Samuel Ajayi Crowther

On August 21, 1846, in Abeokuta, in the west of present-day Nigeria, an older woman came to the missionaries with one of her sons. She was looking for her other child. She had not seen him for about twenty-five years. When she lost him, he was a boy of around thirteen. Now he was an Anglican minister with an English name.

He wrote down in his journal what happened. She took hold of his hand and trembled. “She trembled as she held me by the hand,” he noted. They said little. They sat quietly side by side and looked at each other.

The man’s name was Samuel Ajayi Crowther. As a child he had been captured and sold, and then set free by a British warship. He became the first African bishop of the Anglican Church in modern times. He translated large parts of the Bible into Yoruba, his mother tongue, and year after year he traveled up the Niger River to plant new congregations. At the end of his life his work was taken out of his hands by young European missionaries. The British historian Andrew Walls called him probably the best-known African Christian of the nineteenth century.

The woman in Abeokuta was called Afala. A few years later she would be baptized, taking the name Hannah. To understand why that reunion meant so much, we have to go back to a village called Osogun.

THE DAY OSOGUN BURNED

Ajayi was born around 1807 in Osogun, a small town in Yorubaland. The place lies near present-day Ado-Awaye, in the Nigerian state of Oyo. Nobody knows the exact year. Andrew Walls settles on about 1807, other sources give 1809 or 1810.

The Yoruba were a large people with their own kingdoms, cities and markets. In those years the mighty empire of Oyo was falling apart. War was being waged all over the land, and war meant captives. Whoever was captured could be sold. On the coast European traders stood ready, mostly Portuguese, to buy people for the plantations on the other side of the ocean.

Around 1821 Osogun was raided. According to Walls, the attackers were Fulani and Muslims from Oyo. Ajayi was captured, together with his mother and his sisters. He later wrote about that day twice. One of his phrases has been preserved. Loosely translated, he called it the saddest scene you could imagine.

What happened next, we know in broad outline. The boy was separated from his family and changed owners six times. A Nigerian biography tells that somewhere along the way he was traded for a horse. In the end he landed at the slave market of Lagos and was sold to Portuguese traders.

A SHIP THAT NEVER ARRIVED

In April 1822 the Portuguese ship lay off the coast, ready to sail. According to Christian History, it was called the Esperanza Felix. It never arrived.

Great Britain was fighting the slave trade with warships off the African coast. One of those ships was the Myrmidon, under Captain Henry Leeke. He intercepted the Portuguese ship. According to a book from 1854, he took Ajayi and other boys on board and, after a voyage of two months, put them ashore as free people. That was in June 1822, in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone.

In Sierra Leone, a British colony, the navy landed the people it had freed. The Church Missionary Society, the CMS, had schools there. The CMS was a mission society of the Church of England, the Anglican Church. Ajayi ended up at one of those schools.

He was thirteen or fourteen. He did not know whether his mother was still alive.

A NEW NAME

On December 11, 1825, he was baptized by John Raban, a CMS missionary. He was given the name Samuel Crowther, after an English clergyman who was involved with the society.

He learned quickly. Raban used him as a language helper and between 1828 and 1830 published three small books on Yoruba. It was the beginning of a life’s work, though no one knew it yet.

In 1827 the CMS opened a training institution in Freetown, later known as Fourah Bay College. Crowther was one of its first students. According to Rochester Cathedral, he started there on Christmas Day 1827. Two years later, on September 21, 1829, he married Asano. She too had been freed from a slave ship. At her baptism she was given the name Susan Thompson. They would stay married for about fifty years and had six children.

Crowther became a schoolteacher, and later a tutor at the school where he himself had studied.

MALARIA ON THE RIVER

In 1841 a large expedition set out from England for the Niger, the river that flows right through present-day Nigeria. The plan came from Thomas Fowell Buxton, a British politician who fought against slavery. His idea was that Christianity and honest trade together could replace the slave trade. The CMS sent two men along: the German missionary J.F. Schön and Samuel Crowther.

The journey became a disaster. Most of the Europeans caught malaria, and about forty of them died. Crowther survived. The leaders of the CMS saw the difference. Anyone who wanted to bring the gospel into the interior of West Africa would need Africans.

Crowther was sent to London for training. On June 11, 1843, he was ordained a deacon by the Bishop of London, and on October 1 of the same year a priest. With his ordination, Walls writes, Sierra Leone’s own African ministry began. That same year his Yoruba vocabulary was published. Christian History writes that he soon began leading the liturgy in Yoruba, probably the first time such a service was held in an African language.

