Celebrating the Golden Anniversary of School in Nigeria

Fifty years ago, Gordon Buys of Christian Reformed World Missions served as one of the first teachers at what was then the Wukari Combined Secondary School in Takum, Nigeria.

Buys recently returned with other teachers and representatives of the Christian Reformed Church to help celebrate the golden anniversary of the school, which was destroyed in the late 1990s by war and has been now been reopened as the Reformed Combined Secondary School.

“It was a wonderful experience,” said Buys. “They invited former teachers and students and government officials. The celebration was held in the chapel, which was left intact during the war and fell into disuse. It has been refurbished and is just beautiful.”

Along with celebrating the anniversary of the school, the gathering highlighted a peace process that brought an end to the war in which the school, as well as much of the city of Takum in southwestern Nigeria, was destroyed and many of the people displaced.

“We celebrated the peace between ethnic groups and the churches,” said Peter Vander Meulen, coordinator of the Office of Social Justice who also attended the event.

“It was absolutely wonderful to be there. The school is a living symbol of what came out of the peace work that we did in the area.”

CRWM founded the school in 1965 and helped to operate it until 1977 when the Nigerian government took over, renaming it the Mbiya Secondary School.

The government ran the school for 20 years. Then tensions grew in the late 1990s when the tribal chief, who had ruled the area for 30 years, died, and the tribal government was reorganized, sparking discontent. Violence erupted when a youth from an opposing tribe was beaten.

“Starting in October 1997, war raged, destroying 75 percent of the buildings in Takum,”  according to a brief history published several years ago by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

As chaos spread between warring tribes in Takum, people began fleeing the city and the government army came in to restore order, but ended up firing at people indiscriminately, says the history.

“For several weeks, there was open conflict … An ad hoc boundary developed, and tribal vigilantes killed any from the other side who were so foolhardy as to try to travel through,” says the history.

Eventually, representatives from two opposing churches in the area — the Reformed Church of Christ in Nigeria and the Christian Reformed Church of Nigeria — came together and initiated the peace process, said Vander Meulen. The tribes involved in the process were the Tiv, Jukun, Kuteb, and Chamba.

Vander Meulen and Hizkias Assefa, a Mennonite expert in peace-making negotiation, were asked by an umbrella group of churches, including the CRC, to work with the warring factions.

 Assefa, who also attended the anniversary celebration at the school, and members of the Nigerian Reformed Churches’ Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation Committee (PJRC) were able to address hostilities by bringing the sides together for many meetings and ended up hammering out two agreements.

“A lot of work was done over a five-year period by the PJRC, between the late 1990s to the mid 2000s, with groups in the area and the two peace agreements were signed,” said Vander Meulen.

Once the agreements were in place, people began to seek ways to illustrate the reality that peace had begun to take hold in Takum and the surrounding area.

“The churches and the local peacebuilders on the PJRC started to ask themselves what they could do together to cement the peace process and illustrate what had happened,” said Vander Meulen.

They decided to petition the government to return the school to the churches and other representatives of the community. The government agreed and handed the school back in June 2010, after which they began the process of rebuilding.

With the help of donations - the vast majority from Nigerians - they have removed the debris left behind after the school was vandalized. They have erected new walls and a roof, along with classrooms and dormitories for residential students and rehabilitated the chapel.

Today, the school has about 430 students, said Gordon Buys.

In an exhortation he gave during the anniversary celebration, Buys told those who gathered to always “keep the main thing the main thing.”

He asked people — many of them alumni from the early days of school — to think about things that get in the way of following the will of God.

“Are there distractions?” he asked. “Of course … We were created with the responsibility to choose — this school has a history of distractions. It has been destroyed by sinful choices, but, thank God, it is being rebuilt.”.

Regardless of the distractions, he said, the key thing, despite everyone’s different circumstances, is to keep focused on God and what God would have us do.

“I was a teacher and a pilot,” he said. “Some of you are in business. Some are in government service. Some are in politics. Some are farmers, teachers, doctors, nurses.

"Personalities are different. Circumstances are different. But the goal, the main objective of life, is always the same, by God’s grace. And that is, giving witness to what we know of the Kingdom of God."

Vander Meulen said while the school is a symbol of peace in the area, there is also a mango tree that was planted some years ago after the signing of the second peace accord.

Standing near the tribal ruler’s palace in the town of Wukari, the tree was planted by those who built peace as a symbol of the fruits of peace.

“It represents the entire peace process led by the churches,” he said.

“As Hizkias said in his remarks at the 50th anniversary celebration: ‘The people that built the peace and planted that tree will likely never eat of its fruit - but their children will. And in fact, the 430 children sitting in the chapel and classrooms of this rebuilt and rededicated school are eating the fruits of that peace’.”

After the anniversary celebration, Vander Meulen and Aseffa and others traveled to a nearby area where there are hostilities between Muslim herders and Christian and animist farmers. They are in the process of seeing if the CRC and its partners might eventually play a role in once again supporting a local peace process led by people of faith to resist the forces of radicalization and violence.