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Nigeria Influence of the Christian Missions
Christianity was introduced at Benin in the fifteenth
century
by Portuguese Roman Catholic priests who accompanied
traders and
officials to the West African coast. Several churches were
built
to serve the Portuguese community and a small number of
African
converts. When direct Portuguese contacts in the region
were
withdrawn, however, the influence of the Catholic
missionaries
waned and by the eighteenth century had disappeared.
Although churchmen in Britain had been influential in
the
drive to abolish the slave trade, significant missionary
activity
was renewed only in the 1840s and was confined for some
time to
the area between Lagos and Ibadan. The first missions
there were
opened by the Church of England's Church Missionary
Society
(CMS). They were followed by other Protestant
denominations from
Britain, Canada, and the United States and in the 1860s by
Roman
Catholic religious orders. Protestant missionaries tended
to
divide the country into spheres of activity to avoid
competition
with each other, and Catholic missions similarly avoided
duplication of effort among the several religious orders
working
there. Catholic missionaries were particularly active
among the
Igbo, the CMS among the Yoruba.
The CMS initially promoted Africans to responsible
positions
in the mission field, an outstanding example being the
appointment of Samuel Adjai Crowther as the first Anglican
bishop
of the Niger. Crowther, a liberated Yoruba slave, had been
educated in Sierra Leone and in Britain, where he was
ordained
before returning to his homeland with the first group of
missionaries sent there by the CMS. This was part of a
conscious
"native church" policy pursued by the Anglicans and others
to
create indigenous ecclesiastical institutions that
eventually
would be independent of European tutelage. The effort
failed in
part, however, because church authorities came to think
that
religious discipline had grown too lax during Crowther's
episcopate but especially because of the rise of
prejudice.
Crowther was succeeded as bishop by a British cleric.
Nevertheless, the acceptance of Christianity by large
numbers of
Nigerians depended finally on the various denominations
coming to
terms with local conditions and involved participation of
an
increasingly high proportion of African clergy in the
missions.
In large measure, European missionaries were convinced
of the
value of colonial rule, thereby reinforcing colonial
policy. In
reaction some African Christian communities formed their
own
independent churches.
Data as of June 1991
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