Fieldwork has been combined with archival research conducted in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Nigeria to explicate the manner in which the Sudan United Mission strove to create a Christian Northern Nigerian identity in order to combat a Muslim Hausa identity. To accomplish this transformation, the missionaries created a home for freed Nigerian slaves; it was named after Lucy Guinness Kumm, one of its founders. The story of the home and its use takes place in the midst of Lord Lugard's colonial ideal of indirect rule and the working misunderstanding in which local rulers...