Lausanne World Pulse – Unreached People Groups in Africa and Beyond

By Reuben Ezemadu
January / February 2015

UPGs at Home
MANI-CAP will not only unveil Africa’s remaining unreached people groups at home, but will also reveal:

  • that those who were identified with certain locations of the unreached in the past will no longer be found in those locations/areas now, and
  • that the numbers will not have increased, but rather decreased, not because they have become extinct, but because they have moved out to other locations due to the above factors.

These will still remain our priority foci of MANI in future engagements.

Africa’s Unreached Peoples Abroad
 The origin and characteristics of the majority of the African immigrants in Europe and North America highlight the need to consider their unreached people group status. The majority come from areas in Africa that are considered least evangelized, from people groups regarded as unreached, and from religious blocks and political environments hostile to the gospel. These constitute African mission fields abroad.

Since for whatever reason they have found themselves in “the free world,” they should be given opportunity to hear the gospel as part of the package available to them in the free world. Hence the need to identify where such African mission fields abroad are located!

Africa’s Unreached Peoples in Europe
According to an estimate by The Migration Policy Institute, seven to eight million African irregular migrants now live and work in Europe. Jason Mandryk, from Operation World, recently indicated that in 2000 A.D. France had 6.4 million foreign-born immigrants (3.4% of all immigrants), mainly of North African and Black African origins; while Spain had 4.7 million of such (2.5% of all immigrants) of Latin America and North and West Africa origins.

Helen Trauner,1 quoting Julien Conde and P. Diagne,2 stated that “until the 1980s, four-fifths of sub-Saharan immigrants in France were originating from Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali, predominantly from the Senegal River Valley” (within the 10/40 Window, where there are significant numbers of UPGs and there is the dominant Islamic religious block) and that “more than ninety percent of Malian immigrants in France originate from the rural areas of the Kayes Region in the western part of Mali.”

She continued that the female immigrants who were her main focus of the research, like their male counterparts, originated “from the Senegal River Valley (Mali, Mauritania, Senegal) as well as from the Gulf of Guinea and from Equatorial Africa” (all of them locations of most of the African UPGs). These West African female immigrants in France provided their compatriots an African “imagined community where they meet, communicate in their mother tongue, and have access to an important infrastructure (e.g., to mosques, Islamic schools, markets, etc.).”3

This phenomenon made it possible for the African immigrants from the homogenous and closely-knit people groups of West Africa not to be assimilated by the French culture, thereby maintaining their people group uniqueness, even in such distant lands of Europe and despite many years of their sojourn there.

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