This chapter explores the religious influences on Nigeria, the spread and development of these religions, and their incorporation or imposition in various precolonial and colonial institutions. The topics explored throughout the chapter will lay the foundation for modern-day Nigeria’s religious make-up and sectarian conflict. There are two primary phenomena detailed in the chapter. The first is the efforts of colonial forces to implement a system of indirect rule, an essential component of which was the incorporation of pre-existing religious institutions into the colonial fold. The second was the desire of colonial and missionary forces to spread Christianity and Western culture to the various peoples of Nigeria. Both processes would promote Islam and Christianity at the expense of African traditional religions. However, Indigenous practices would vigorously resist, often infusing their beliefs into colonial institutions and various sects of Christianity.

This chapter details the circumstances and techniques behind the colonial acquisitions and conquests of Nigeria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It details two broad categories of methods used by colonial forces: forceful acquisitions and acquisitions achieved through diplomacy. While broad categorizations of colonial techniques are made, this chapter outlines that different techniques could and were used for every Indigenous polity involved. The strategy behind every colonial conquest depended on numerous factors such as the size, “sophistication,” geography, and local political landscape of the polity in question. However, while the techniques behind the colonial acquisitions could drastically differ, this chapter outlines the common goals behind each strategy: to drive a set of processes that weakened the power and authority of indigenous power structures. This would create a power void that, through gradual or rapid action, would be filled by colonial forces or actors aligned with colonial interests. The reactions and independent actions taken by indigenous polities are equally crucial to the history in question. Like their European counterparts, the indigenous states of Nigeria reacted to colonial meddling and the actions of their fellow polities in many different ways, with varying degrees of success.

This chapter chronicles the triumph of a Protestant notion of religious liberty at Independence. The Protestant victory took the form of the late colonial state's domestication of an international legal provision—Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 18 emerged from the concerted effort of international Protestant ecumenists to protect Christianity from the ravages of secularism, manifesting in restrictions on missions in places like Northern Nigeria, among other things. Protestant ecumenists emphasized two religious liberties: the liberty of the proselytizer to preach and the target audience to convert. Further, Protestant ecumenists argued that the Protestant notion of religious liberty trumped arguments about the empire's need to be separate (or distanced) from Christian missions. By narrating the Protestant effort to neutralize a mission-hostile secularist separation with a mission-friendly notion of religious liberty, the chapter argues that these constitutional ideas take shape in specific contestations. Consequently, the chapter makes a case for apprehending these ideas by closely studying the struggles that galvanize them.

This chapter traces the origins of the NGO moment to the humanitarian crisis precipitated by the Nigeria-Biafra War. It describes humanitarianism as a key component of the West’s response to decolonisation, linking imperial notions of charity, relief and development to the practices adopted by NGOs. The principle of ‘access’ is at the heart of this chapter. ‘Access’ was central to the public narrative of intervention in Biafra: through the NGO-inspired model of ‘people-to-people’ action that drew so much popular support for the region, and in the televised images of the aid airlift that brought supplies into the region. It was important in a practical sense, too: in the continuities of personnel (missionaries and former colonial officials) from empire that were vital in the operation of non-governmental aid. And, this chapter argues, it also offered a reminder of the importance of Third World governments in shaping the territory of emergency relief. In Biafra, the relationship that NGOs cultivated with the local regime lay at the heart of their claims to legitimacy in the West, while also granting considerable agency to local authorities in setting the agenda of non-governmental aid.

This chapter traces the origins of the NGO moment to the humanitarian crisis precipitated by the Nigeria-Biafra War. It describes humanitarianism as a key component of the West’s response to decolonisation, linking imperial notions of charity, relief and development to the practices adopted by NGOs. The principle of ‘access’ is at the heart of this chapter. ‘Access’ was central to the public narrative of intervention in Biafra: through the NGO-inspired model of ‘people-to-people’ action that drew so much popular support for the region, and in the televised images of the aid airlift that brought supplies into the region. It was important in a practical sense, too: in the continuities of personnel (missionaries and former colonial officials) from empire that were vital in the operation of non-governmental aid. And, this chapter argues, it also offered a reminder of the importance of Third World governments in shaping the territory of emergency relief. In Biafra, the relationship that NGOs cultivated with the local regime lay at the heart of their claims to legitimacy in the West, while also granting considerable agency to local authorities in setting the agenda of non-governmental aid.

Chapter 1 traces the common ideological grounds that made possible the formation of an alliance in the early 1920s between Reform-minded students in Peru and a number of Christian missionaries and religious pacifists from Europe and the United States. These students, many of whom formed the APRA movement shortly after, viewed in continental solidarity a remedy to the moral crises they sensed around them. For many Christian pacifists, who like the Scottish Reverend John A. Mackay and the US internationalist Anna Melissa Graves feared belligerent forms of nationalism, the references they saw in the Peruvian student reform movement to the Bolivarian ideal of a united America was inspiring. They viewed in these young Latin American radicals an opportunity for spiritual renewal in the Western World. Whereas these groups of historical actors often disagreed on the means to the end, still they agreed on which end to pursue. For all of them, the Americas provided a foil for the wrongs of Western civilization.

Chapter 2 studies how personal self-transformations in exile triggered the rise of new social and hemispheric consciousnesses among Apristas who were deported abroad in the 1920s. It traces as a case study the rocky relationship that the young student activist and future APRA leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre maintained during his first years in exile with the foreign allies, specifically the Scottish Reverend John A. Mackay and the US internationalist Anna Melissa Graves, who assisted him, and who tried to politically influence him. Transnational solidarity networks, the chapter shows, would herein assist in crucial ways APRA’s early formation as a persecuted political group. But this reliance on foreign assistance came with a price for the movement’s autonomy: it cracked open a space for progressive US allies and Christian missionaries to peddle their own agenda to Latin American critiques of empire.