The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (5 page)

“The
raison d’être
of this mission is to attempt to counteract the Mohammedan advance in Central Africa by winning the pagan tribes to the Christian religion,” Kumm wrote his supporters in America and London. Not knowing Kumm’s true aim, the Emir of Wase’s great-grandfather even helped the missionary clear the land. The Kumms modeled their
mission on that of David Livingstone, the Scottish Congregationalist missionary and explorer who had bushwhacked across Africa. He fought armed battles against Muslim slave raiders until, infected with malaria and crippled by chronic dysentery, he died in Zambia, in 1873. Livingstone’s heart was buried under a mvula tree. His corpse—embalmed, wrapped in calico, canvas, and bark—was shipped to England
and buried at Westminster Abbey, where his tombstone is inscribed: “Christianity, Commerce and Civilization.”

Both Livingstone and the Kumms belonged to a burgeoning global religious movement—one that intended to reach the whole world with
the Gospel. It was rooted in evangelical Christianity, a broad-based movement that had begun in the sermons of early eighteenth-century British and American
preachers who called for a return to an egalitarian form of faith uncorrupted by the secular forces of the day. The movement was based on several core tenets that generally hold true today. First, preachers challenged their congregations to have a direct encounter with Jesus Christ through scripture—not through the church and its rites. Each person had to decide to dedicate his or her life to Christ—and,
in that decision, to be reborn, or “born again.” Second, they averred that the words of scripture were infallible, a term that implies different things for different people. For some, it means that the Bible is literal, word-for-word truth; for others, that the words of the New Testament are more generally inspired by God. Third, many saw it as their duty to reach new believers, a project
known as the Great Commission and rooted in Jesus’s parting command to his disciples: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). The evangelical movement, while strong in Britain, was especially popular in North America, and by the 1820s, most American Protestants were calling themselves evangelicals.
Today, one in four American adults is an evangelical Christian, and for many, the basic tenets established in the nineteenth century have not changed.
²

During the nineteenth century, the advances of the industrial revolution—especially the steamship and telegraph—and the American Civil War, made possible a theological revolution. The tenets of the evangelical movement spread throughout the world.
Many American evangelicals, especially Yankees, had hoped that the Civil War would usher in a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth in the United States. Instead, the brash new wealth of the Gilded Age turned Americans toward the Gospel of Wealth as preached by Andrew Carnegie. Frustrated and disillusioned at home, evangelicals turned their attention to reaching the rest of the world with their message
of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Some evangelicals believed that it was possible to accelerate Jesus’s return by reaching every single person on earth with this message from the Gospel According to Matthew: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (24:14). The Great Commission is often misconstrued as an imperative
to convert the whole world. The underlying message is that once the whole world hears the evangelical message, Jesus will return—regardless
of whether or not that message is accepted. To most, it’s about offering an invitation, not getting an answer.

At the turn of the twentieth century, war, industrialization, and this new theology made evangelicals in America and Britain suddenly determined
to “evangelize the world in this generation.”
³
These were the words of the Reverend Arthur T. Pierson, a now largely forgotten Yankee evangelical who inspired a worldwide movement. As Pierson put it, “[A]ll should go and go to all.” With his urging, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), founded in London in 1844, launched the Student Volunteer Movement. Thousands of young men and women
mobilized as missionaries to reach what they believed were the last blank spaces of the map with the Gospel. Preaching to the poor and focusing on building a “healthy mind, spirit and body,”
⁴
these clean-cut, educated young people led Bible study, built health clinics, and introduced organized sports. Their understanding that Christ was Lord offered more than a set of beliefs; it was the cornerstone
of a whole way of life.

This worldview, with its emphasis on the language of light and darkness, good and evil, flourished in opposition to an enemy. Islam, many evangelicals believed, was their most formidable foe. The Kumms, for example, were concerned—correctly, it turned out—that the same innovations of the industrial revolution (the steamship and telegraph) that allowed Christian missionaries
and explorers to spread the Gospel inland in Africa and Asia also encouraged the spread of Islam. More African Muslims were, for instance, going on hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, spreading Islam more widely on their return home.

