The Middle Belt Movement and the Formation of Christian Consciousness in Colonial Northern Nigeria.

This article looks at the connection between a political movement and the evolution of Christian consciousness. It seeks to answer a series of questions not often asked, in hopes of demonstrating that these questions deserve more attention than they have generated in the past. Historians and mission scholars rightly expend a good deal of effort studying the transition in mission-established churches from European to indigenous control. Missions did more than establish churches, however. They established local Christian cultures. Yet while there is some understanding of what indigenous peoples sought to do when they assumed direction of churches founded by missionaries, there is very little idea of what indigenous peoples have sought to do when they take over local Christian cultures. But, if it is the case that, as Lamin Sanneh has argued, Christianity "stimulated the vernacular,"(n1) then the local Christian cultures built upon the vernacular, perhaps more so than the churches missions founded, are the true legacy of the missionary enterprise.

Across the 1950s Africans in Northern Nigeria took control of many of the churches founded in the region by missionary societies.(n2) Less heralded, but arguably just as important, during the same time they also took the lead in defining Christian culture in the area. One question this article poses is how and in what ways did local Christians in the north change the focus of Christian culture once they were in charge. The article will make the case that an answer to the question may be found in an assessment of the Middle Belt Movement that occurred across the 1950s. The Middle Belt Movement has been treated almost exclusively as a political movement. As argued here, it can also be appreciated as an assertion by northern Christians of a new Christian identity. This new Christian identity provides some clues to how northerners "indigenized" Christianity.

The passing of control of African churches from Europeans to Africans has been one concern of scholars. Another, related concern has been with the European role in the process. How did missionaries and mission organizations negotiate the demands by Africans for more say over African religious communities? Nationalism is identified as a major source of impetus behind such demands, the nationalist's search for self determination being recognized as both a cause and a consequence of the Christian desire for more involvement in the management of church life.(n3) One tendency among scholars has been to postulate a split in the reaction by missions to African nationalism.(n4) Liberal missions such as the Church Missionary Society (CMS) are seen to have devised policies that enfranchised and built upon African initiative. More conservative "faith missions" such as the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) and the Sudan United Mission (SUM), the two missions most active in the evangelization of Northern Nigeria, are understood to have resisted such accommodations.(n5) While respecting the significance of the split for the positions assumed by mission groups themselves, one finds it worth pondering just how important the different stances were on the ground. Did the willingness or unwillingness of missions to acknowledge the legitimacy of African nationalism matter to Africans? Did the resistance of the faith missions get in the way of their congregants embracing nationalism? The Middle Belt Movement would suggest that for some locales an answer to the question may be a four-sided affair, African congregants of liberal missions passing on liberal Christian sensibilities to the African congregants of faith missions. The decision-making of mission organizations did not take place in vacuums, in other words, the capacity of missions to shape the flow of events being buffered by, among other things, the actions of African Christians with whom mission representatives had no preexisting connections.

This last point prompts a third and last series of questions. Ogbu Kalu has speculated that some missions thought that they could outlast the decolonization process.(n6) Accepting that some did, a next question is what forced missions out of such strategies. Was it or was it not African Christians? The value of these questions is that they call attention to the issue of native agency not as it had an impact on the establishment of Christian communities, but as it had an impact on the evolution of Christian communities. Few scholars would challenge the point made by Adrian Hastings, that the yeoman's part in the planting of Christianity in Africa was performed by evangelists or catechists.(n7) But how did African faith, African initiative push forward the institutional development of churches, particularly at the juncture when missions had to face up to the euthanasia Henry Venn had originally advocated? Kalu suggests that once it was clear that change was coming, mission organizations sought to precipitate a "passive revolution" in church control, that is, as he described it, "a return to informal empire" where "former rulers would retain sufficient economic and technological resources" to continue to "influence… policy from behind the curtain of the vestry or boardrooms of their metropoles."(n8) Kalu saw passive revolution as having been put in place by mission organizations over the period 1955-75, only to be "sabotaged" after that time by "youthful charisma," that is, "young puritan preachers" such as appeared in the 1970s in Malawi.(n9) Not to challenge Kalu's point, but perhaps his model worked best for the African congregations of liberal mission organizations. The Middle Belt Movement would suggest that the decolonization strategies of faith missions may have been sabotaged from the beginning by saboteurs coming from a very different direction, that of the further immersion of African Christians in what the missionaries saw as the world of Mammon.

