Children of the mission in Kano emirate: Conflicts of conversion in colonial northern Nigeria, c.1899--1953

This dissertation examines the politics of Christian conversion among youth in the context of missions in Kano emirate during British colonial rule. Studies of colonial-era Christian missions in Muslim Northern Nigeria have focused on governmental efforts to limit, segregate, secularize, and otherwise control evangelistic activities in education and medicine in order to protect the “indirect rule” of the British through indigenous authorities. Yet popular histories of missions among Muslims reveal that interactions with Christian evangelists occurred and shaped Hausa ideas about colonialism in the early twentieth century.;Using original personal papers, oral narratives, and archival materials from the most active, but least studied, Christian society in Kano, the Sudan Interior Mission, I reexamine the history of missions in the colonial project to demonstrate the significance of Christian evangelism and conversion. While not statistically impressive, conversion in the missions generated categories of difference that prefigured mission activity but had a disproportionate impact on colonial politics. Religious interaction, a concern for colonial administrators and missionaries, did not hold the same significance for Muslim Hausa until the 1930s, when the Native Administration collaborated with the missions in the establishment of a provincial leprosarium and rural dispensaries. In Hausa society, certain social strata were actively engaged religious inquiry and exploration.;I trace conversion to Christianity historically, finding that youth were of greatest interest to missionaries, and orphaned or unattached boys converted most often. A historical approach to their life stories shows that conversion changed from a scholarly activity to a process centered on bodily healing as the missions themselves transformed strategies of evangelism from unofficial schools to medical institutions and orphanages. While these youth came from backgrounds of social marginality, their conversion in the context of mission institutionalization and collaboration with the Muslim government created conflicts of authority that gradually dissolved the working relationship. This study demonstrates that the nature of this conflict over religious identification changed and culminated in the social and spatial separation of Christians and Muslims in Kano on the eve of independence from Britain.