with another permitting either party to terminate the agreement by giving a notice of twelve months. The post-Lugardian sympathy with missions is also reflected in Section 21 of the 1952 Education Ordinance’s conferment of a right of appeal upon the denial of applications to establish mission schools. The first appeal under this provision was brought by the Sudan United Mission with regard to its application to open a school in Mataszu, Katsina Province, a Muslim area. That case centered on the “right of a mission to establish a mission school in a Muslim area where existing educational facilities were still inadequate to meet the needs of all children of school going age.”¹⁵⁶ The Northern Region Board of Education decided the appeal in favor of SUM. Missionary proselytization, in sum, received a boost in the Cameron years.

Unlike Lugard’s emphasis on the religious liberty of Masu Sarauta institutions to shield Muslims from proselytization, Cameron emphasized the state’s neutrality on religious matters and was more inclined to grant missions access to the protectorate. However, not even Cameron’s desire for an anglicized native population could eliminate restrictions outrightly. Ultimately, a census exercise conducted in the waning years of colonial rule would reveal that the missionary gains were limited almost exclusively to non-Muslims.¹⁵⁷ If the missionary project was not without gain, it was hardly the harvest missionaries envisioned when they set out for Northern Nigeria.

Conclusion

Imperial secularism was contingent on the career of indirect rule. The 1903 guarantee of noninterference issued to Muslim elites called for the embrace of Indigenous religious institutions as a vehicle for colonial governance. That adoption of indirect rule entailed two claims about the constitutional relationship between religion and the state. The first was religious liberty, that “all men had the right to worship God as they pleased,” and the second was that the state would “not interfere with” religion, that is, state-religion separation. Neither commitment was principled. In fact, it was the varying sensibilities of colonial administrators that determined the tenor of imperial secular governmentality. Rooted in different attitudes regarding the means and ends of colonialism, and of the place of the missionary project in it, these administrative sensibilities determined on-the-ground policies on the contested question of missionary proselytization. With Lugard and Lugardians envisioning Muslims as the ideal colonized subject, and Cameron inclined to a vision of an ideal Christian subject, different imperatives of secularism came to be instruments wielded in furtherance of these positions. For Lugard and Lugardians, the emphasis was on religious freedom (of the Masu Sarauta) and the separation of the state from missions, while administrators leaning toward Cameron’s approach stressed the separation of the state from caliphal institutions, and the religious liberty of missions. As administrative inclinations evolved, so too did the career of imperial secularism, and this mode of governmentality became an agenda rather than a coherent ideology.

The aphorism that “history, not jurisprudence, teaches the true principle” is true of the career of imperial secularism in Northern Nigeria.¹⁵⁸ Rather than stopping at the conclusion that imperial secularism is politics, however, a productive inquiry interrogates the sort of politics that mode of governmentality entailed – and its limits. The implementation of imperial secularism fielded the constitutional ideas of religious freedom and separation, with administrators wielding these notions to advance their inclinations on the missionary question. Missionaries savvily wielded the constitutional ideas deployed by colonial administrators to contest restrictions that threatened to frustrate their proselytizing ambitions. These efforts did not always cushion the blow to missionary expectations (as the practical necessity of maintaining a caliphal intermediary endured even beyond the Lugardian years); yet these notions of religious liberty and separation ultimately policed the boundaries of the discourse over missionary proselytization. Consequently, missionaries, like emirs and colonial administrators, were participants in shaping the trajectory of imperial secularism, and ultimately, in making the state. Colonial Northern Nigeria, therefore, became a site of intense struggle over the question of missionary proselytization. These struggles would endure, extending beyond the missionary question into other domains of contestation.