The British colonial government frustrated European missionaries’ desire to convert Northern Nigeria by curtailing Christian proselytization. This chapter situates missionaries’ tumultuous relationship with the state in the emergence of secularism as an imperial technique of managing religions and religious difference. That technique involved the government’s insistence on its separation from Christian missions, and its indirect rule of the territory through Muslim chiefs. Colonial administrators resolved that paradox–of the state’s rhetoric of separation from Christian missions even while the state remained intimate with Muslim elites–in one of two ways. Some administrators emphasized the superiority of the religious liberty of Muslims over the missionary desire to proselytize; others stressed the imperative for the state to be separate from what remained of the precolonial Sokoto caliphate. As administrators latched on to either argument, so did colonial subjects also deploy either notion to further their agenda. What emerges is a story of a struggle between imperial bureaucrats, Christian missionaries, and Muslim chiefs over the governance of religious difference.

This chapter makes a case for the value of examining magical realism’s many intersections with religion, a topic that has been undertreated in Anglophone scholarship. While the global corpus of magical realist literature has drawn from countless religious resource bases, faith in magical realism has been thought of almost exclusively as indigenous faiths for reasons this chapter explores. In contrast, the mode has been considered as especially antithetical to Christianity, even though we can trace the latter within some of the earliest self-professed magical realist narratives, and many subsequent ones. It is in direct response to these dual misconceptions that this chapter focuses on magical realist narratives that utilize Christianity and narratives that utilize indigenous religious, showing, for example, how we might see within both the use of common narrative strategies and effects. By addressing these two poles, the author encourages an open understanding of the mode’s potential relation to any religious resource base. The chapter concludes that while the term 'magic' itself is freighted, the form can be amicable towards religious practitioners and sensibilities. We see this in a couple of ways. First, magical realism’s structural configuration can be – and is – understood as pointing to a multidimensional human world. Second, the mode can provide a phenomenological account of religion, or an experience of belief from the inside.