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men. Despite frail health, Lucy toiled among London’s garment workers and went on to chronicle their plight and argue for their need of salvation in her book
Only a FactoryGirl.
She had traveled among the world’s Hindus in
Across India at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
. Her books were not just religious tracts: they were calls for a new Christian world order based on equality and justice. Until the secular human rights movement began after World War II, Christian missionaries were the leading advocates for social change. Christian activists both liberal and conservativewere hugely instrumental in bringing to light abuses such as slavery, and they are once again today. Along with her husband, Lucy Kumm turned her attention to fifty to eighty million souls whom she feared faced the threat of Muslim domination in what they, like so many others, called the Land of the Blacks. After reading her tracts, more than twenty young men—members of the YMCA’s StudentVolunteer Movement—set out for Sudan. Most contracted fever and died in the African mission field, which was called “the White Man’s Graveyard.”
    The Kumms were only two of a number of missionaries in the Middle Belt at the time, and many were not particularly interested in competingwith Islam. Doctors, teachers, and farmers, they brought with them the two
Bs—
Bible and bicycle—and offered practicalsolutions to problems of health, agriculture, and eventually education. Their work was the legacy of the mid-nineteenth-century mission strategist Henry Venn, who developed the “Three-Self” indigenous church. Each local community should be self-sustaining, self-governing, and self-propagating, he argued, and Christianity should empower people, offering a way out of oppression.
    Kumm, though, wasamong those who took this to mean liberation from the looming threat of Islam, and he believed he could use people’s loathing of their Muslim rulers to his advantage in converting them to Christianity. At first, however, he found that these so-called border pagans had little interest in his divine message. The formidable indigenous traditions that had led people to reject Islam for centuries nowgalvanized them against this new alien creed. Toiling at the base of the rock without converts, Kumm taught health, hygiene, and horticulture but did little converting. However, he needed money to keep the mission going, since Sudan United Mission, like many at the time, was not linked to any particular Protestant denomination. 6 Its success depended on Kumm’s entrepreneurial spirit. To prove hisplan could succeed, he needed converts. In his memoirs, he describes the watershed night in 1904, when, before leaving for a fund-raising trip in America, he summoned his local workers to the base of Wase Rock. “Boys,” he said, “who would like before saying goodbye to me to accept Jesus as his personal savior?” 7
    No one answered, at first. Then his personal servant, Tom Alyana, a former slave,stepped forward and accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. Alyana would be the first of what now, a century later, have become millions of followers of Kumm’s teachings. Soon after, Kumm and Lucy, now pregnant with their third child, traveled to America to raise money for their mission. In Northfield, Massachusetts, she began to miscarry. Refusing to go to the hospital until she had finished herbook about Congo,
Our Slave State
, Lucy contracted a fever and died.
    Heartbroken, Kumm returned to Nigeria to make a dangerous foray across the continent. Starting out at the base of Wase Rock in 1909, Kumm trekked east for more than one thousand miles, from the British territory of Nigeria, through French-occupied Chad, to British Sudan. Skirting the southern edge of Muslim North Africa, whichhe called “the Ultima Thule of Africa”—based on a term Greek explorers used for borders of the known world—he would travel along the tenth parallel investigating Islam’sspread, and assessing