Nigeria Culture and Religion
Nigeria Culture and religion: Before the British took over as a colony in Nigeria, there was Christianity and Islam. From across the Sahara, the Borno Empire brought Islam to northern Nigeria in the eleventh century. By the fourteenth century, Wangarawa traders from Mali had brought Islam to the Hausa states in the west.
As of the end of the 18th century, most of the Hausa states and the Kanem-Borno Empire were officially Islamic. But in the first ten years of the 1800s, the Sokoto jihad began, which was a new stage in the growth of Islam in northern Nigeria and parts of Yorubaland to the south.
In northern Nigeria, most towns had joined either the Sokoto caliphate or the sultanate of Borno by the end of that century.
These were the two main Muslim governments. The rest, the so-called pagan groups, had either bad relationships with or lived together with these states. As early as the 1600s, Christianity was brought to Warri and Benin in southern Nigeria. However, it did not take hold, and it was quickly replaced.
After the English evangelical renaissance and the fight against the slave trade in the late 1700s, Christian missions became interested in spreading the gospel in Africa again. All over southern Nigeria in the 1890s, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Roman Catholics established missions. These included Badagry, Abeokuta, Ibadan, Onitsha, and Calabar.
It spread in many parts of southern Nigeria but not in northern Nigeria, which is mostly Muslim. In 1900, Britain said that it was in charge of Nigeria. At first, the British didn’t like the defeated Fulani emirs of the Sokoto empire; some of them had fought back militarily. This changed, though, when the British saw how important the frameworks of the Islamic polities were to their rule.
Because of this, the British became protective of Islam, especially when compared to Christianity. Together with the emirs, they fought a shared enemy: Mahdism, an Islamic form of millenarianism. However, Britain’s strategy of favoring Islam was only in Northern Nigeria. It didn’t go to Yorubaland because there wasn’t anything like the Sokoto kingdom there. When it became clear that the British did not want to destroy Islam, most Muslims joined them.
Even so, there were negative responses to the new order, including hijra (a planned departure from the land of the heathen), armed conflict, and Mahdist propaganda. In 1903, Hijra and military resistance were shown in Burma. In 1906, the Mahdist threat was shown in Satiru.
Even though the Muslim resistance was put down, the threat of Mahdism stayed strong for the rest of the colonial period.
This made the British and the native ruling classes work together more to protect each other. As a result, Islam spread incredibly quickly in northern Nigeria. While Nigeria was still a colony, peace was restored, and Muslim traders and scholars moved into areas of northern Nigeria that were not Muslim to sell their goods and share their faith.
Non-Muslim societies that didn’t know how to read or write liked them because they were educated in Arabic and Hausa and were linked to economic growth. They soon became Muslims, in part so they could join a bigger trade network and share in its wealth.
Second, British officials made it very clear that Christian missions were not allowed to build churches or stations in the emirates. They kept their promise to respect the holiness of Islam, and this made it possible for Muslims to observe and spread their faith without any problems. The colonial strategy of putting non-Muslim communities under the emirates and putting Muslims in charge of their districts was much more important.
Over time, the Native Administration (NA) system and Muslim rule of trade put pressure on the emirs’ non-Muslim subjects to become Muslims. In this way, the faith spread peacefully to places where it could not have been forced in the past. By accident, colonial power had done for Islam what the jihad had not been able to do. That is, the share of Muslims in the total population rose from 50% in 1920 to 75% in 1952 in Bauchi state, from 74% in Borno to 83.5% in Borno, and from 43.5% in Llorin to 62.6% in Llorin.
Islam didn’t do as well in southern Nigeria. This was partly because there wasn’t any colonial protectionism and partly because Christian missions were free to work in the area. Still, the government understood why Muslims didn’t want to go to Western schools because they thought that missions were using this as an excuse to convert their children. Because of this, the government helped Muslims open their own schools so their children could get a Western education without having to become Christians.
It gave small funds and pushed Muslims to make lessons that combined Western and Islamic teaching. The Ahmadiyya Movement, the Ansarud-Deen Society, and the Anwar ul-Islam all pushed for Yoruba Muslims to get more Western-style schooling. This mix of Western and Islamic schooling worked well, and it helped Islam hold its ground in western Nigeria as Christianity spread.
The Muslim community grew religiously and intellectually thanks to the spread of Mahdist, Tijani, and Wahhabi literature, the building of Muslim printing presses, and more people going on the hajj, which introduced Muslims in Western Nigeria to the wider world of Islam. By 1900, Christianity had spread a lot through southern Nigeria.
By keeping the peace through colonial power, Christian missions were able to spread to places that were previously hostile. The Ijebu were defeated in 1892, which made it possible for the kingdom to be converted to Christianity. The missions were able to convert many people in many areas by providing modern health care and education based on Western ideas. They did this while flying the British flag.
Between 1859 and 1881, they were the first people to start secondary grammar schools. Later, they built more schools wherever they had a base. This was also a very important time for the growth of Christianity because the Bible was translated into many native languages. As a result of this time, “African churches” grew, especially among the Yoruba.
People from Africa who had been turned down for church jobs or who didn’t like the denationalizing ideas of European preachers (like those about marriage and joining secret or title societies) wanted to start churches that weren’t too Westernized.
Most of the big denominations split up, which led to the creation of different “African churches” that were different from the mission churches in terms of doctrine and worship. The “Aladura” churches in Yorubaland were important because they made Christianity more native by using African music and instruments in prayer, African chieftaincy titles to run the churches, and uniform dresses for everyone.
There has been debate about the role of Christianity in setting up colonial rule. Some people said that faith helped colonialism and got something good out of that. Even though the missions agreed with the British plan to colonize places like Abeokuta and Ijebu, their agreement or prompting did not change the British “forward policy,” which had its own dynamics.
In any case, Christianity was kept out of Muslim villages in northern Nigeria because Islam worked better for the colonial government there. Because of this, the missions backed the colonial government because it was in their own best interest, but they weren’t afraid to criticize the bad behavior of colonial officials when the time called for it.
During this time, Islam and Christianity spread in different parts of the country for different reasons. Both took advantage of the British people being there, even though they were actually working for the colonial government. By the end of the colonial era, they were Nigeria’s most important organized religious groups.
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