The first wave of
contact our people had with Christians and missionaries under the protection of
Portugal
was between the 15th and 18th centuries. Mainly Capuchin missionaries and
Augustinians from Portugal,
Spain
and Italy
were involved in this encounter. Following the pattern of Church-State
relations, missionaries called at king's courts, sought to convert the kings,
and from there attempted to make the populace Christian.
The evils of the
society between the 16th and 18th centuries that affected Christian life
included slavery, human sacrifice, and killing of twins. There were also
cultural practices like polygamy and elements of traditional religious
practices called "fetish worship". Missionaries who found it
difficult to distinguish between their home cultural practices and the
Christian faith were intolerant of unfamiliar customs of the Nigerians they
encountered. But the evidence of the impact of Christianity may be contained in
the following testimony recorded in 1644: "In the city of Warri there is a church with an altar, a
crucifix, statues of Mary and the Apostles, and two candlesticks alongside. The
Black people come into this church with the rosary constantly in their hands,
just as proper Portuguese do. They recite it together with other popish
prayers. Outwardly they show themselves very religious. They also know how to
read and write and are eager for Portuguese books, pens, ink and paper".
Warri and Benin Christianity were a court and elite practice that did not
really penetrate the interior. Its impact waned in Warri when the Itsekiri
kingdom disappeared before the colonial era. We learn from this to ensure the
penetration of Christianity to the grassroots level.
From the 19th to the 20th centuries:
The second wave of
mission in the 19th century West African sub-region started with the
Protestants. The sheer burden of this missionary work lay with the liberated
slaves and lay men and women of the West African region. In the region of
Nigeria Yoruba liberated slaves were the most enterprising both in trade and in
spreading Christianity. Henry Townsend and Ajai Crowther stand out clearly, as
missionaries of no mean stature in the western, Niger and delta areas of Nigeria. The
church they founded, made up initially of liberated slaves, later included the
indigenes of the southern Nigeria
area. Similar to the first wave of evangelisation from the 16th to 18th
centuries, trade and politics affected positively and negatively the progress
of the Christian mission. One must note in this regard the negative impact of
slavery and the struggle against it. There is also the positive and negative
influence of slaves who assumed power in the Niger Delta in the evangelisation
of the region. The encounter with Islamic religion in the Niger Benue
confluence foreshadowed what problems would later bedevil evangelisation and
the relationship between Christianity and Islam. Catholics in Nigeria, after
the failed efforts that ended in early 19th century, count their membership
from liberated slaves from Brazil.
The Society of African Missions (SMA) based in Dahomey (Republic of Benin)
discovered that a Catholic community was already in Lagos, early in the 1860s under the
supervision of a catechist named "Padre Antonio". In 1868 the SMA,
led by Francesco Borghero, arrived Lagos and the evangelisation of the area
covered today by five provinces - Lagos, Benin, Ibadan, Jos and Kaduna - was
initiated. The Vicariate Apostolic of the Bight of Benin
was created in 1883 and was under Fr. J. B. Chausse. Our Lady of Apostles
Sisters (OLA) co-operated in this mission. They had communities in Lagos and Abeokuta by 1873.
The Vicariate
Apostolic of the Upper Niger was created in
1884 with its centre first in Lokoja and later in Asaba under the very popular
Fr. Carlo Zappa who had minor seminarians by 1911. The strong resistance of the
West Niger Igbo to foreign religion and fashion was reduced by British military
operation. From this area Paul Emechete emerged as the "first modern
priest in the Gulf
of Guinea" in 1920.
This development was in line with SMA founder, Marion Brésillac’s insistence on
building local community and local clergy. The church, which reached Abeokuta and Ibadan in the 1890s, had
already a minor seminary established in Ibadan
by 1908. The first three Yoruba priests ordained in 1929, Julius Adewuyi, Peter
Oni, and Lawrence Layode were trained in neighbouring Dahomey at the St Gall major seminary, Ouidah.
As happened with the
Protestant mission, the move to the north was halted by British order. However,
in 1907 the intrepid Zappa was able to make the 300-mile leap from Asaba to
establish the only catholic station in the north up to the 1930s in Shendam.
Westwards, the historic Benin
was administered from Sapele, got its own bishop in 1929 (Thomas Broderick) who
was resident in Asaba, and moved to Benin in 1939. Issele-Uku diocese
was created in 1973 to take care of the West-Niger Igbo. These were the initial
steps that later led to the formation of the three ecclesiastical provinces of Lagos, Ibadan and Benin.
If Zappa preferred
raising Christian communities and did not emphasize education, though he was
compelled to do so later, the school in the service of evangelization became
the trademark of the Holy Ghost Fathers [Spiritans] who arrived Onitsha in December 1885
led by Fr. Lutz. The Apostolic prefecture of the Lower
Niger was created in 1889. Fr. Léon Lejeune was the architect of
the school for evangelization, and the indefatigable Bishop Joseph Shanahan
carried this to its ultimate conclusion leading to massive conversions among
the Igbo to Catholicism. The initial evangelization in the Lower
Niger consisted of buying back slaves, instruction to create
Christian community and medicare. Lutz and later the Sisters of Cluny were
noted for medicare.
