How Christianity came to Nigeria and West Africa

Nigeria today has one of the largest Christian populations in the world, and Christians in Ghana, Benin, Togo and across the region number in the tens of millions. A century and a half ago the churches of Nigeria could be counted in dozens. How did it happen?

The usual answer — "the white missionaries brought it" — is partly true and mostly misleading. This article tells the longer story. Dates here are as accurate as the sources allow; where the record is uncertain, that is marked.

The first attempt: Portuguese Catholics

Portuguese ships reached the Bight of Benin in the 1470s and 1480s, and contact with the kingdom of Benin began around 1486. Catholic missionaries followed in the early sixteenth century; the Oba Esigie is reported to have allowed baptisms and churches, and some at court learned Portuguese. But the mission depended on royal favour and Portuguese trade, and it did not take root among the people.

The kingdom of Warri, among the Itsekiri, went further. From about the 1570s several of its rulers (the Olus) were baptised, and one, known as Dom Domingos, was educated in Portugal and returned with a Portuguese wife in the early seventeenth century. A Christian court tradition lasted, with long gaps, into the eighteenth century before fading away.

Further west, the Portuguese built Elmina castle on the Gold Coast in 1482, with a chapel. Over the following centuries the European forts along that coast had chaplains — and they were also centres of the slave trade.

The return: freed slaves bring the gospel home

After Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron began stopping slave ships and landing the freed captives at Freetown, Sierra Leone. Tens of thousands of people from all over West Africa — many of them Yoruba — were resettled there. Missions, especially the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Methodists, worked among them, and many became Christians and learned to read.

From the late 1830s some of these freed people, known as Saros, began sailing home to Badagry, Lagos and Abeokuta to find the families they had been torn from. They brought their faith with them and asked for missionaries to follow. This is the decisive fact of Nigerian church history: Christianity came back to Nigeria largely through Africans returning from slavery.

The story of how abolition and the church are connected is told in Slavery, abolition and the church.

Badagry, 1842

On 24 September 1842 Thomas Birch Freeman, a Methodist missionary of African and English parentage who had already worked on the Gold Coast, landed at Badagry. The service held there is remembered as the first Christian service in modern Nigeria; the site is marked today. In December the same year Henry Townsend of the CMS arrived. The mission house built at Badagry in 1845 is widely described as Nigeria's first storey building.

Townsend visited Abeokuta, the new capital of the Egba people, where many Saros had settled. The CMS mission there began in earnest in 1846. Townsend later started Iwe Irohin in 1859, generally counted as Nigeria's first newspaper.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther

No figure matters more to this story.

Ajayi was born around 1806 in Osogun, in Yorubaland. In 1821, as a teenager, he was captured in a raid, sold several times and put aboard a Portuguese slave ship. In 1822 the Royal Navy intercepted the ship and landed him at Freetown. There he became a Christian, was baptised in 1825 taking the name Samuel Crowther, and was the first student enrolled at the CMS's new Fourah Bay College in 1827.

He took part in the British Niger Expedition of 1841, was ordained in England in 1843, and joined the mission at Abeokuta. There, in 1846, he found his mother and sisters, whom he had not seen since the day of his capture. His mother later became a Christian.

Crowther's greatest work was translation. He published a Yoruba grammar and vocabulary in 1843, translated much of the Bible into Yoruba with others (the complete Yoruba Bible appeared in 1884), and pioneered written work in Igbo and Nupe. His insistence that Africans should hear God speak in their own languages shaped everything that followed.

In 1857 he led the Niger Mission, staffed almost entirely by African clergy and catechists, mostly from Sierra Leone, with stations at Onitsha, Lokoja and in the Niger Delta. On 29 June 1864 he was consecrated in Canterbury Cathedral as bishop — the first African bishop of the Anglican communion. This was the vision of the CMS secretary Henry Venn: churches that would govern, support and spread themselves under their own leaders.

Nigerians did not accept it quietly. In 1891 a group in Lagos left the CMS to form the United Native African Church, the first of the "African churches" — orthodox in doctrine but African in leadership. Crowther's son, Archdeacon Dandeson Crowther, led the Niger Delta Pastorate as a self-supporting African church.

Calabar and the south-east

In 1846 Hope Waddell, an Irish-born Presbyterian who had worked among freed slaves in Jamaica, arrived in Calabar with a group of Jamaican Christians, at the invitation of Efik chiefs, for what became the Church of Scotland mission. The Hope Waddell Training Institution, founded in 1895, later educated many leading Nigerians.

Mary Slessor, a mill worker from Dundee, arrived in 1876. She learned Efik fluently, lived in villages rather than mission compounds, moved inland to the Okoyong, and became famous for rescuing twins — who were believed to be cursed and were often abandoned to die — and their mothers. She also served as a magistrate under the colonial administration. She died in 1915 and is buried in Calabar.

The Catholic missions

The Catholic church returned in the nineteenth century. The Society of African Missions (SMA), founded in Lyon in 1856, began work in Lagos in the 1860s and later spread across the west and north. The Holy Ghost Fathers (Spiritans) arrived at Onitsha in 1885.

Under the Irish bishop Joseph Shanahan, from the early 1900s, the Catholic mission in the east made schools its main strategy. In Igboland, where there were no large centralised kingdoms and education became the road to opportunity under colonial rule, this proved extraordinarily effective. Between roughly 1900 and the 1930s, Igbo communities turned to Christianity in large numbers through mission schools — Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian. Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi, an Igbo priest and later monk, was beatified by John Paul II in Onitsha in 1998.

