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Gathering up the 
Fragments after  
Boko Haram
Helping Baptist Churches in  
Northeastern Nigeria Recover, Conserve, 
and Digitize their History
By Anthonia O. Ahimah, Ibrahim Danin Library, Baptist Theological Seminary,  
Kaduna, Nigeria; D’Anna Shotts, Ibrahim Danin Library Baptist Theological Seminary,  
Kaduna, Nigeria

ABSTR ACT Almost everyone has heard of the deadly terror group 
Boko Haram, which began to gain world attention in 2009. Their 
impact on northeastern Nigeria has been devastating: lives lost and 
disrupted, properties destroyed, culture and history eradicated by 
violence. Though they no longer hold territory, in 2014-15 Boko Haram 
controlled an area the size of Belgium, and also carried out multiple 
violent attacks in surrounding areas. The Northeastern Nigeria Baptist 
Digital History Project was begun to help affected Baptist churches in 
three northeastern states which suffered invasion, many of them with 
devastated and scattered congregations and damaged or destroyed 
buildings, recover the dignity of their history through researching, locat-
ing, digitizing, and indexing historical documents related to their found-
ing and growth. 

Original impetus for the project, headquartered in the Ibrahim Danin 
Library of Baptist Theological Seminary, Kaduna (located outside the 
Boko Haram sphere of influence), was the discovery of a trove of forty-
year-old, handwritten working files created by missionaries present at 
the founding of many of the earliest Baptist churches in the area. Other 
primary materials already held by the Library contain clues to interpret-
ing these records, and are also being digitized for access by scholars 
and researchers.  



262  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

INTRODUCTION 

Nigeria, sometimes known as “the Giant of Africa,” has around 200 
million people. Approximately half are Christian and half are Muslim, 
though there is also a smattering of purely traditional worshippers as 
well. (African Traditional Religion underlies much of Islam and Chris-
tianity in the country, as well.) Islam came down through the Sahara 
Desert into Northern Nigeria with Arab traders on camel caravans 
from the twelfth century. Christianity arrived with Catholic priests 
accompanying Portuguese explorers in the Bight of Benin off the 
southern coast in the fifteenth century, but didn’t really take root 
until the “Great Advance” of European and American missions in the 
nineteenth century (which was centered in southwest Nigeria). So, 
the interaction between religions is nothing new in the country, but 
the intensity and potential for violence has greatly increased as the 
two “missionary” faiths continue to grow rapidly amid difficult social 
and economic circumstances. 

With a long history of religious activity, and an increasingly chal-
lenging environment, preservation and particularly digitization of 
historical materials become vitally important in the context. There 
are many applicable African proverbs, including “No condition is 
permanent” and “Who knows tomorrow?” Many Nigerians and 
others have commented on what is referred to as “the lack of mainte-
nance culture.” There are also climate extremes (and lack of climate-
controlled facilities), mold and dust, and insects, plus infrastructure 
issues like secure storage, fire-proofing, archival-quality folders, 
etc. One must keep in mind always that cultural heritage items are 
not permanent, personnel are not permanent, and the mission of an 
organization is not permanent.

BACKGROUND

BAPTIST MISSION OF NIGERIA (BMN). Baptist work in southern Nige-
ria began in 1850. Thomas Jefferson Bowen, a frontiersman who 
had fought in the Texas Revolution of the 1830s, was the first Baptist 
missionary to Nigeria, arriving at Badagry in the south in 1850 (follow-
ing the Anglicans in 1842 and the Methodists in 1848).  Christian 
mission work was largely confined (by British colonial policy) to the 
southern part of the country until after World War II. After this time, 



Listen and Learn Sessions  263

Baptist missionaries began visiting for short periods in the north 
around 1946. Baptist mission work in northeastern Nigeria began in 
the late 1950s, although some Baptist fellowships had earlier been 
established by Yoruba traders, civil servants, and laborers from the 
south. The institution where our project is housed, Baptist Theological 
Seminary, Kaduna (BTSK), began in 1948, was burned to the ground 
during a Muslim-Christian conflict (unrelated to Boko Haram) in 2000, 
and was rebuilt between 2001 and 2007. We also know the pain of loss, 
as the entire library and all historical records of the school were lost 
at that time.

