Christian expansion in Nigeria: Memoirs and archival records of Evangelist Paul Gindiri,1935 to 1996

Abstract

This article interrogates the entanglements of mission history, Christian expansion, and regional particularity in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria by foregrounding the life and ministry of Paul Gindiri, an indigenous missionary whose contributions remain conspicuously absent from dominant missiological narratives. Through a critical analysis of archival primary materials and relevant secondary scholarship, the study demonstrates that Gindiri exemplifies a cohort of African Christian agents whose mobility, linguistic competence, and embeddedness within local sociocultural worlds enabled forms of evangelistic reach and ecclesial consolidation that frequently exceeded the capacities of Western missionaries. By situating Gindiri within broader debates on African agency, subaltern missiology, and the reconfiguration of Christian geographies in twentieth-century Nigeria, the article argues that indigenous missionaries were not merely auxiliaries to Western mission enterprises but were, in fact, principal architects of Christian expansion. The study thus challenges Eurocentric historiographies and advances a more regionally attentive and analytically robust account of the making of modern Nigerian Christianity.