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9 Handmaid to the Gospel: SIM’s Medical Work in Niger, 1944–1975 “The tall one, Father of Kero, Rushing off to ’Dan Issa [to preach]” —Epithet of praise (kirari) for Jim Lucas, who built the hospital at Galmi and originally oversaw the Danja Leprosarium Of Nurses and Evangelists, Successes and Failures When Adamu Na Mamayo was a young man in Nigeria tending his father’s cattle, he was encouraged to pursue Koranic learning as his father , a Fulani Muslim scholar, had done. He was eighteen and well trained in Islam when his family discovered that he was showing symptoms of kurtu, or leprosy. They sent him to a SIM leprosarium in Nigeria for treatment in the early 1950s. As the son of a Muslim scholar, he was not at all inclined to listen to the preaching of the missionaries. But he had to stay at the leprosarium for several years, for at that time treatments of leprosy (Hansen’s Disease) had limited efficacy. Like many Hansen’s Disease patients, he tolerated the ineffective treatments because the mission was quite effective at treating the symptoms and side effects of the disease, such as cuts, burns, and loss of the use of hands and feet. The mission could also provide useful documentation when the disease had ceased to be contagious, enabling the patient to travel. Missionaries also had a great deal of experience with the disease; they knew that it was not highly contagious and as a result treated patients with humanity.1 Adamu lived in a kind of village with other patients, farming to earn Handmaid to the Gospel / 291 his keep and becoming accustomed to the Christianized routines of the leprosarium. In time he came to enjoy hearing the missionaries recount in Hausa some of the familiar stories in the Abrahamic tradition, particularly the story of Noah. He found that he wanted to know more about some of these stories and began to read the Hausa Bible in secret. He hid his new interest from his family and quietly questioned Muslim scholars about the new Christian perspective he was gaining on Jesus and the prophets. During his long stay at the leprosarium, he fell in love with another patient, a young Hausa woman from the Maradi region. By the time he was cleared to leave the leprosarium after five years he and his Hausa bride were crypto-Christians. He went home with a Bible, which he did not hide, but he was not ready to confront his father directly. Reluctant to tell his family of his conversion, he persuaded the mission to support him for further biblical training in a SIM Bible school in Malumfashi so that he would be fully equipped to counter the arguments of his scholarly kin. Eventually he did go home when he was about twenty-five and openly profess his Christianity. “Oh no,” cried his mother, “there will be no one to bury you!” His father died six months later. In Nigeria, his kinfolk and Muslim neighbors refused to eat with him. It was clear that he no longer had a viable community. Eventually, in 1977, the mission encouraged Adamu to move to the Maradi region with his Nigérien bride to serve as a preacher in the SIM leprosarium in Danja. Adamu came to Niger to live near his wife’s family and raised his own children in the more congenial setting of the Maradi region, where Muslims and Christians have traditionally had a less fraught relationship with one another. Scholarly work on health and missions in Africa often focuses on curing and the body, western conceptions of medicine, and the violence of western medical intrusions. These are important issues, yet in this case it was precisely the failure of the mission to provide a quick and effective cure for Hansen’s Disease that ensured the conditions that gave Pastor Adamu long exposure to Christianity, habituation to Christian routines, and the possibility of creating a family and earning an income as a preacher. SIM’s medical interventions in this region begin with this paradox —that it was the inadequacy of “scientific” treatments for leprosy that made leprosaria particularly fruitful sites for evangelism before the widespread use of sulfone-based antibiotics in the mid-1950s (on the gradual adoption of the use of antibiotics, see Silla 1998, 106–115). Once SIM had a broader network of medical installations and relatively effective treatment options for a variety of medical conditions, the value of...

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