A growing field of historical scholarship is scrutinising the relationship between the colonial endeavor and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionary movement. It critiques previous assumptions of straightforward collaboration as too simplistic and suggests that the relationship was varied, complex, and mutually critical. Likewise, the engagement of these two vehicles of western civilization with populations they sought to influence is now rarely understood as a simple colonization of consciousness but one in which agency of the local population was demonstrated in pluriform ways in contexts of unequal access to political power. In Making Headway, Andrew E. Barnes enters thoroughly into these debates, particularizes them in the context of Northern Nigeria between 1900 and 1965, and provides an analysis which helpfully develops the thinking of the field by studying Christian evangelization and colonial administration side by side.
Northern Nigeria is recognized as a site of tension between missionaries and colonial administrators; a place in which the form of Indirect Rule applied by the administration respected the Muslim faith of the emirs and, therefore, discouraged the evangelism of Christian missionaries. Barnes establishes his theoretical and historiographical framework in the first two chapters and engages throughout with the historical literature of the area and examines the archives of the administration and the prominent missionary societies to present a cultural history of political and religious sensibilities that influences the modern state of Nigeria.
Central to Barnes's thesis is the influence of British class structures on Northern Nigeria. In chapters 3 and 4, Barnes addresses colonial rule in Northern Nigeria and produces evidence to suggest that British indirect rule was a form of cultural transfer that recognized social class as being prior to other affiliations and that attempted to create an African elite who thought and acted like the British elite. Policies concerning religion, Barnes suggests, stemmed from this primary orientation. Policies were also influenced by an assumption that the cultures of Northern Nigeria were largely static, discrete, and required protection from southern influence and forms of modernity deemed unwholesome by the government. This was an assumption largely shared by missionaries, yet missionaries and administrators were deeply divided on the definition of western civilization and thus on acceptable cultural transfer.
In the following two chapters, the work of mission agencies—most particularly the Sudan Inland Mission (SIM), Sudan United Mission (SUM), and the Church Mission Society (CMS)—is examined. They demonstrated distinct evangelical theologies which nuanced their engagement with Northern Nigerians (the use of “liberal” to describe CMS has a North American meaning and is misleading from a British perspective; although CMS was less conservative than the SIM and SUM, it did not understand itself to be liberal). The missionary societies represent for Barnes another British class with its own assumptions of life. Whether Barnes is correct to call this “yeoman Christianity” from a mythic British past is questionable, and he gives few sources for his assertion. A correlation with a British ideal of evangelical culture may be more convincing. Missionaries, as is noted, were also influenced by a common expectation that Muslims were easier to convert because they were religiously and culturally closer to Christians than followers of traditional African religions, and thus they wished to target them particularly. However, the suggestion that administrators and missionaries assumed different ideals that were in part, at least, influenced by class and its confluence with religion in Britain provides a useful way of understanding their modus operandi. It is also persuasive in demonstrating why Northern Nigerians, adapting one of the two forms of western civilization to their needs, acted as they did immediately prior to independence.
Chapter 7 outlines the change in educational policy from one that wished to inculcate the most conservative notions of western civilization by providing Northern Nigerians with little formal education to one in which missionaries and government officials began to work more closely than hitherto to provide greater opportunities for schooling. It prepares the way for the final two chapters on “The Africanization of Western Civilization” and “The Indigenization of Modernity.” As their titles suggest, these chapters are concerned with the adaptations and interpretations that Northern Nigerians made to the forms of western modernity available to them, as they sought to make it part of themselves. Numerous examples lead Barnes to conclude that Christians, who had inherited the missionary tradition, were inclined to develop political movements of the masses, whilst the Muslims, influenced by a British structure that maintained elites, used Islam to encourage oligarchic rule. Finally, Barnes suggests that it is precisely the competition between missionaries and government that ultimately encouraged each side to support Nigerian endeavors in ruling and evangelizing the region.
This is a book of great detail and lively examples. The careful and thorough research it underpins is apparent throughout. Unfortunately, the reliance on written sources means that there are few African voices commenting on the subject, a noticeable lack in the final chapters. Recourse to oral testimonies for mid-twentieth century events would surely have been possible and would have enhanced the final chapters. This reviewer would also have appreciated a comprehensive map or two of the area and a list of archives included in the bibliography as well as referenced in the endnotes. These are, however, relatively small concerns in a book that makes an important contribution to the field.
