Missionaries, Indirect Rule, and the Changing Mandate of Mission in Colonial Northern Nigeria: the Case of Canada's Rowland Victor Bingham and the Sudan Interior Mission
https://archives.anglican.ca/link/article37458
- Author
- Faught, C. Brad (Curtis Brad), 1963-
- Material Type
- Journal Article
- Journal
- Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society
- Date
- 2001 Fall
- Material Type
- Journal Article
- Date
- 2001 Fall
- Volume
- 43
- Issue
- 2
- Page
- [147]-169
- Notes
- "This essay examines the early history and changing philosophy of one example of [late Victorian Christian mission] imperative: the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), which would be known as the African Industrial Mission (AIM), as well as the Africa Evangelistic Mission (AEM, for part of its early history. Founded in the late 1890s by the British-born Canadian evangelical Rowland Victor Bingham, the SIM was at the time of his death in 1942 the largest Protestant interdenominational mission in Africa. During the period of the SIM`s founding much of sub-Saharan Africa was known generically as the 'Soudan', literally, 'land of the blacks'. However, the early focus of the mission was Northern Nigeria, whose place in the annals of British colonial administrative history is assured mainly because of its demonstration of indirect rule, the system of governance inspired principally by the colony's first high commissioner and the 'doyen' of British colonial administrators, Sir Frederick (later Lord) Lugard (1858-1945). And it is the intersection of Bingham's SIM with Lugard's indirect rule that forms the core of this study" (p. [147]-148). "'Commerce and Christianity' as a missionary slogan and as a philosophical bulwark ... was the SIM's chief focus for debate, not indirect rule. Helped along by Bingham's premillennialism, and by the increasing commercialization characteristic of life in the West ... the SIM partially jettisoned its commitment to the old verities of missionary service in order to embrace the premillennialist imperative of the lean and urgent evangelistic message. If indirect rule allowed for that to exist -- indeed to flourish -- then it comes as no surprise that Lugard's popularity would be widest among those whose missionary success be attributed partly to his beneficence. Ironically, later in the century, it was often mission-educated Africans who were prominent in the drive for independence, and with its attainment came, of course, the end of indirect rule -- but not of the Sudan Interior Mission" (p. 168-169).
- Subjects
- Bingham, Rowland Victor, 1872-1942
- Lugard, Frederick John Dealtry, 1858-1945
- Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) - History
- SIM (Organization) - History
- Missions - Nigeria - History
- Great Britain - Colonies - Africa - Administration
- Nigeria - Politics and government - To 1960
- Location
- General Synod Archives