ABSTRACT
Christian missionary endeavour was nothing new in West Africa in the nineteenth century. As early as 1471 Pope Sixtus IV had assigned the Christianization of the Atlantic seaboard of West Africa to the Archbishop of Lisbon. Nor was Christian religious penetration attempted from the coast only. Evidence is being collected that there were Christians in several parts of Northern Nigeria in the seventeenth century and that a Roman Catholic Bishop was appointed for a Bornu mission in the first decade of the following century.1
