Daniel Aribo Conteh, Indigenous Limba Agency, and African Kinship Practices in the Formation of the National Pentecostal Mission, Sierra Leone

Abstract

Abstract Indigenous Pentecostalism remains a marginal area of research in the Christian history of Sierra Leone. This essay explores the mission journals of the Assemblies of God (AOG) and the oral recollection of key Limba actors to ascertain whether the implicit missionary marginalization of the Reverend Daniel Aribo Conteh and his Limba churches may have accentuated this indigenous underrepresentation. By means of an intercultural history of Christianity approach, I outline the processes that led to the secession of the National Pentecostal Mission, Sierra Leone (NPM-SL) from the AOG and discuss how after conversion Conteh mobilized ethnic solidarity in the form of African kinship practices to support the missionary intuitions of the Limba churches outside AOG missionary control in colonial Freetown. The essay contends that, despite their negligible education, the Limba people’s indigeneity under Conteh’s leadership resulted in the establishment of the NPM-SL as an indigenously governed, self-supporting, and missionally oriented Pentecostal denomination in Sierra Leone.