BOKO HARAM (BH). Though the group has roots back into the 1970s, 
widespread violence and terrorism began in 2009 after the death in 
police custody of the group’s founder, Yusuf Mohammed. Starting 
around 2011, BH conquered territory about the size of Belgium and 
began styling themselves as a caliphate. When the tide began to turn 
against them in early 2015, they returned to their previous guerrilla 
campaign and escalated the use of suicide bombers. They also perpe-
trate atrocities on a regular basis to subdue local populations and 
attract worldwide attention to their cause. The scale of the devastation 
is appalling: more than 20,000 people killed (more lethal than ISIS) 
and 2.5 million internally displaced persons. 

“The human fallout of the crisis has been underreported, 
including the suffering of displaced people and the plight of 
women,” Nnamdi Obasi, senior Nigeria analyst for the Inter-
national Crisis Group, told The World Post earlier this year. 
Life in NE Nigeria, he said, is “hellish.” (https://www.bbc.com/
news/world-africa-42735414) 

Since 2009, at least 900 churches of all denominations have 
been destroyed by BH. (https://www.christianpost.com/news/900-
churches-in-nigeria-destroyed-by-boko-haram-173879/) Before BH, 
there were fourteen Baptist churches in Yobe State; however, all but 
one have had their buildings completely destroyed. Five are now 
worshipping again in the “rubble” of their buildings under temporary 
shelters. A small sample of destroyed Baptist churches in the north-
eastern states includes: Maiduguri, Baga, Ngala Gamboru (Borno 
State); Mubi (Adamawa State); Damaturu, Potiskum, Ngalda, and Buni 
Yadi (Yobe State). 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42735414
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42735414
https://www.christianpost.com/news/900-churches-in-nigeria-destroyed-by-boko-haram-173879/
https://www.christianpost.com/news/900-churches-in-nigeria-destroyed-by-boko-haram-173879/


264  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

But brave Nigerian Christians are once again worshipping and 
working in the area. 

One example is in the little railway town of Buni Yadi. Everyone 
has heard of the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls in the town of 
Chibok (April 2014), but little outside attention has been given to trag-
edies in Buni Yadi both before and after the Chibok incident. In Febru-
ary 2014, 59 secondary-school boys were slaughtered by BH. The town 
was overrun and destroyed by BH in May 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/May_2014_Buni_Yadi_attack), and recaptured by the Nige-
rian military in March 2015 (https://www.naija.ng/398118-military-
reclaim-buni-yadi-buni-gari-from-boko-haram.html#398118). Buni 
Yadi has continued to experience terrorist attacks and suicide bomb-
ers even earlier this year. 

Despite this situation, Buni Yadi Baptist Church is now working 
to rebuild the fence around their devastated building, to avoid the 
property being used as a toilet by the next-door mosque (which was 
actually built on seized church land). While excavating to lay new foun-
dations, human remains were discovered in shallow graves. Church 
officials learned that during the 2014-15 capture and occupation of 
Buni Yadi by BH, the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, lived in pasto-
rium, and executions done in front of the mosque were buried in the 
church property. The Nigerian Army had to be contracted to exhume 
the remains due to BH’s policy of planting landmines in the graves to 
prevent family members from recovering the bodies of loved ones.

REV. WILEY B. FAW

Who was Wiley Faw? According to Rev. John Matthew, a Nigerian 
Baptist missionary (and former pastor of the Buni Yadi Baptist Church 
mentioned above), Rev. Faw “labored tirelessly . . . he played the role of 
pastor, teacher, discipler” and funder of land purchases, even in the 
face of government hostility, throughout northeastern Nigeria. Wiley 
Faw and his wife Geneva served for thirty-two years as missionaries 
to Nigeria through the International Mission Board, Southern Baptist 
Convention. Arriving in the early 1960s, shortly after Nigeria’s inde-
pendence, Wiley worked first as a science teacher in a mission school 
in Jos, and later as a pioneer evangelist and church planter throughout 
the Northeast. Rev. and Mrs. Faw retired around 1995, and Rev. Faw 
died in 2016. (Mrs. Faw survives, though in very poor health physically 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2014_Buni_Yadi_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2014_Buni_Yadi_attack
https://www.naija.ng/398118-military-reclaim-buni-yadi-buni-gari-from-boko-haram.html#398118
https://www.naija.ng/398118-military-reclaim-buni-yadi-buni-gari-from-boko-haram.html#398118


Listen and Learn Sessions  265

and mentally.) According to missionary colleague Harriett Bowman, 
“Wiley Faw was a pioneer of the gospel in northern Nigeria. He had 
a huge impact which continues even today. People on earth may not 
recognize that one of the great ones has passed on, but heaven surely 
rejoices at the coming home of a great warrior.”