The nexus of this conflict lay along the tenth parallel. In June 1910, at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, twelve
hundred Protestant missionaries gathered to chart the greatest crises Christianity was facing. (No Roman Catholics were invited.) The most pressing challenge to their faith—and to the world’s future—many argued, was Islam. John Mott, the YMCA’s founder, who spoke at the conference, wrote in his 1910 book,
The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions
:

Two forces are contending for Africa—Christianity
and Mohammedanism [Islam]. In many respects the more aggressive is Mohammedanism. It dominates Africa on its western half as far south as 10° N. latitude, and on its eastern half, as far south as 5° N. . . . If things continue as they are now tending, Africa may become a Mohammedan continent . . . Once received,
it is Christianity’s most formidable enemy. It permits a laxity of morals, in some
cases worse than that of heathendom. It sanctions polygamy. It breeds pride and arrogance, and thus hardens the heart against the Word of God.
⁵

Karl Kumm, the ambitious German evangelist, also spoke at this watershed Edinburgh conference—the first of its kind to bring together more than a thousand Protestants from different denominations. He and his wife, Lucy, stood at the vanguard of this new
movement to stop Islam. Lucy, the daughter of a famous Irish evangelical pastor, H. Grattan Guinness, was thirty-three when she and Karl were married on February 3, 1900, at the American Mission Church in Cairo. She was already a writer, and an accomplished evangelist in her own right. Well traveled in the world’s roughest corners, she exemplified the power wielded by women missionaries at the
beginning of the twentieth century. The evangelical movement, which began as a call to social justice, preached for women’s equality at home and in the field, where women performed work as dangerous and unforgiving as that of men. Despite frail health, Lucy toiled among London’s garment workers and went on to chronicle their plight and argue for their need of salvation in her book
Only a Factory
Girl.
She had traveled among the world’s Hindus in
Across India at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
. Her books were not just religious tracts: they were calls for a new Christian world order based on equality and justice. Until the secular human rights movement began after World War II, Christian missionaries were the leading advocates for social change. Christian activists both liberal and conservative
were hugely instrumental in bringing to light abuses such as slavery, and they are once again today. Along with her husband, Lucy Kumm turned her attention to fifty to eighty million souls whom she feared faced the threat of Muslim domination in what they, like so many others, called the Land of the Blacks. After reading her tracts, more than twenty young men—members of the YMCA’s Student
Volunteer Movement—set out for Sudan. Most contracted fever and died in the African mission field, which was called “the White Man’s Graveyard.”

The Kumms were only two of a number of missionaries in the Middle Belt at the time, and many were not particularly interested in competing
with Islam. Doctors, teachers, and farmers, they brought with them the two
Bs—
Bible and bicycle—and offered practical
solutions to problems of health, agriculture, and eventually education. Their work was the legacy of the mid-nineteenth-century mission strategist Henry Venn, who developed the “Three-Self” indigenous church. Each local community should be self-sustaining, self-governing, and self-propagating, he argued, and Christianity should empower people, offering a way out of oppression.

Kumm, though, was
among those who took this to mean liberation from the looming threat of Islam, and he believed he could use people’s loathing of their Muslim rulers to his advantage in converting them to Christianity. At first, however, he found that these so-called border pagans had little interest in his divine message. The formidable indigenous traditions that had led people to reject Islam for centuries now
galvanized them against this new alien creed. Toiling at the base of the rock without converts, Kumm taught health, hygiene, and horticulture but did little converting. However, he needed money to keep the mission going, since Sudan United Mission, like many at the time, was not linked to any particular Protestant denomination.
⁶
Its success depended on Kumm’s entrepreneurial spirit. To prove his
plan could succeed, he needed converts. In his memoirs, he describes the watershed night in 1904, when, before leaving for a fund-raising trip in America, he summoned his local workers to the base of Wase Rock. “Boys,” he said, “who would like before saying goodbye to me to accept Jesus as his personal savior?”
⁷

No one answered, at first. Then his personal servant, Tom Alyana, a former slave,
stepped forward and accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. Alyana would be the first of what now, a century later, have become millions of followers of Kumm’s teachings. Soon after, Kumm and Lucy, now pregnant with their third child, traveled to America to raise money for their mission. In Northfield, Massachusetts, she began to miscarry. Refusing to go to the hospital until she had finished her
book about Congo,
Our Slave State
, Lucy contracted a fever and died.

