PART IV
ISLAM, COTTON GROWING, AND THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC
CHAPTER I
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM IN SOUTHERN NIGERIA
I have referred to Christian missionary propaganda in Mohammedan Northern Nigeria. There has now to be considered the question of Christian missionary propaganda in Southern Nigeria, and the corresponding growth therein of Mohammedanism. The relative failure of the one and the admitted success of the other are at present the subject of much debate and give anxious thought to the heads of the Church. The fundamental cause appears to lie in a disinclination to face the fact, however obvious, that a religion which took centuries upon centuries to take root in Europe, owing, very largely, to its ethical demands upon man, cannot hope to establish itself in the now accessible tropical forest regions of West Africa in a few decades, while a religion embodying a distinct advance upon paganism but not involving the complete structural change in native society which the Christian Church exacts, has every chance of doing so. Then, too, there is another question which the ecclesiastical authorities may never, it is true, find it possible frankly to confront, but which laymen, it seems to me, are bound to do—those, at any rate, who are persuaded that the African race is one of the great races of mankind, not intended by the Almighty Architect to disappear from the scene of human affairs. I refer to the physiological requirements, in the present age, of the Nigerian forest peoples in their struggles with the forces of primeval Nature.
All that remains of the Portuguese attempts to Christianize the deltaic region of Nigeria in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are a few names and the addition of crucifixion to native punishments of criminals or happy despatch of sacrificial victims. The chief obstacle to the modern efforts of the Anglo-Saxon in Southern Nigeria and the real explanation of the successful modern efforts of the African Muslim, are to be sought in the appeal respectively made by Christianity and Islam to the patriarchal communities to which they are addressed, and in the methods and character of the respective propaganda. Christianity in West Africa either cannot be divorced, or cannot divorce itself, from Europeanism and the twentieth century. It remains for the people of Nigeria, and of all West Africa, an alien religion taught by aliens who cannot assimilate themselves to the life of the people. Islam, on the other hand, has long ceased to be an alien religion. It is imparted by Africans. It is disseminated by Africans. It has its roots in the soil. It has become a religion of the people, losing much of its rigidity and fanaticism as it works down to the coast absorbing the true negro.
Everything is against Christianity as presented to the Nigerian (I venture to emphasize this), and everything is in favour of Islam, although Christianity, in itself, contains more that should appeal to the Negro character than does Mohammedanism. The conditions of Southern Nigeria are the conditions of the Old Testament. The crying need of the country, as of all western tropical Africa, is the need which is proclaimed in, and stamps itself upon, every page of the book of Genesis, the Divinely ordained requirement—population. Vice plays only a microscopic part in the relationship of sex in Nigeria. Race propagation is the motive force which regulates sexual relationship. The Nigerian, incessantly striving with the destructive agencies of Nature, responds to the instinctive and mysterious call of racial necessity. Infant mortality is terrible. With the Nigerian the reproduction of the species is the paramount, if unanalyzed and, no doubt, uncomprehended obsession. It must continue to be so for a period whose limit will be determined by the rate of his progression in coping with these destructive agencies.
This is not the place to discuss what the attitude of the Christian missionary should be to this paramount racial need, but it is obvious that his insistence upon an acceptance of a sex relationship contrary to the promptings of Nature must present a barrier—one of the greatest, if not the greatest—to the acceptance of the Christian faith, or, perhaps, it would be better to say, of orthodox Christianity. One might be permitted, perhaps, to suggest that those who are disposed to regard the condition of the Nigerian forest-dweller in these matters as calling for hard and rigid regulation, are too prone to forget what Lecky describes as the “appalling amount of moral evil, festering uncontrolled, undiscussed and unalleviated under the fair surface of a decorous society,” in civilized Europe, monogamistic social laws notwithstanding. Sex relationship, whatever its character and whatever the conditions of society or climate, is never, and can never be, free from abuses. West African polygamy contains many ugly sores, and so does the European system.