The Sounds of the Christians in Northern Nigeria: Notes on an Acoustic History of Bachama Christianity

The lived experience of African Christianity is expressed in the endless variety of forms in which biblical and other Christian texts are read, listened to, apprehended, and turned into ritual and social practice. In this chapter I approach the lived Christianity of Africans through one of its important but generally understudied means of communication and expression, that of sound, starting from the simple observation that African Christian practice is not only the result of reading texts but also of listening to sounds. Anybody who has lived in or visited an African community will know that it has its distinct religious soundscape, these days not the least shaped by Pentecostal churches and Islamic reform movements which have transformed the public soundscapes of Africa, and also made them a great deal louder. My focus is not, however, on the contemporary soundscapes of African Christianity but on one of its historical forms, a goal which involves trying to reconstruct what an African Christianity sounded like at the beginning of the twentieth century. The purpose of the chapter is twofold: to reconstruct the sounds of an African Christianity and, methodologically, to illustrate how it may be done. The Christianity I am discussing is that of the Bachama-speaking community in the Adamawa region of northeastern Nigeria. Missionaries from the Danish branch of the Sudan United Mission first settled in the Bachama town of Numan in 1913 to work among the Bachama and neighboring ethnic groups, and the Bachama community is today predominantly Christian with the Lutheran church as the largest and most significant denomination.1