This article was written as a guest editorial by Dr. Musa A. B. Gaiya, for the autumn 2025 issue of The Pastor’s Study magazine, which will be published in November. Dr. Gaiya appeals for the African church to rise to the task of Christian historiography and biographical writing, and lays out some of the difficulties facing the church in this.
Jonathan Bonk was perhaps the first to draw attention to the dearth of biographical writings in Africa. He went ahead to propose a revision what he termed “ecclesiastical maps”[1] of the global progress of Christianity by the study of the locals who had made the expansion of Christianity possible. For the African scene, he lamented:
The twentieth-century growth and character of Christianity in Africa is without historical president, yet information on the major creative and innovative local figures and leaders of this growth – from local evangelists and pastors to nationally known Christian leaders – is sadly lacking from standard historical and biographical reference works.
Going through the table of contents of a book the Overseas Ministry Study Center (OMSC) published, titled Mission Legacies, there are just two Africans, Samuel Ajayi Crowther (Sierra Leonian/ Nigeria) and William Wade Harris (Liberian).[2] There are no Katos, no Olatayos, no Bawados, no Ganakas, no Todis – outstanding Nigerian church leaders, some of them recognised internationally. This is not because the authors of this book did not think these other Africans were insignificant but because they did not know them. The only biography of Byang Kato written by a Nigerian, that I know of, is an unpublished essay written by a lecturer in JETS, Rev. Kantiyok A. Tukura, titled, “A Brief Biography of Late Rev. Dr. Byang Kato.” He delivered it as part of lectures to memorialise Byang Kato in JETS’ Chapel on 28thOctober 2003.
It is this lacuna in the writing of church history in Africa that moved OMSC to begin the collection of biographies of African Christians so as to create “an electronic biographical database on African Christian leaders who have laid the foundations and advanced the growth of Christian communities in Africa.”[3] The project is called Dictionary of African Christian Biography (DACB).
Biographies are essential tools for writing church history because they provide an opportunity for Christians from the grassroots (especially catechists and evangelists) to the leadership of the church to explain their pilgrim stories and what Christianity means to their lives. Thus biographical writing shifts the focus from the structures (staple diet of historical theology) to members of the church (grassroots history).[4]
Biographies are essential for writing the lives and legacies of Africans, Asians, Latin Americans and Oceanians because these are where the living churches are. Typically, in Nigeria a church with 500 members is considered small, while many churches in Europe and North America are virtually empty, some have been turned into casinos, cinemas or museums. For African churches to tackle this dearth of Christian biographies, theological seminaries must mount courses in Christian historiography, so students are taught how to collect biographical data, analyse them and write stories of African heroes of the gospel.
The challenge young scholars writing African biographies is getting sources (material, data) especially given that Africans do not write their stories, they do not write memoirs, or keep records of the daily lives in diaries, and hardly do they write autobiographies, etc. To overcome this, scholars of Church History in Africa teach how to collect oral data through conducting interviews, such that much of the stories will depend on oral data. Oral history is a useful tool for historical reconstruction in Africa because orality is part of African culture. They pass information from one person to another orally, and oral storytelling is a major aspect of traditional education in Africa.
Therefore, writing Christian biographies is very crucial for the African church because it helps to record and store these stories of the lives of Christians so that succeeding generations can learn from the legacies of outstanding African Christians. Without biographies many of these great Christians are buried with libraries of their stories on earth when they die.
Dr. Musa A. B. Gaiya is a professor of church history at University of Jos, Nigeria. He is an ordained minister with the Evangelical Church Winning All. He has published several books and articles.
[1] Jonathan J. Bonk, “The Dictionary of African Christian Biography: A Proposal for Revising Ecclesiastical Maps”, Missiology: An International Review, vol. xxvii, no. 1, Jan. 1999, p. 1.
[2] Gerald H Anderson, et al (eds.), Mission Legacies, Biographical Studies of Leaders of the Modern Missionary Movement, Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 1994.
[3] Bonk, op cit.
[4] Michele Miller Sigg, “Pointillist History and Essential Roel of Biography in the Dictionary of African Christian Biography”, in Dana L. Robert, (ed.), African Christian Biography, Pietermaritzburg (South Africa): Cluster Publications, 2018, p. 1.