Tangale missionaries to the Hausa

The Tangale Church poured themselves out

Part two of two

Previously, we shared the story of the evangelists from the Tangale people group in northern Nigeria, who had a great zeal to reach their neighbours with the Gospel. The Tangale themselves only heard the Gospel from 1915 onwards, but by 1930 their evangelists had spread the Good News far and wide among their people.

The Gombe Emirate was a Muslim stronghold and seemingly unreachable to foreign missionaries. Gombe town, the capital, was opened by Tangale Karau Pane through his fruit selling business, but the Pindiga area further south was also forbidden to the missionaries. Also within the Gombe Emirate, it was rocky ground for evangelists.

Again, the Tangale evangelists found a way to bring the Gospel to this unreached area – this time by going in to see relatives of theirs who lived in the district! The effect of the prohibition policy seemed not to affect the Tangale Christians, who were able to penetrate the closed areas unhindered. From there, other couples went out further afield in the Emirate.

Along with the missionaries, the Tangale embarked on evangelistic ventures into distant areas. In 1936, five couples volunteered to go and work in the thorny ground of Hausaland (see photo). In 1940, the harvest of souls in Garko, near Kano, began. The first convert, a young Fulani man, confessed Christ and went around sharing their testimonies to all his friends.

By 1940, besides a staff of one hundred self-supporting Tangale workers, the Tangale Church had sent twenty foreign missionaries to Muslim and animistic groups in other parts of the country. Their numbers grew so rapidly that they could be compared to foreign mission workers in Nigeria at the time. The African Mission Society, now known as the Evangelical Missions Society (EMS), was founded in 1948 and has one of the largest workforces of any African mission agency today (with 1600 missionaries). By 1963, more than a third of the EMS missionaries were Tangale. They truly grasped the missionary vision of our Father and carried it forward to the lost!

For a printable version of this story, click here.

From the book Transforming Africa’s Religious Landscapes, Chapter 16: SIM and the Tangale Factor in the Christianization of the Hausa of Northern Nigeria 1915-1976 by Reuben Goje Maiture.