Heartbroken, Kumm returned to Nigeria to make a dangerous foray across the continent. Starting out at the base of Wase Rock in 1909, Kumm trekked east for more than one thousand miles, from the British territory of Nigeria, through French-occupied Chad, to British Sudan. Skirting the southern edge of Muslim North Africa, which
he called “the Ultima Thule of Africa”—based on a term Greek explorers used for borders of the known world—he would travel along the tenth parallel investigating Islam’s
spread, and assessing prospective sites for his missionary forts. The trek was also a grueling public relations junket to raise money for his Sudan United Mission. Kumm’s supporters sent him what they could, and he published their
letters of encouragement in his newsletter,
The Lightbearer
. One devotee mailed him a pearl-mounted gold shirt stud and a note: “Perhaps the enclosed could be disposed of for a few shillings (it cost 11/-, and is practically new), it is all I have to give.”
⁸
For the trek, Kumm took two hundred African porters and their families along with him, confident that he would convert them to Christianity
during leisure hours. The party never stopped walking. Descending from the plateau at the beginning of the rainy season, the members of this bedraggled expedition soon faced a forced wade through the thick tree-lined corridors of gallery forests, and hacked their way through dense bush woven with webs of wet vines. As they traversed
chaur
, the deep, sandy ravines cut into open savanna, the party
fell victim to flash floods. Kumm and his expedition basically swam across Africa.

“All these rivers,” he wrote in despair, “terminate in one vast lake, between the 7th and 10th degree north [of the equator].”
⁹
He had hit the
sudd—
“barrier” in Arabic—the impenetrable swampland that begins along the tenth parallel and, like the tsetse fly, had helped to stop Islam from spreading south in Sudan.
Kumm’s oxen nearly drowned. His horses died of sleeping sickness. He watched his porters become “walking skeletons.” Six had to be carried, and one died of starvation. At last he boarded a steamship, which chugged up the White Nile to the sand-swept colonial capital of Khartoum, where Kumm stopped before sailing back to England. At home in Britain, the popularity of missionaries and colonial adventurers
was at its zenith. When Kumm landed at Dover on December 29, 1909, reporters from Reuters,
The Daily Telegraph
,
The Star
, and others waited for him on the dock. The next day’s headline: “KUMM HAS COME BACK.”

One hundred years later, the church Kumm planted at the base of Wase Rock, Church of Christ in Nigeria (COCIN), has hundreds of outposts in the Middle Belt. Most are small, zinc-roofed buildings
that shine like dull nickels against the grassy plateau. And when religious violence breaks out in the region, the contemporary leaders of Kumm’s church are often earliest into the fray.

I visited the gated compound of Kumm’s church headquarters in Jos, the Middle Belt capital, in August 2006, within days of my visit to the Emir of Wase. The city’s red roads were crammed with thousands of signboards—for
churches, mosques, and miscellaneous religious organizations vying for customers. In one short stretch, I spied De Last Day Coffin Company, which competed for the attention of a passerby with signs for Living Faith Church and NASFAT, a Muslim tent revival in the vein of a Pentecostal church service. And that was only three. Within sixty seconds (I timed it) we passed Child Evangelical,
Christ Resurrection, Apostolic Faith, Mount Olive, Grace Foundation, Christ Embassy, Assemblies of God, Divine Mercy Ministry, Jesus Foundation, World Impact Partners, Christ Pilgrims Welfare Board, Fountain of Praise, Every Night Is a Miracle Ministries, Family Restoration Gospel Ministry, Angels International College, Amazing Grace Private School, and the Great Commission.