Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 130
Nigeria (Ekklesiyar Yan'uwa a Nigeria = EYN) in 1976. 13 I visited the still existing station in
Gava in 1994 and met a German volunteer and his family living there who were engaging in
developing literacy in Hausa among the montagnards. By then the Basel mission was not
doing any missionary work but was only engaging in development projects.
It took four more years, until 1963, before the first converts could be baptised, which
highlights how remote Gava was, compared to the situation the Chandlers were confronted
with at Gwoza town. The baptism of those first eight converts in April 1963 was the result of
68 altogether who had attended baptism class in Gava since April 1961. In the first half of
1960s, the Basel mission also founded a field hospital in Ngoshe, which still existed during
my time (see Plate 8b). The presence of the Basel Mission in Gava also yielded some
interesting linguistic works, such as a Glavda-English dictionary by Rapp and Benzing
(1968). Scheytt tells us, in his account of 1965, how the early missionaries visited the
mountain areas, in particular Chikiɗe, to spread the gospel, but he does not mention any such
visits to Dghweɗe. The general tone of Scheytt’s text is, in comparison to that in Florence
Chandler’s Memories, less religious and more ethnographically descriptive, though both
accounts are rather patronising, dwelling on an alleged innocent simplicity of the minds of the
locals. However, the underlying attitude is obvious, since the whole enterprise was about
spreading the gospel by all means, accompanied at the same time by an attempt to maintain a
good working relationship with the new Muslim elites in Gwoza, who were administrating
and governing the area.
John Zakariya, my Dghweɗe friend and research assistant, informed me that Dghweɗe first
received Christianity from the Sudan United Mission (SUM) in Gwoza, due to the connection
of Korana Basa with Gwoza. As a result, Yohanna Bayawa, a man from Klala in Ghwa’a, was
converted by SUM in Gwoza. He subsequently attended their school in Limankara. During
this period he visited Ghwa’a and other parts of Dghweɗe, and subsequently settled in
Barawa. Once there, he left SUM to join the American church of the Brethren, since they
were in fellowship with the Basel Mission. We assume that this was during the first half of
the 1960s. According to John Zakariya, a man by the name Baba Mustafa, who was a brother
of Yohanna Bayawa, was one of the first four Dghweɗe men to be baptised by missionaries of
the Basel Mission of the Church of the Brethren.
From July 1971 until March 1972, Esther Frick, a linguist from Switzerland, resided in
Barawa where Yohanna Bayawa became her principal language informer. In 1976 Frick
produced a primer in the Dghweɗe language. She published the first phonology of Dghweɗe
in 1978 and translated the New Testament which became the Dghweɗe bible in 1980. Frick
writes in 1978 that only very few people knew Hausa at that time. This was about to change
during my time in the 1990s, when Hausa became the main lingua franca, and most local
Christians started to use the Hausa bible instead of the Dghweɗe bible, for example during
their service in Ghwa'a.
EYN is today the largest church in the eastern part of the Gwoza hills, while the Church of
Christ in Nigeria (COCIN) is more dominant in the western part of the Gwoza LGA. Before
the destruction by Boko Haram, EYN had churches in Dzga, Hembe, Galthaghure and Klala,
while COCIN was dominant in Gharaza and Tatsa. There was no church in Korana Basa. The
Deeper Live Church was, according to John Zakariya, the third biggest church in the Gwoza
13
At the end of 2009 I had brief email contact with Dr Thomas Guy, the chief librarian of the archives
of mission21, a joint venture of four international missions in Basel, but I did not have the time to visit
the archives. Therefore my information remains rudimentary and patchy. There was a 50th anniversary
of the 'Gavva' mission in 2009, and the Nachrichtenblatt (6/2009) of the Basel Mission describes its
history. There is also a joint publication by Wilhelm Scheytt and René Gardi, published in 1965, in
which Gardi provides the pictures and Scheytt the text. Scheytt was the missionary who joined Schöni
in 1961. He gives an account of some of their missionary activities in his 1965 publication but doesn’t
mention dates. While working on the Cameroonian side, I had contact with the Eichenbergers, a Swiss
missionary couple based in Mokolo, who knew all about the early cross border missionary activities.
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