The Middle Belt Movement is most simply described as an episodic push by groups of northern Christians across the 1950s to found a political organization of sufficient strength to pressure the colonial government to establish a fourth administrative region to go along with western, eastern, and northern administrative regions created by the Richards Committee in 1948.(n10) The Richards Committee was the first of several committees established by the colonial government with the charge of determining the constitutional makeup of a decolonized Nigeria.(n11) The western and eastern regions were created out of the old Southern Province. They were both understood to be centers of Christianity. The northern region was the old Northern Province. It was taken for granted that it was Muslim territory. The fourth region would encompass the provinces in the northern region closest to the Southern Province. Most of these provinces were officially listed as populated by traditionalists. Most also, however, had significant Christian minorities, and there was some expectation, at least by Christians, that over time these minorities would eventually became majorities. The case for a fourth administrative region, then, was a case for a regional home for northern Christians.(n12)

Groups of northern Christians first came together in 1949 over the issue. Significantly, the organization they established was known as the Non-Muslim League (NML), a reflection of the shared perception on the part of the participants that what they had in common was a desire to be free of the Muslim political control that was to be implemented throughout the northern region as a prelude to decolonization. In 1950, the name of the organization was changed to the Middle Zone League (MZL) to signal the commitment of the members to the idea that their political concerns would be best addressed by the creation of the aforementioned fourth administrative region. In 1953, the MZL split into two over the issue of finding common ground with the north's ruling Muslim elite. The group that opted to throw in its lot with the Muslim elite retained the name Middle Zone League. The group that continued the agitation for a separate administrative region named itself the Middle Belt People's Party. In 1955, the two groups resolved their differences and came back together to form the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC). In 1958, the UMBC joined in an alliance with the Action Group (AG), the political party of the Yoruba in Nigeria's western region. The UMBC embraced the political platform of the AG, which proposed a constitution for Nigeria sufficiently decentralized as to allow ethnic groups real say in the determination of local affairs.(n13)

As an attempt at political mobilization, the Middle Belt Movement has to be counted a failure. At no time were its members of sufficiently one voice as to force the colonial government to pay heed to its demands. And ultimately the government was able to have members accept a characterization of them and their grievances as reflective of their "minority" status in the north, a move that eviscerated any claim for a separate state.(n14) In his memoirs, Sir Bryan Sharwood-Smith, lieutenant governor of Northern Nigeria during the 1950s, explained the push for the creation of a Middle Belt state as having among its sources a sense of inferiority on the part of Christians relative to Muslims. Most of the Christians having been newly civilized, it made sense that they in fact did appear as "uncouth and ill mannered" before the "older" Muslims.(n15) Sharwood-Smith was confident, however, that at least with certain Christian leaders some sort of communication by Muslim leaders that the former were welcome in the club was all that was needed to alleviate this feeling of inferiority. Thus, even though "eyebrows were raised," Sharwood-Smith arranged for the Sultan of Sokoto to drop by the home of Rwang Pam, the chief of the Birom, one of the ethnic groups most active in the Middle Belt Movement.(n16)

Perhaps, but Sir Bryan might have given more acknowledgment to the effort on the part of the colonial government to identify and buy off individual leaders with promises of future roles in government. This factor clearly played a role in the splintering of the movement's leadership.(n17) And having convinced northern Christians to see themselves as "minorities," the colonial government could announce, after the sitting of yet another committee, that constitutional safeguards were all that was needed to keep Christians safe once power in the north was passed on to Muslim elites.(n18)

It may be, however, that the Middle Belt Movement is miscast as a political movement. Most of what is known about the Middle Belt Movement stems from the research of American political scientists. These scholars were primarily interested in the emergence of party politics among Northern Nigerian Muslims. Thus the movement has suffered from the neglect that is the usual fate of political movements that are treated as the background to something else.