The Faw files were recovered in 2015 (about twenty-five years 
after the Faws retired), in a storage container in the city of Gombe, 
on the edge of BH territory. The materials were housed somewhat 
haphazardly in two ancient filing cabinets in a loosely-sealed shipping 
container, with little regard for climate or pest control. The archive of 
Rev. Faw’s working materials includes information from 110 churches 
in ten associations (local groupings) and four conferences (regional 
groupings). Most of these churches have no remaining documents or 
archival materials at all, and many of their buildings have been totally 
destroyed during the nine years of the insurgency. This has led to 
frequent opportunistic challenges to the churches’ property rights.

THE NORTHEASTERN NIGERIA BAPTIST DIGITAL HISTORY 
PROJECT

The rationale for digital preservation is well-known: 

ARTIFACTS Climatic extremes of heat, dryness, and humidity 
as well as insects may cause problems, especially in tropi-
cal climates. There may also be legal issues (as in laws with 
regard to possession of cultural-heritage items) in addition 
to changing administrative situations/priorities regarding 
space for display and storage.

DOCUMENTS Storage space may become an issue. Items may 
be packed up and moved without regard to organization or 
suitability of storage arrangements. Some primary historical 
documents may be labeled in a manner such that they  
are not recognized as valuable. We are aware of several exam-
ples in our context: at a sister seminary, an untrained person 
was made head of the library and “cleaned things up” by 
burning a large collection of old newspapers, some of which 
were the only extant copies of historical titles; a local mission 
organization made their move to new offices “easier” by 
abandoning many file cabinets of old mission records dating 



266  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

back a century, probably including original legal documents 
such as land titles acquired in the days when expatriate 
missionaries were in charge of most purchases.

When it comes to digitization, there are, of course, premium solu-
tions for the “big dogs” (those with adequate funds): outsourcing, often 
with significant minimum charges, or high-speed scanners costing 
thousands of dollars. We have outsourced one large, fragile volume, 
but transporting to and from US was nerve-wracking. Unfortunately, 
even the most basic of high-speed book scanners is priced out of our 
range, and electricity issues are a critical factor (power surges, vari-
able voltage, long periods with no power). In addition, lack of climate 
control is also very hard on sensitive equipment. Therefore, we had 
to look for affordable alternatives.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY METHOD

As the Baptist Mission of Nigeria started most of the Baptist work in 
Nigeria, we began this project several years ago by digitizing minutes 
of the Baptist Mission of Nigeria. These minutes, covering 1850-1991, 
are also used in researching Nigerian Baptist history, as many Baptist 
churches all over the country had significant missionary input in their 
founding, and the information describes activities of personnel that 
worked in Nigeria as missionaries. 

For these bound materials, we 
used a relatively inexpensive digi-
tal photography set-up (see photo at 
left), explained to us by Chris Beldan, 
an ATLA member now retired from 
the library of Lancaster Theological 
Seminary, Lancaster, PA, who used 
it in his work there. This involves a 
good-quality digital camera, a tripod 
capable of holding a camera facing 
down instead of out, a laptop with a 
remote-shutter program installed, 
and Adobe Acrobat software for 
creating PDFs from the resulting 
JPEG photos (and also for converting Photo credit: D’Anna Shotts



Listen and Learn Sessions  267

to OCR). This digitizing method is recommended by the Endangered 
Archives Project (EAP) of the British Library (https://eap.bl.uk/), and is 
explained and supported by articles and documents produced by the 
Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John’s University, Colleg-
eville, Minnesota (www.vhmml.us/resource/downloads).

This method will be used again later for bound copies of minutes 
of other local organizations.

SCANNER METHOD

A few years later, files were recovered from the Faw archive described 
above, which contains vital information such as receipts of land 
purchase, legal documents, building plans, minutes and proceedings, 
and correspondence between Rev. Wiley Faw and church pastors and 
denominational leaders in the area where he served as a missionary. 
Since most of these materials are in single-sheet form, it made more 
sense to use some form of scanner.

