JORAS - Nigerian Journal of Religion and Society

This ministry of a remarkable Catholic missionary who laboured among the Egba people of Southern Nigeria for almost 40 years, spanning the closing decade of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries. Jean-Marie Coquard, who hailed from Brittany in Northern France, began life as a sailor in the merchant navy from 1873-1882. Following rejection by the Sacred Heart missionaries of Betharram in 1885, he joined the Society of African Missions (SMA) and was ordained a priest in 1890. He immediately embarked on the Society's mission in West Africa, taking up a medical apostolate in Abeokuta – an apostolate already initiated by both Catholic and Protestant missionaries - and opening the first Catholic hospital there. With only two trips abroad, the first in 1896, to Brazil to collect funds for a minor seminary in the Benin vicariate, and the second in 1907, to attend an SMA General Assembly in France, he was to remain in Abeokuta until his death in 1933 at the age of 74.

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