HOME IN ABEOKUTA

In 1846 Crowther went to Abeokuta with the English missionary Henry Townsend. Abeokuta was the city of the Egba, the Yoruba group to which Crowther himself belonged. They arrived on August 3. Three weeks later his mother stood in front of him.

What moves me about that journal entry is how bare it is. No big words, no prayer, no explanation. A mother who trembles and a son who lets her hold his hand. I think Crowther knew there were no words for what had happened in those twenty-five years.

According to Walls, his mother and one of his sisters were among the first to be baptized in Abeokuta. According to another source, that happened in 1848. Her son was the one who told her the gospel.

Have you ever seen someone again whom you had already given up? Then perhaps you know something of what happened that day in Abeokuta.

THE LORD'S PRAYER AT WINDSOR

In 1851 Crowther traveled to London to speak up for Abeokuta. He talked with government ministers, among them Lord Palmerston. He was received by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. A Nigerian biography tells that he prayed the Lord’s Prayer for them in Yoruba. Henry Venn, the secretary of the CMS, was convinced that Crowther’s visit had moved the British government to act.

Venn became the most important ally of his life. He had a clear goal. Mission churches had to stand on their own feet as soon as possible. They had to govern themselves, support themselves and carry the gospel further themselves. After that, the missionary was supposed to leave. For Venn, Crowther was the proof that it could be done.

Meanwhile Crowther kept working on his translation. In 1852 a Yoruba grammar appeared, along with translations of Luke, Acts, James and 1 Peter. He worked together with an African colleague, Thomas King. Walls points to a choice that was ahead of its time. Yoruba is a tonal language: the same word means something different when you say it higher or lower. Crowther wanted the translation to mark those tones. His approach became a model for later Bible translations in Africa.

In 1862 his house burned down. Eleven years of notes and part of his translated manuscripts went up in flames. He started again.

AN ARABIC BIBLE IN GBEBE

In 1854 Crowther went up the Niger again, with an expedition paid for by the British shipowner McGregor Laird. This time the crew used quinine against malaria, and according to Christian History no one died.

In 1857 the next journey followed, on the ship Dayspring. Venn gave Crowther a commission: a mission along the Niger, carried entirely by Africans. Most of the helpers came from Sierra Leone.

In Onitsha, in the land of the Igbo, the group was given a piece of land by the king. The African minister J.C. Taylor stayed behind there to begin the mission. Farther upstream, in Gbebe, Crowther gave an Arabic Bible to one of the leaders of the town. Shortly afterward the Dayspring struck a rock near Rabba and sank. The group continued overland.

Many Muslims lived along the middle Niger. Crowther did not debate with them in order to win. He looked for what the Bible and the Qur’an had in common, such as the figures who appear in both books. Walls describes how careful he was in handing out Arabic Bibles, because he knew they were sometimes used as amulets. He wrote that “the Bible, the sword of the Spirit, must fight its own battle.” The image comes from Paul: And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God (Ephesians 6:17).

“WILL YOU REFUSE ME MY LAST WISH?”

In 1864 Venn wanted to go further. He believed the African church should have an African bishop, and that it should be Crowther. Crowther refused. Walls calls him a truly humble man. Rochester Cathedral tells that he called himself unworthy.

A saying of Venn’s circulates about the conversation between the two men. Loosely translated, he is supposed to have asked his son Samuel Ajayi whether he would refuse him his last wish before he died. The line appears in later biographies. I have not found it in any account from 1864.

Not everyone was enthusiastic. Henry Townsend, the missionary with whom Crowther had gone to Abeokuta, opposed an African bishop. Venn pressed on.

On June 29, 1864, Samuel Ajayi Crowther was consecrated bishop in Canterbury Cathedral by Archbishop Charles Longley. One source from Rochester gives June 24, most others June 29. His title was bishop of the countries of West Africa beyond the territory of the British queen. He was sent to peoples where Britain had no authority yet. That same year the University of Oxford gave him an honorary doctorate in divinity.

A man who as a child had been sold six times now stood in one of the oldest churches in England, with the archbishop’s hands on his head.

BONNY AND THE RIVER

As bishop, Crowther traveled up and down the Niger again and again. His diocese had no borders on a map. It consisted of stations on the river and in the delta, each with a few African ministers, catechists and teachers.

