Roger Ingold is one of the missionaries featured in ‘The Disturbances’
“The Disturbances” is a new feature-length documentary film telling the story of how Christian missionaries and Nigerian pastors helped intervene in violence in northern Nigeria in 1966, during a time of tribal genocide that preceded the Biafra War. Among missionaries from several denominations, Church of the Brethren mission workers are featured including Roger Ingold, who was Nigeria field secretary at the time. Children of Brethren mission families also were interviewed for the film.
EthicsDaily.com, a division of the Baptist Center for Ethics, produced the film. Robert Parham and Cliff Vaughn were the documentary producers.
“It is an untold story that is finally getting its due on its 50th anniversary,” said a release. “Thousands of people, mostly Igbos and Easterners, were brutally killed in a few days in the fall of 1966 in northern Nigeria. The death toll would have been higher if Christian missionaries and Nigerian pastors had not taken action to save lives. Their heroic work has been unknown, primarily because those involved never spoke about what happened–using veiled language and euphemisms, such as ‘the disturbances,’ in public reports and statements.”
Those interviewed for the project included missionaries and missionary children from the Assemblies of God, Christian Reformed Church, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Southern Baptist Convention, Sudan Interior Mission, and Sudan United Mission, as well as the Church of the Brethren.
The release noted that “the producers conducted more than two dozen on-camera interviews, acquired nearly 2,500 documents, slides, and photographs, obtained several hours of missionary home movies, worked with roughly a dozen different denominational, educational, and filmic archives, and talked to scores of other witnesses.”
For more information visit www.TheDisturbances.com or visit the film’s Facebook page and Twitter page.