Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel

5. African Agency and the Growth of the Church in the Maradi Region, 1927–1960

5 African Agency and the Growth of the Church in the Maradi Region, 1927–1960 The ones who have a red number, Almasihu [Savior], that’s not just anyone . . . —Song sung in Tsibiri ridiculing the earliest converts, who wore a red number issued by the mission (Barmo Abdou interview) Introduction When I spoke with Christians in Maradi about the history of their community , I was often puzzled by the deep resentment of Christians toward the mission that had introduced Christianity into the region. Why did they convert if the mission was so terrible? If Christianity is the central pillar in their lives, then why weren’t they grateful to the mission? For the secular scholar it is rather difficult to come to terms with the reality that for missionary and convert alike, agency in the moment of conversion rests not with humans but with the Holy Spirit. Missionaries did not “give” Africans Christianity. And African converts did not convert without, in effect, being actively “turned” toward God and away from sin through the power of the Holy Spirit. As Brian Stanley has recently argued in a thoughtful overview of the ways scholars and converts have talked about conversion, “Whatever validity social scientific analyses of conversion may possess in relation to the general phenomenon of conversion from one religion to another, Christian theology cannot rest content with any understanding of conversion to Christ as purely a matter 148 / Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel of human agency, whether on the part of the evangelist or the convert” (Stanley 2003, 320). Within their understanding of conversion, Christians don’t feel beholden to missionaries—they don’t concede that they have suffered some “colonization of the mind.” Converts are far more conscious than missionaries of the broad range of highly individual circumstances that contribute to the disposition of any particular individual who encounters evangelical Christianity: family training to reflect deeply about God, unhappy experiences in makarantar allo (Koranic school), prior exposure to Catholicism, private dreams and visions, resentment at being called a kafir by Muslim neighbors, a need to enter a loving community. . . . Christian converts in Niger do not tend to express gratitude to missionaries for their exposure to Christianity— the mission did not “give” them salvation. Jesus did. SIM missionaries, on the other hand, have a harder time sustaining the humility their interpretation of history would seem to imply. They feel an urge to count their converts, to measure just what the mission has accomplished, and to tell glorious stories of the feats of the earliest “pioneers” in Niger. They somehow feel that Christian converts ought to feel grateful to the mission because they feel keenly the extraordinary sacrifices choosing the life of a missionary entails. Missionaries I spoke with did refer to “giving” the gospel to Africans; the urgency of taking part in that saving act governed their choices in life, sometimes at tremendous personal cost. Working in the service of God, however, makes it hard for missionaries to acknowledge mistakes—whether individual failings or misjudgments by the mission as a whole. When converts find it hard to forgive those unacknowledged mistakes, missionaries tend to see that failure of Christian forgiveness as a sign of spiritual immaturity. The self-designation of Christians, masu bin Yesu (followers of Jesus), suggests a collective that is actively following Jesus. This is in contrast to the term sometimes used by Hausa-speaking Muslims to describe Christians, ’yan mission (people of the mission), which calls to mind individuals drawn, like moths, to the resources of a mission. How did these earliest “people of the mission” become instead “people of the church,” an independent and self-defining community of believers—’yan eglise? The song quoted as an epigram above suggests that one of the key problems for Christians was becoming more than simply a number, a statistic counted by the mission, branded with a humiliating red mark that separated them from their Muslim and Arna neighbors. The number assigned to them had the additional problem of giving the impression that in order to become a Christian one had to be from a certain set of African Agency and Growth of the Church in the Maradi Region / 149 families—aristocratic families, as it happened—not just anyone. Generating a genuine Christian community out of such beginnings would not be easy. The active choices and efforts of Africans—youthful seekers of...