For this phase of the project, we began with an HP300 flatbed scan-
ner which was already on hand. This had the advantages of being (1) 
USB-powered, so not dependent on availability of electricity, and 
(2) cheap. Disadvantages were that it was relatively slow, requiring 
lots of manual adjustments and handling of files—and it was old and 
cantankerous.

We continued to search for a better solution, and eventually 
received a recommendation for the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 scanner, 
which sells for around $420 and is compact enough to carry on-site 
when necessary. It feeds up to fifty pages at a time, automatically 
copies double-sided items, and can automatically do OCR conversion. 
(However, for our purposes, the double-sided function doesn’t work 
for lined notebook papers and/or bleed-through from thin sheets writ-
ten in ink.) There were other challenges particular to the material: 
widely varying sizes of sheets; much of the material is handwritten 
in Hausa language (and OCR doesn’t work on handwriting or Hausa 
language!); and ink sketches and oversized, faint site plans. However, 
some items are marvelously evocative of place—like letters written on 
sheets torn from an oversized ledger from the Railway Corporation 
in a town where most Christians were working to build the railroad!

In addition to technical issues, we had to make the usual deci-
sions facing an archival project: sorting files, eliminating duplicates, 

https://eap.bl.uk/
www.vhmml.us/resource/downloads


268  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

file labelling conventions and methodology, creating metadata, and 
OCR decisions.  

Physical and Administrative Challenges Encountered 
During the Project:

 • Fragile/poor quality of the papers used

 •  Many of the documents are handwritten in Hausa language; 
therefore, OCR not possible

 • Power fluctuations/absence

 • Lack of secure storage, archival folders, etc.

 • No climate control

 •  Inadequate funding for better archival conditions, materials, 
and staffing

 •  Ownership/copyright (for the purpose of putting materials 
online)

 •  Materials in the files (some negative created by or regarding 
living persons)

Future Challenges Anticipated:

 • Distance for potential users to access in person

 •  Lack of computer skills among potential users of digital 
resources

 •  Creating simple pathfinders/finding aids for the collection to 
enhance access

 •  Encouraging churches/institutions to contribute further material

INTERVIEWS ABOUT THE PROJECT’S IMPACT

For this presentation, interviews were carried out with several people 
who have used the materials in physical form. These interviews, 
intended to gauge the impact on users, are summarized briefly below:

REV. K. U. DANNAT, church historian, author, and lecturer 
at Baptist Theological Seminary, Kaduna, Nigeria, said the 
materials in the project would be of incalculable worth to 
him as a researcher and author as he prepares to write a 
book on the Baptist history of the Northeast. As a lecturer, he 



Listen and Learn Sessions  269

will encourage his students to use the archive to get a sense 
of what primary sources are like, their importance, and the 
difficulties surrounding their use as well. 

REV. ABRAHAM DIMUES, Northeast Baptist Conference Presi-
dent and pastor of Bishara Baptist Church, Bauchi (one of 
the churches represented in the files). Rev. Dimues said their 
church is about to celebrate an anniversary, and wanted to 
write a history of the church. Unfortunately, due to several 
crises and violent incidents in their area in the last twenty 
years, there are no surviving documents from their found-
ing period. In the archives, however, there is much mate-
rial. Rev. Dimues said, “There are so many things [in the files] 
that we’ve been looking for, and we couldn’t get them. But 
now . . . the hardship is over. Ordination of the first deacons, a 
copy of the ordination service of the first pastor, many other 
things. This is wonderful.” 

REV. JOHN MATTHEW, Nigerian Baptist Convention missionary 
in Yobe State (and former pastor of Buni Yadi Baptist Church 
mentioned above) used materials from the files as the basis 
of his final-year research project on the influence of Yoruba 
Baptist traders on Baptist work in the Northeast: “Rev. Faw’s 
impact was great . . . He labored tirelessly in [what was then] 
Borno Baptist Association . . . To have access to his papers on 
this work has been of immense benefit to my research. I could 
not have completed my project without these materials.”

FUTURE PROSPECTS

So, what’s next for the Northeastern Nigeria Baptist Digital History 
Project? We hope to:

 •  Discover more files as we make visits to churches in Northeast-
ern Nigeria to encourage participation

 •  Digitize Northeastern Baptist Conference minutes (including 
Northern/Bethel Conference minutes covering the early history)

 • Publicize the project to Baptist institutions and organizations

 •  Encourage the Nigerian Baptist Convention to set up an archival 
center in the Northern part of Nigeria


