Christians and Christian missions in Somalia, 1881 to today

In short

Missions came with colonial rule and stayed small. The record below gives each mission, what it did, and how it ended, with the source for each. Numbers come from very different sources and do not agree; each is given with who counted.

The north: the French Catholic mission, 1891 to 1910

The French Catholic Mission opened an orphanage at Daymoole, near Berbera, in 1891. According to the Somali Christian writer Aweis A. Ali, citing the historian Said Samatar, meeting children from this orphanage was one of the things that turned Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan against British rule. The mission was expelled in 1910 and moved to Jigjiga (Aweis A. Ali, "A Brief History of Christian Missions in Somalia", African Research Journal of Education and Social Sciences, 2020). The same paper dates the first Catholic orphanage among Somalis to 1881.

After that, the British government kept all missions out of the Somaliland Protectorate. In 1927 the Colonial Secretary named it as the only colony besides parts of northern Nigeria from which Christian missions were excluded (Hansard, 29 July 1927). In 1937 the Colonial Secretary said the government had "for many years" been "obliged... to exclude all missionaries" because of "the specially difficult conditions" of a protectorate "inhabited almost entirely by nomadic Mohammedan tribes". The only exception was two members of the Bible Churchmen's Missionary Society helping in a camp for refugees from Ethiopia (Hansard, 28 April 1937). In 1947 the government said the policy was "reviewed from time to time" (Hansard, 30 July 1947).

The south: Swedish Lutherans, 1896 to 1935

The Swedish Overseas Lutheran Church opened a mission at Kismaayo in 1896 and spread to Jilib, Jamaame and Mugaambo with schools, clinics and churches. Most converts came from farming communities of the Jubba valley. Italy expelled the mission in 1935 (Aweis A. Ali, 2020). A 2023 count by the Somali Bible Society says most Christians in southern Somalia today descend from these converts (Somali Bible Society, Somali Christian Census 2023).

The south: the Catholic Church under Italy, 1904 to 1991

Catholic work in Italian Somaliland began officially on 21 January 1904 under the Prefecture Apostolic of Benadir (Somali Bible Society, 2023). Trinitarian Fathers arrived in 1903 and gave schooling and help to the poor and sick; under governor De Vecchi in the 1920s the Consolata missionaries were promoted (Christianity in Somalia, Wikipedia). By 1939 the Italian government paid the church to run 12 primary schools with 1,776 pupils (Aweis A. Ali, 2020, citing Touval 1963).

Mogadishu Cathedral was built between 1923 and 1928 on the order of governor Cesare Maria De Vecchi, in a Norman style copied from the cathedral of Cefalù in Sicily. It was the largest cathedral in eastern Africa. The historian Claire Dillon argues the design was meant to present Italian rule as a "peaceful conquest" (Mogadishu Cathedral, Wikipedia, citing Dillon 2025; Geeska interview with Claire Dillon, 2025). See Mogadishu Cathedral.

How many Catholics?

• 1940: Bishop Francesco Filippini claimed about 40,000 Somali Catholics, mostly in the Jubba and Shabelle farming areas (Aweis A. Ali, 2020, citing Tripodi 1999). Bishop Giorgio Bertin of Djibouti has said this figure is too high (same source).
• About 1950: about 8,500 Catholics, at the start of the UN trusteeship (Christianity in Somalia, Wikipedia, citing the Diocese of Mogadishu).
• 2004: about 100 (same source).

Mennonites and the Sudan Interior Mission, 1953 to 1976

The Mennonite Mission came to southern Somalia in 1953 and the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) in 1954. Both ran schools, clinics and hospitals. In 1962 the Canadian Mennonite teacher Merlin Grove was stabbed to death in Mogadishu. In 1966 Somali Christians in Mogadishu, Buulobarde and Beledweyne joined the Mennonite church. After the government took over mission property, the Catholic cathedral let both missions' members worship there. Both missions were expelled in 1976 (Aweis A. Ali, 2020). The Bible was first published in full in Somali in 1979 (Christianity in Somalia, Wikipedia).

