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prospective sites for his missionary forts. The trek was also a grueling public relations junket to raise money for his Sudan United Mission. Kumm’s supporters sent him what they could, and he published theirletters of encouragement in his newsletter,
The Lightbearer
. One devotee mailed him a pearl-mounted gold shirt stud and a note: “Perhaps the enclosed could be disposed of for a few shillings (it cost 11/-, and is practically new), it is all I have to give.” 8 For the trek, Kumm took two hundred African porters and their families along with him, confident that he would convert them to Christianityduring leisure hours. The party never stopped walking. Descending from the plateau at the beginning of the rainy season, the members of this bedraggled expedition soon faced a forced wade through the thick tree-lined corridors of gallery forests, and hacked their way through dense bush woven with webs of wet vines. As they traversed
chaur
, the deep, sandy ravines cut into open savanna, the partyfell victim to flash floods. Kumm and his expedition basically swam across Africa.
    “All these rivers,” he wrote in despair, “terminate in one vast lake, between the 7th and 10th degree north [of the equator].” 9 He had hit the
sudd—
“barrier” in Arabic—the impenetrable swampland that begins along the tenth parallel and, like the tsetse fly, had helped to stop Islam from spreading south in Sudan.Kumm’s oxen nearly drowned. His horses died of sleeping sickness. He watched his porters become “walking skeletons.” Six had to be carried, and one died of starvation. At last he boarded a steamship, which chugged up the White Nile to the sand-swept colonial capital of Khartoum, where Kumm stopped before sailing back to England. At home in Britain, the popularity of missionaries and colonial adventurerswas at its zenith. When Kumm landed at Dover on December 29, 1909, reporters from Reuters,
The Daily Telegraph
,
The Star
, and others waited for him on the dock. The next day’s headline: “KUMM HAS COME BACK.”
    One hundred years later, the church Kumm planted at the base of Wase Rock, Church of Christ in Nigeria (COCIN), has hundreds of outposts in the Middle Belt. Most are small, zinc-roofed buildingsthat shine like dull nickels against the grassy plateau. And when religious violence breaks out in the region, the contemporary leaders of Kumm’s church are often earliest into the fray.
    I visited the gated compound of Kumm’s church headquarters in Jos, the Middle Belt capital, in August 2006, within days of my visit to the Emir of Wase. The city’s red roads were crammed with thousands of signboards—forchurches, mosques, and miscellaneous religious organizations vying for customers. In one short stretch, I spied De Last Day Coffin Company, which competed for the attention of a passerby with signs for Living Faith Church and NASFAT, a Muslim tent revival in the vein of a Pentecostal church service. And that was only three. Within sixty seconds (I timed it) we passed Child Evangelical,Christ Resurrection, Apostolic Faith, Mount Olive, Grace Foundation, Christ Embassy, Assemblies of God, Divine Mercy Ministry, Jesus Foundation, World Impact Partners, Christ Pilgrims Welfare Board, Fountain of Praise, Every Night Is a Miracle Ministries, Family Restoration Gospel Ministry, Angels International College, Amazing Grace Private School, and the Great Commission.
    At COCIN headquarters,a framed photograph of Karl Kumm hung from a nail in the main office. Here was the pale-eyed hero in profile. With the swept-back locks of a romantic poet, he fixed his gaze beyond the frame. I asked the church’s information officer, whom I’ll call Pastor J., 10 if he knew what Kumm was supposed to be looking at.
    He glanced at the picture and said he wasn’t sure. But Kumm’s prediction, the pastoradded, had come true: the Middle Belt now stood as the last line of defense against Islam’s domination of the country, the continent,