The Aladura: Africans read the Bible for themselves

The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed a vast number of people in Nigeria, and mission churches seemed to have little to say about sickness except Western medicine. In Ijebu-Ode, prayer groups began meeting to pray for healing — the start of what became the Aladura ("praying people") movement.

• In 1930 a former road-construction worker named Joseph Ayo Babalola began preaching at Ilesa. Crowds gathered in their thousands, people brought their idols to be burned, and many reported healings. The movement that grew from this revival became the Christ Apostolic Church, one of the largest indigenous churches in Nigeria.
• In 1925 Moses Orimolade Tunolase and a young woman, Christiana Abiodun Akinsowon, founded the Cherubim and Seraphim society in Lagos, known for white garments, visions and prayer.
• Josiah Ositelu founded the Church of the Lord (Aladura) around 1930, and Samuel Oschoffa founded the Celestial Church of Christ in Porto-Novo in 1947.

These churches varied. Some, like the Christ Apostolic Church, stayed close to classic evangelical and Pentecostal belief. Others mixed biblical faith with practices drawn from traditional religion — the line between faithful contextualisation and syncretism that Byang Kato would later warn about. But together they showed something important: Nigerians were not passive receivers of a foreign faith. They were reading the Bible, praying, and taking seriously its promises about healing and the Holy Spirit in ways the mission churches often did not.

Ghana: a parallel story

On the Gold Coast the pattern was similar. Philip Quaque, a Fante, was ordained in the Church of England in 1765, decades before any of this — the first African so ordained. The Swiss Basel Mission arrived in 1828; after many missionary deaths, Andreas Riis settled at Akropong in 1835, and in 1843 the mission brought Christians from Jamaica to help. Methodists began at Cape Coast in 1835, where Thomas Birch Freeman worked before going to Badagry.

In 1914 the Liberian prophet William Wadé Harris walked along the coast of Ivory Coast and into the western Gold Coast, and tens of thousands burned their charms and were baptised. In the twentieth century Ghana produced a strong Pentecostal movement, notably the Church of Pentecost, and one of Africa's great theologians, Kwame Bediako, who argued that Christianity is not a Western religion that Africa borrowed but a faith that Africa has made its own.

Northern Nigeria

The north has a different history. Islam had been present in the Hausa states for centuries, and the jihad of Usman dan Fodio from 1804 created the Sokoto Caliphate. When Britain conquered the region around 1900, Lord Lugard's policy of indirect rule through the emirs meant that Christian missions were largely kept out of the Muslim emirates.

Missions therefore worked mainly among the non-Muslim peoples of the Middle Belt and the plateau. The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) was founded by three young men in 1893; two of them, Walter Gowans and Thomas Kent, died within a year. The survivor, Rowland Bingham, tried again, and the first lasting station opened at Patigi in 1902. The Sudan United Mission began in 1904. The churches SIM planted joined together as the Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA) — a name approved in January 1954. Around 2010–2011 it became the Evangelical Church Winning All, keeping the same initials, and it is today one of the largest denominations in Nigeria.

ECWA's best-known son is Byang Kato (1936–1975), from Kwoi in southern Kaduna. Trained in Nigeria, London and at Dallas Theological Seminary, he became the first African general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar. His book Theological Pitfalls in Africa (1975) warned against theologies that subordinated the Bible to culture. He drowned off the coast of Kenya in December 1975, aged 39.

Christians in the north have faced recurring violence, from riots in the 1980s and 1990s to the Boko Haram insurgency since 2009. Their perseverance is part of this story too.

War, revival and the Pentecostal explosion

The Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) devastated the east. Churches organised relief — Catholic and Protestant agencies flew food into Biafra at night — and many people found faith in the midst of suffering. After the war the federal government expelled many foreign missionaries, especially Irish Catholic priests, and Nigerian leadership took over by necessity.

At the same time, revival spread through schools and universities. The Scripture Union, working in secondary schools, and the Christian unions at Ibadan, Ife, Nsukka, Lagos and elsewhere saw students converted in large numbers in the late 1960s and 1970s, with a strong stress on holiness, Bible study, evangelism and the baptism of the Spirit. Historians such as Richard Burgess have traced how this generation produced much of Nigerian Pentecostal leadership.

• Deeper Life Bible Church grew from a Bible study begun in 1973 by William Kumuyi, a mathematics lecturer at the University of Lagos.
• Benson Idahosa, converted in 1952, led the Church of God Mission International in Benin City. It grew from a prayer fellowship begun in 1962; Idahosa took charge in 1968, and the church was registered in 1974.
• David Oyedepo founded Living Faith Church Worldwide, widely known as Winners' Chapel, in 1981.
• The Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in 1952 by Josiah Akindayomi (formerly of the Cherubim and Seraphim), was transformed after Enoch Adeboye, another university lecturer, became general overseer in 1981. It now has parishes in many countries.

What this history teaches

Three things stand out.

The gospel in Nigeria was mostly spread by Nigerians. Missionaries founded stations; Africans filled them. The catechist who walked to the next village, the teacher in the mission school, the trader who carried a Yoruba Bible, the prophet who called people to burn their charms — these are the people the church in Nigeria owes most to.

The Bible in African languages changed everything. When Crowther and others translated the Scriptures, Nigerians could test what missionaries said against God's own word. That is why African Christians could reject the racism of the 1890s and still keep the faith — they knew the faith did not belong to the missionaries.

Growth brings its own dangers. Byang Kato's warning is still needed. A church can grow very large and still drift from the gospel, whether into syncretism, into prosperity teaching, or into tribalism. The best of the West African story is a church that held to Scripture while making the faith its own.

"How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?" (Romans 10:14). In West Africa, most of the preachers were African.