1989: the killing of Bishop Colombo

Salvatore Colombo, an Italian Franciscan who had worked in Somalia since 1946 and was consecrated Bishop of Mogadishu in 1976, was shot dead in the cathedral on 9 July 1989. Siad Barre's government blamed Islamists; other accounts blamed the government. Several sheikhs were arrested, and on 14 July 1989 government forces fired on worshippers leaving a mosque in Mogadishu after a sermon criticising the arrests (Salvatore Colombo, Wikipedia). No bishop of Mogadishu has been named since. The Bishop of Djibouti serves as apostolic administrator.

Since 1991

The cathedral stopped being used after 1991 and was largely destroyed in 2008; plans to rebuild it were announced in 2013 (Mogadishu Cathedral, Wikipedia). Foreign Christian aid workers killed in Somali lands since 1991 include Annalena Tonelli, an Italian lay Catholic who ran a tuberculosis hospital in Boorama and was shot there in October 2003, a few months after winning the UN refugee agency's Nansen Award (Annalena Tonelli, Wikipedia, citing UNHCR and L'Osservatore Romano). Aweis A. Ali also lists Sister Leonella Sgorbati, Verena Karer, Dick and Enid Eyeington and others (Aweis A. Ali, 2020).

Christians in Somaliland

Somaliland's constitution makes Islam the official religion, forbids Muslims to convert, bars spreading any other religion and requires all laws to follow sharia. It also requires the president, vice-presidential candidates and members of the house of representatives to be Muslim (US State Department, 2023).

In 2016 Bishop Giorgio Bertin and other Catholics were "rehabilitating a Catholic church in Hargeisa" (Catholic World Report, 20 March 2016). In 2023 the only Catholic church in Somaliland remained closed (US State Department, 2023). In 2021 Agenzia Fides reported a "more stable Christian presence" in Somaliland than in the rest of the country, with one priest serving a Catholic community who pray at home or indoors. Caritas works there under the name Caritas Naxariis and ran a school project for 35 displaced children (Vatican News, 30 April 2021). The Somali Bible Society's 2023 count found 7,642 Christians in Somaliland (see below).

Numbers today

• US State Department, 2023: a Christian community of about 1,000 (International Religious Freedom Report 2023, via ecoi.net).
• Somali Bible Society, 2023: ran its own count from August 2022 to October 2023 across Somalia, Somaliland, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya, mostly by phone. It counted 171,227 Christians in Somalia (22,123 men, 23,356 women and 125,748 children), 7,642 in Somaliland, and 3,760, 8,917 and 5,649 ethnic Somali Christians in Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya (pp. 54–56). Children under 15 were counted if they live with a Christian parent or guardian. It names four limits: areas held by al-Shabaab could not be reached, remote Christians could not be contacted, some refused, and language barriers in the south (Somali Christian Census 2023). It says most professing Somali Christians are Lutheran, Catholic, Nazarene or independent.
• Open Doors, 2023: ranked Somalia second on its list of places where Christians face the most pressure (Christianity in Somalia, Wikipedia, citing Open Doors).

The law and society today

The 2012 provisional constitution makes Islam the state religion and bans spreading any other religion. Sharia is read as forbidding conversion from Islam, and the penal code punishes blasphemy and "defamation of Islam" with up to two years in prison. There are no public places of worship for non-Muslims except inside the Mogadishu airport compound, and the only Catholic church in Somaliland stays closed (US State Department, 2023). The report says conversion is "seen as a betrayal of family and clan", and that al-Shabaab treats suspected converts as targets.

In Somaliland in 2022, a woman was jailed for five years for blasphemy, apostasy and spreading Christianity; she was released conditionally in August 2023 after declaring a return to Islam (US State Department, 2023).

Read further

• Aweis A. Ali, Understanding the Somali Church (KENPRO, 2021).
• Helen Miller, The Hardest Place: The Biography of Warren and Dorothy Modricker (2006), on the SIM mission.
• Ahmed Ali Haile and David W. Shenk, Teatime in Mogadishu (Herald Press, 2011).
• Why almost every Somali is Muslim.