President Gordon B. Hinckley is scheduled to arrive in Nigeria Saturday to begin a five-country African tour.
President Hinckley dedicated a temple in South Africa in 1985 while a member of the First Presidency, but his visits to Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe will be the first ever by a head of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.The visit also comes nearly 20 years after then-church President Spencer W. Kimball announced a revelation that blacks could be ordained to the priesthood, dissolving a previous restriction on black church members. The June 1978 announcement was immediately followed by an active campaign to establish church branches in western Africa.
Brigham Young University President Merrill J. Bateman was the dean of the BYU business school in 1978 and a specialist in Ghanaian economics, having taught at the university in Ghana in 1963. The church sent him on an expeditionary mission to west Africa one month after the June announcement on the priesthood.
He had seen functioning, though unofficial, LDS-like congregations in Ghana as early as 1969. He and companion Edwin Q. "Ted" Cannon found even more self-started congregations there when they brought the news about the priesthood and the assurance the church would soon have an official, established presence.
Cannon and his wife, Janath, would soon after be assigned there to establish a church mission and to begin baptizing the congregations of believers who had patterned their worship after church practice and doctrine.
President Hinckley's African tour is part of an ongoing, vigorous campaign to meet with church members around the globe.
Mike Otterson, the church's director of media relations, said the timing of President Hinckley's visit to Africa is coincidental to the anniversary.
"He is going to shake hands and feel the spirit of the members, and that visit was planned quite independently of any consideration of the priesthood anniversary," Otterson said.
The majority of the church's membership lived inside the United States in 1978, and the revelation had an immediate impact here. But an article written by Indiana history and religion professor Jan Shipps in "The Christian Century" two months after the revelation offered a broader perspective.
"The June 9 revelation will never be fully understood if it is regarded simply as a pragmatic doctrinal shift ultimately designed to bring Latter-day Saints into congruence with mainstream America," she wrote. "The fact that this revelation came in the context of worldwide evangelism rather than domestic politics or American social and cultural circumstances is yet another indication that Mormonism . . . is here to stay."
She told the Deseret News this week she was surprised the church hadn't made a stronger link between the anniversary and President Hinckley's African tour. She also sees an otherwise unlikely parallel between President Hinckley and Pope John Paul II.
"They're travelers. They're the leaders of international churches, and they move from one place to another. What they have to take is their presence, which is a kind of connection with deity," Shipps said.
The church spent the past year commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Mormon pioneer trek to Utah. The church established branches among European colonists in South Africa as early as 1853 and now has 24,000 members there. But with the church's pioneering days in black Africa stretching back only 20 years, many of Africa's LDS pioneers will be waiting to greet President Hinckley during his conferences there.
There are 28,000 Latter-day Saints in Nigeria, 24,000 in South Africa, 14,000 in Ghana, 6,200 in Zimbabwe and 2,200 in Kenya.