The Middle Belt Movement has a decidedly brighter visage, however, when looked at from the cultural perspective. The political parties, the political conferences, and campaigns the movement engendered may not have produced the desired administrative region, but they did provide northern Christians with a shared political consciousness that reinforced those Christians' sense of faith. Ask Nigerians to this day to identify the Middle Belt, and they can point to it on a map. Ask Nigerians to identify the faith of the people who live there, and they will say Christianity. In sum, participants in the Middle Belt Movement got their own space even if they did not get their state.

But to say that the Middle Belt Movement is better appreciated as a cultural movement is to bring us back to the question of the emergence of a local Christian culture in the region and to the question of the role of missionaries versus indigenous Christians in that emergence. Was the Middle Belt Movement something local Christians took over from the missionaries? Or was it something local Christians created in reaction to the missionaries? The argument here is that it was the latter.

Political scientists all affirmed that missions created the Middle Belt Movement. They portrayed the movement as the last great push by the missions to disrupt political developments in Northern Nigeria.(n19) In order to get to the case for looking at the movement as the creation of northern Christians, then, it will first be necessary to challenge the case for the movement as the result of missionary initiative.

Political scientists agree that the Middle Belt Movement was fostered by missionaries. They also agree that the movement was sparked by adverse reaction to moves on the part of the colonial government. There is some contention, however, as to what this spark ignited. The most influential version of the movement's inception was put forward by Richard Sklar. He presented the movement as a reaction against perceived religious persecution. Sklar traces the origins of the Middle Belt Movement back to the formation of the Birom Progressive Union (BPU) in 1945 by Patrick Dokotri, "a former Catholic seminary student."(n20) According to Sklar, the original aim of the BPU was to agitate before the colonial government for improvements in the Biroms' political and economic situation. The focus on a Middle Belt state only emerged in 1949 in the aftermath of a motion before the northern House of Assembly to restrict Christian missionizing in the north. At that point Dokotri decided to join with a number of other Christian leaders to create the Northern Non-Muslim League, which quickly morphed into the Middle Zone League.(n21)

In contrast, Dudley's explanation of the origins of the Middle Belt Movement deemphasized the search for a founding group and focused more on the impetus behind the emergence of the movement. Dudley pointed out that by the late 1940s most ethnic groups in Northern Nigeria had seen the establishment of ethnic improvement associations or "progressive unions," such as the one mentioned for the Birom.(n22) For Dudley, the important point to appreciate about the evolution of the Middle Belt Movement was the degree to which it represented an evolutionary step forward for such associations. As Dudley saw it, the Middle Belt Movement was a banding together of Christian-dominated ethnic associations with the ambition of creating a space where Christians would not have to worry about Muslim efforts to halt progress. The local governments set up by the British in Northern Nigeria were known as Native Authorities. Even in areas where the population was traditionalist, the colonial government in Northern Nigeria often placed these Native Authorities in the hands of Muslim elites. Thus the confrontations between ethnic improvement associations and government could have a religious edge. Dudley took pains to highlight the fact that the religious dimension only came to the fore in the late 1940s when the politicking began in preparation for the devolution of political authority from the colonial government to Nigerians. For ethnic improvement associations, the British officials who had made up the upper echelons of the northern government had become judges before whom they could dispute the actions of Muslim Native Authorities. The planned replacement of the British officials by Muslim elites placed before Christian eyes the prospect of having to contest the decisions of local Muslim governments before a provincial Muslim government. It was fear of this scenario that galvanized the Christians in ethnic associations to merge.(n23)

Dudley's story of the origins of the Middle Belt Movement seems closer to the mark. The one systematic reconstruction of the Middle Belt Movement on the local level, Niels Kastfelt's study of Adamawa province, supports this conclusion. Kastfelt shows that in Adamawa ethnic improvement associations formed first, and then provided the building blocks for the movement.(n24) Together, Dudley and Kastfelt made a case for seeing the Middle Belt Movement as the result of a mobilization of already existing organizations toward a new goal. Their research demonstrated that the ethnic associations were the constituent elements of the Middle Belt Movement, and that the primary concerns of these associations were all local in nature. It was the conviction that Muslim rule would stand in the way of the associations' individual agendas that prompted them to decide to act in unison toward the rejection of such rule.

