CHRISTIANITY’S FRONT LINES

Oshogbo, Nigeria. 

We are here in the Osun Sacred Grove, dedicated to the Yoruba goddess of fertility, Osun (pronounced like ocean), and designated as a World Heritage Site.  We are alone and have the place to ourselves. 

Nigeria is devoid of visitors.  The only foreigners are diplomats, international bureaucrats, and oil or oil-related businessmen.   They consider it so dangerous to be here that they require a police escort to take them from their hyper-expensive hotel in Lagos (where all business is done) to the airport. 

The thought that a lone American would get a plain car and driver to take him 300 kilometers north of Lagos strikes them as lunacy.  Yet that’s just what I’ve done – with no problems in the slightest.

It is a revelation being here.  I’ve been a lot of places in Africa, but Nigeria is Africa on steroids.  More relevantly, Nigeria is where Christianity is on steroids.  If you want to see where Christianity, every variant of it, is alive, muscular and flourishing like nowhere else on earth, here is where you come.  Here is where you find the front lines between Christianity and Islam.  Here is where Sharia Islam is going to lose.

Nigeria is a creation of British colonialism, which began with the noble determination to extinguish the slave trade operated by the Yoruba tribal kingdom of Oyo in what is now southwest Nigeria.  This led  to the annexation of the Yoruba coast in 1861.  A British Army officer, George Goldie (1846-1925), then persuaded his government to grant an exclusive charter to his Royal Niger Company to combat the encroachment of French and German state-supported traders in the region.

Goldie became the Cecil Rhodes of Nigeria (named after the Niger River), promoting the expansion of the British colony into an enormous area as big as Texas and Wyoming combined, encompassing Moslem sultanates in the Saharan north dominated by the Hausa and Fulani tribes, Yoruba kingdoms in the southwest, and Igbo-Ijaw autonomous communities in the Niger Delta.

The Portuguese had introduced Roman Catholicism to the Yoruba as early as the 1500s.  Goldie encouraged the Anglican Church Missionary Society to set up missions among the Yoruba and Igbo, then supported the establishment of missions from a full panoply of Protestant and evangelical denominations from England and the US.

The first Governor-General of the Protectorate of Nigeria, Frederick Lugard (1858-1945, regarded as the model British colonial administrator) gave his full support to the Christianization of the southern animist tribes, while dissuading it among the Hausa Moslems as he had enough trouble forcing them to cease their slave trade.

As the south gained a Christian and educated elite, the north remained feudal Islamic.  The main tribal divisions remained, codified into dividing the colony into three regions: Western (Yoruba), Eastern (Igbo/Ijaw), and Northern (Hausa/Fulani).  Rivalry between them increased, went into high gear after World War II, and even higher when oil was discovered in the Niger Delta of the East.

It was sheer lunacy to think such a place should be given independence as a pretend unified state, but that’s what the spineless Brits did in 1960.  They were so spineless they gave political control of the whole country to the feudal Moslems of the North. Independence promptly led to a series of coups in which the Hausa Moslem army officers came out on top and conducted a bloodbath, killing tens of thousands of Christians, mostly Igbo, living in the North.

This prompted the Igbo, led by Odumegwu Ojugwu, to declare, in May 1967, the East as seceded from Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra.  The Nigerian Civil War pitted the outgunned and outmanned Igbo Biafrans against the Nigerian Army (Yorubas with Hausa as they both wanted Biafran oil).  The Brits were so obsessed with keeping Nigeria intact that they blockaded the Biafran capital of Port Harcourt, causing mass starvation of some 200,000, followed by the city’s capture by Nigerian troops perpetrating genocidal slaughter.

The Biafrans fought on against an alliance of the Brits and the Soviets (yes, you read that right), had the help of Canadians and French, while Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in America did nothing.  By the time Biafra had to surrender in January, 1970, there were over three million dead of murder, disease, and starvation.  Virtually all Igbo homes, property, and wealth were confiscated.  The world shrugged its shoulders.

The Hausa military clique, now with billions of oil royalties, turned Nigeria into the most totally corrupt kleptocracy of modern times.  Then something interesting happened. In 1995, the Yoruba general who led the Nigerian Army’s wipe-out of Biafra, Olesegun Obasanjo, condemned the human rights abuses of Nigeria’s latest Moslem military dictator, Sani Abacha, who threw him into prison for treason.

In prison, thanks to the efforts of Dr. Danny McCain’s International Institute for Christian Studies, Obasanjo became a Born-Again Christian.

Abacha died in 1998, Obasanjo was released and ran for president in 1999, requesting international observers to oversee a fair election.  He won, and won again in 2003.   By the end of his term in 2007, a lot of problems remained, but corruption at least substantially abated.

Then the northerners rigged things again, and got a Fulani Moslem, Umaru Yar’Adua, elected.  Previously, when governor of the northern state of Katsina, he established Moslem Sharia to be the law of the land.  But before he could make any efforts to expand sharia rule in Nigeria, in November 2009 he flew to Saudi Arabia to have his heart condition treated.  He was never seen in public again, dying in May, 2010.  It was a stroke of good luck for Nigeria – literally.