When Shanahan took
over from Lejeune as prefect in 1905 he capitalized on the Igbo love for
education and his knowledge of their religion to evangelise. "If we go
from town to town talking about God we know from experience that much of our
efforts brings no result. But no one is opposed to schools". This sole
focus on schools even to the point of excluding the building of churches drove
a wedge between original preoccupation of French Spiritans to build Christian
communities and the new drive to make converts through the schools. The matter
became clear during the school take-over in 1970.
In his great treks
inland Shanahan not only established schools but also saw the need for more
agents of evangelisation. St Patrick’s Society (Kiltegan) was founded in 1932
for this particular mission. The Prefecture
of Calabar was created in
1934 and confided to them. In this way the catholic foothold in Calabar made in
1903 after the destruction of the Long Juju (Arochukwu oracle) in 1901 became
firm. As from 1930 Shanahan turned his attention to expand towards the north
resulting in the prefecture of the Benue
(present day Makurdi diocese). The Holy Rosary Sisters (founded in Kileshandra
in 1924) joined the mission for the education of women. So also were the
Medical Missionaries of Mary founded by a lay missionary Mary Martin. Later Sr.
Magdalene Walker started the foundation that came to be known as the Handmaids
of the Holy Child Jesus. The latter two congregations were for the education of
the girls in Calabar and adjoining areas.
Shanahan was
extremely cautious about setting up seminaries compared to the SMA in Western Nigeria. The first seminary of Igbariam was
opened in 1924, and the first ordination of a priest of the Lower
Niger (John Cross Anyogu) was in 1930. One must also note the
impact of policy differences and even competition between the Spiritans and
SMA. This may have led to lost opportunities for setting up common projects
like common major seminaries. From these initial efforts in the Lower Niger there emerged the three ecclesiastical
provinces of Onitsha,
Owerri, and Calabar.
This late 19th
century and early 20th century evangelization in Nigeria initially attracted slaves,
outcasts, the poor, the disabled and all the marginalized. It is a statement on
the Christian missionary orientation to outcasts and underprivileged. This
alienated the greater number of the native peoples and they refused to become
members. Nonetheless, prominent people like John Okenla, Balogun of Abeokuta
and Chief Idigo of Aguleri were converted. Catechists, catechist-teachers and
lay people played immense role in the spread of the faith during this period.
Both they and the foreign missionaries showed heroic faith and endured trials
to help the church establish in southern Nigeria.
The evangelisation
of Northern Nigeria was more difficult because
of the implantation of Islam and its system of government, the initial mistakes
of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), its link to colonial ambitions in the
north, and the application of the Lugard exclusion from preaching to Moslems.
Catholic presence was recorded in the north in the 17th/18th century in Gobir
(Sokoto) and Bornu.
The kingdom of Kororofa was said to have had well nigh
100,000 Christians and a sixty-bed hospital built by a priest. Contact was
through the caravan route linking Bornu/Sokoto and Tripoli. And the Emirs were reported to have
shown hospitality to the priests involved in this presence.
Attempts by the SMA
to establish in Lokoja in 1884 did not yield lasting fruit, despite the fact
that a Christian enclave was established with 30 purchased slaves and a house
for the nuns (Our Lady of Apostles) who worked alongside the SMA. Reports
indicate that the CMS who preceded the Catholics showed hospitality by allowing
Catholics to use their church for worship. The Holy Ghost Fathers in their
struggle to contain Islam and slavery followed the system of Christian village
as a method of evangelization establishing one in Dekina but were forced
through frustrations to withdraw in 1904.
From the foothold
established in Shendam in 1907 the prefecture of the immense area North of the
river Benue was established in 1911, but the
centre was relocated to Jos. Further SMA forays into missions in the North led
to the creation of the prefectures of Jos and Kaduna in 1934. Shanahan and his successor
Heerey had been joined by German Holy Ghost Fathers who worked along the Benue region as far as Yola; this led to the creation of
the prefecture of the Benue in 1934 with
Makurdi as headquarters. Other missionary groups that arrived from the 1930s to
the time of political independence in 1960 include the Augustinians (Adamawa
region) and Dominicans (Sokoto). One must not forget the impact of southern
Christians on Catholic presence in the North. These constituted about 50% of
Catholics before the civil war. These and other lay assistants made significant
contributions to the evangelization of the north. It is remarkable that
Catholics, firmly united around the clergy and having liturgy in the same
language before Vatican II, did not break up along ethnic lines for their
worship, as was the case with Anglicans and other Protestant groups.
The first native
priests from the north, Aloysius Makozi and Joseph Ohieku were ordained in
1961. From these difficult beginnings there are now three ecclesiastical
provinces in Northern Nigeria - Kaduna, Jos, and Abuja.
Today there are 52
dioceses and 9 provinces in Nigeria.
The emergence of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria as an organ of
unity of the local churches makes concrete the remarkable co-operation that
existed among the bishops of Nigeria
before 1950 when a local hierarchy was established. Institutions like the
Catholic Secretariat, the regional Major Seminaries, the National Missionary
Seminary of St Paul, and the Catholic Institute of West Africa are all aspects
of strengthening the "catholicity of the undivided church" and
testify to the maturity of the Nigerian church. The late Dominic Ekandem was in
1954 ordained the first bishop in Anglophone West Africa and made a Cardinal in
1976. And in 1985 Francis Cardinal Arinze President of the Secretariat of
Christian Unity became the second Nigerian cardinal.
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