What was the role of the missions in this development? Dudley showed that the concerns of ethnic improvement associations only tangentially had to do with religion. Christians may have made up the majority of the participants in these associations in traditionalist areas, but the goals the associations pursued were in no necessary way Christian in nature. Kastfelt supported this point, observing about the Bachama ethnic improvement organization in Adamawa Province that the missionaries among the Bachama knew little about it, and that the members of the association showed no interest in involving missionaries in its affairs.(n25) Remarkably, Dudley still traced the impetus behind the Middle Belt Movement back to the Christian missions. He quoted Abba Habib, General Secretary of the Northern People's Congress (NPC), the political party of the ruling Muslim elites, to the effect that the UMBC, the political party of the Middle Belt Movement, was "only an ideology infused by the missionaries against the expansion of Moslems in Northern Nigeria."(n26) Dudley then goes on to argue that concern to hide the connection with missions was behind the decision to change the name of the organization founded by northern Christians from the Non-Moslem League to the Middle Zone League, though, as Dudley emphasized, a Christian minister was still elected president of the latter.(n27)

Dudley was simply following other political scientists who all took for granted a behind-the-scenes role by missions in directing the Middle Belt Movement.(n28) But did missions, in any coordinated way, play a role in the advance of the movement? Other than accusations from Muslim and British officials, there is no evidence that they did.(n29) Available evidence instead suggests that missionaries were of two minds about political developments in Northern Nigeria after World War II, and that the political activities of African Christians left them at best nervous.

Reflective of the missionary attitude toward these activities are two pieces in The Lightbearer, the journal of the SUM, one of the faith missions alluded to earlier. The SUM's pride in the political accomplishments of one of its own came through in an article from 1952, titled "Christian Influence in Government."(n30) The article announced the election of Pastor David Lot to the Northern House of Assembly. It offered a brief biography of Lot, noting that he was the son of an evangelist and that he had done his training for the ministry at Gindiri, the evangelist training center maintained by the mission.(n31)

Yet, in general the SUM looked at politics as just another guise of Mammon. This point comes through in comments published as part of the Annual Report for 1949.(n32) The comments were offered in the context of a cautionary tale about the Birom. Implicitly, however, the comments were also about ethnic improvement associations in general and the illusions of power these associations generated. The BPU had effectively exerted pressure on the colonial government to force the tin mining companies to offer greater compensation to the Birom for the land the companies stripped of tin. This was the background to the opening comment that thanks to the high price of tin, the Birom had "plenty of money."(n33) Because of the money, the Birom now wallowed in materialism. Thus, the Birom, a people who had once been "as primitive a people as could be found anywhere," primitive here being a synonym for lacking in material culture, now possessed "clothes, good food, better houses, large numbers of bicycles, and even motor-cars."(n34) Another measure of the BPU's success was its ongoing effort to compel the colonial government to recognize the central regions of the Jos Plateau, including the city of Jos, as under Birom jurisdiction. Earlier during the colonial regime the colonial government had established a Muslim-controlled Native Authority to rule the African peoples who congregated in Jos. As of 1947 the colonial government had gone so far as to appoint a chief for the Birom, but did not grant him jurisdiction over the Muslims living in Jos. Rather, the government opted to attempt to co-opt the leadership of the BPU into a coalition with the Muslim elite.(n35) These developments were in turn the context for the comment in The Lightbearer that while the District Head and several of the village heads among the Birom were Christians, and while the District Head was a member of the Northern House of Assembly, the chief import of this political advancement was that the District Head now hobnobbed "with all the big emirs."(n36) Yet, as the report then warned, it would take little for the Biroms' bubble to burst. If the price of tin was to suddenly fall, the comments concluded, the Biroms' world would fall apart because Birom farms "do not produce enough food for half the year, and they have no export crops."(n37)…