Adua had selected the governor of a state in the Delta (Bayelsa) to be his vice-president.  He was the son of a canoe-maker who had earned a Ph.D. at Port Harcourt University in zoology, had performed well in a number of academic/executive positions and was appointed deputy governor.  He became governor when his boss was convicted of bribery.  He was an Ijaw and a Christian.  Adua thought he could help put down the Ijaw guerrilla insurgency in the Delta and assuage Christian fears of his sharia promotion.

His name, his real name, is Goodluck Jonathan.  And when Adua died, he became president of Nigeria.  He was elected in his own right last April (2011).  Rioting promptly broke out among Moslems in the North.  During his presidency, he ended the Delta insurgency with an amnesty and share-the-oil-wealth program – and saw the eruption of a Moslem terrorist insurgency in the North called Boko Haram.

Boko is the Hausa term for Western or non-Islamic education and culture.  Haram is Arabic for sinful or forbidden.  Boko Haram teaches actual Flat-Earth Islam – that the world must be flat because the Koran says it is.  It rejects Western science, Western democracy, and of course, Western religion.  It is dedicated to forcing Sharia on all Nigeria.

Sharia law has already been imposed on 12 northern Nigerian states.  Here’s the map:

Here’s the lesson of the map.  When Moslems are in the majority or near-majority of a region, they force their religion – the extreme sharia version of it – upon everyone.  When they are not – and they face determined opposition to their religious fascism – they can’t, so they get along with others.

There are lots of Moslems in southern Nigeria.  Mosques are all over the place.  But there are a lot more Christians and a lot more churches.  Far more important than numbers, though, is the passion.  Nigerian Christians of whatever variety are passionate about their religion, and they don’t put up with Moslem bullying.  So the Moslems are good little boys and girls and play nice. 

Witnessing this up close is an extraordinary experience, just as witnessing Nigeria in general is.  This is Africa’s most populous country – over 155 million – imagine Texas with that many folks.  The masses of people are overwhelming.  The traffic is like nothing you’ve ever seen, especially with the endless numbers of motorbikes and scooters, most of which have multiple passengers.  Every thing you can imagine for sale is on display along the streets in gigantic quantities – everything in a Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Best Buy, Woolworths etc in endless profusion on the street, on every street, in every town.  It is truly mind-boggling.

And everywhere you look, there is a sign advertising a church or ministry.  Here’s a selection:

This is only the barest hint of a glimpse.  Nigeria has some 78 million Christians, at least half the population.  There are hundreds of denominations, countless thousands of churches.  There’s an entire film industry making Nigerian Christian Movies.  Christian bookstores are all over the place.  At every traffic light or stop sign, street vendors are selling CDs of Christian music.

Combine this with an unbridled enthusiasm for entrepreneurial capitalism, advocacy of democracy, and a desire to be educated in Western learning and science.  Compare that package with one of jihadi hate, medieval feudalism, and know-nothing illiteracy.  Who loses?  That green sharia blob on the map.

In fact, Islam is losing to Christianity throughout Black or Sub-Saharan Africa, and has been steadily doing so since 1950, according to Pew Research:

But Nigeria is the front line.  20% of the entire world’s black population lives in Nigeria.  There are some 250 ethnic groups speaking 520 languages.  It is the African Wild West, with rampant crime and corruption.  Life expectancy is 47 years.  Infant mortality is 97 out of every 1000 births.  Yet every Christian you talk to is convinced things are improving, that Nigeria has a bright future.

These people have an optimistic energy that is inspiring.  If the North lacks that optimism, it is their problem.  As one fellow explained to me, "If the Sharia North wants to become a landlocked backwater, we should let them go.  Nigeria has a Christian future, not a Sharia one.  Moslems are welcome to live peacefully among us, and millions do.  But our constitution guarantees freedom of religion, and there is none in the North.  So the North must choose, to live in 21^st century Nigeria, or a 7^th century state of their own. This is what our President Goodluck believes."

Nigerian Christians are not putting up with Moslem intimidation.  America’s Christians could learn from them.

Meanwhile, back at the Osun Sacred Grove, there is this sign near the entrance:

Having a shot or three of whiskey is part of prayer time in Nigeria.  It helps to tell the truth to God or whatever spirit you’re communing with.  For although the chart above shows a decline in traditional religion, what really happens is local deities and spirits are incorporated into Christianity, transformed into, e.g., Catholic saints.  The Osun goddess exists along side Jesus in the Yoruba pantheon. 

If gently queried, an Osun devotee will explain, "Jehovah says to have no other gods before Him – which means it’s ok to believe in other gods after Him."  Remember, TIA – This Is Africa.

Thus I’ve learned what I can here – and now it’s time to scramble back home for Thanksgiving.  I, like you, am bottomlessly grateful I am an American.

Ps:  One last thing I was startled to learn in Nigeria:  who knew Skye has a bank in Lagos?