A professor of mine once explained historical research as akin to pulling an onion from the ground and then peeling back the layers to get to the seed. His point was that the outer layers were growing, organic things with histories worthy of study, but the inner phenomenon—that served as impetus for everything else. Historical research was thus the process of learning to discern outer phenomena from the inner phenomenon. The notion made an impression on me at the time, but the insight it carried did not come home to me until I took up the task of writing this book. That was fifteen years ago. It started out as an entirely different study, then morphed into another, and then another, and then one more. Each time I thought I had hold of the inner phenomenon, but like another layer of onion skin, it peeled away and I was confronted with the task of reconstructing yet another narrative. It was only after ten years of starts and stops that I identified the narratives presented below as offering the best angle on the topic of the introduction of European civilization in Northern Nigeria.

When I first arrived in Nigeria as a Fulbright scholar in 1992, this was not the topic I hoped to investigate. Since my undergraduate days I have retained an interest in both African and European history. In graduate school one has to choose, however, and I opted to concentrate on European history. I have never regretted the decision, but after completing my first research project, I decided to try to mesh my two interests. I decided to study European missionaries in Africa. Since my research on Europe was on Counter-Reformation Catholicism, a brand of Catholicism propagated across the European countryside by missionary orders, I decided to look at the connections between Catholic missionizing in Counter-Reformation Europe and Catholic missionizing in colonial Africa. But quite literally on my first day in the old colonial colony of Northern Nigeria I made an observation that started me on the onion peeling alluded to above.