An important place became Bonny, a trading town in the Niger Delta. According to a Nigerian biography, the leaders of Bonny renounced their idols on Easter Day 1867. The same source tells that a young Christian, Joshua Hart, was killed in Bonny because he refused to take part in the old rituals. Walls mentions Bonny as one of the most important places of his work, without those details.

That same year, according to that biography, Crowther and his son Dandeson were held for several days by a local chief who demanded a ransom. I have found that story in only one source.

His son Dandeson was ordained a priest in 1870 and later became archdeacon of the delta. In 1878 the CMS bishop was given his own ship, which bore the name Henry Venn. In 1880 the Royal Geographical Society honored him with a gold watch for his exploration along the Niger. He wrote the first book on the Igbo language and worked on Nupe.

On October 19, 1880, Susan died, after about fifty years of marriage.

A COMMISSION HE WAS NOT ALLOWED TO READ

Henry Venn had died. In London other people took the helm, with other ideas. Walls points to a change in mission policy and in thinking about race.

Complaints came in about the conduct of some African workers in the Niger Mission. Some of those complaints were justified. Crowther himself had warned for years that many of his helpers lacked good training and that he had no means to guide them. In 1881 he met with CMS delegates on Madeira. Control over the mission’s money went to a committee. An investigation into his workers followed. According to Christian History and an African biographical dictionary, Crowther did not get to see the report before it went to London. In 1883 the first African workers were dismissed.

Honesty also requires this: according to the Nigerian church historian F. Anyika, Crowther supported the arrival of European missionaries and stricter supervision in those years.

ONITSHA, 1890

In 1887 John Alfred Robinson became CMS secretary for the Niger. In 1889 he came under the influence of Graham Wilmot Brooke, a young Englishman with great ideals. Brooke was about twenty-five when the CMS put him in charge of a group of new missionaries. Early in 1890 they left for the Niger.

These young men wanted a pure church. They saw sin wherever they thought they saw it, and they had little regard for culture and age, writes the historian Peter Williams. In 1890 it came to a confrontation in Onitsha, with the bishop and the leading African ministers. Robinson wrote a report that the Dictionary of African Christian Biography calls harsh and one-sided. In August 1890 the new secretary, F.N. Eden, dismissed or suspended a series of African ministers. Dandeson was suspended too.

Crowther was over eighty. He resigned in protest in 1890, write Brockman and Rochester Cathedral. Exactly which positions he laid down differs from source to source. What exactly was said in Onitsha, I have not found in the sources I read. What is certain is that the work of a lifetime was taken out of his hands in a short time.

I do not want to make one group holy and the other bad here. Brooke was young and was given a task too big for him, writes Williams, and he lays much of the blame on the CMS in London. Robinson died of meningitis in Lokoja in 1891, Brooke shortly afterward of blackwater fever. One of the young missionaries from that group, H.H. Dobinson, later regretted his hasty judgments, writes Walls.

What would you do if your life’s work were taken over by people who could have been your grandchildren?

THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR

According to the Nigerian biographer Owodayo, on May 8, 1891, Crowther wrote a plan for an independent church in the Niger Delta. In September 1891 he suffered a stroke. After that he could hardly move or speak.

He died on December 31, 1891, in Lagos. Walls describes him in those last months as a desolate, broken man. He was buried on January 1, 1892. The funeral was well attended.

He was given an English successor, Joseph Sidney Hill, who arrived in Nigeria at the end of 1893.

In April 1892 the congregations in the Niger Delta decided not to go along with the European takeover. Under the leadership of Dandeson Crowther they continued as the Niger Delta Pastorate, a church that governed and supported itself, outside the CMS. It was exactly what Henry Venn had once envisioned. Walls writes that the way Crowther was pushed aside played a part in the rise of the independent African churches that later sprang up all over West Africa.

PRAYERS IN CANTERBURY

In July 2014 a service was held in Canterbury Cathedral, a hundred and fifty years after his consecration. Thanks were given for his life, and prayers were said asking for forgiveness. In his sermon the Archbishop of Canterbury called him the apostle of Nigeria, a man who had been “betrayed and let down and undermined” by his own church.

I often think of the boy on that Portuguese ship. He was on his way to the other side of the ocean. Then another ship came. He was set free, received a new name and learned to read. Later he translated the words of Jesus for his own people, with the tones marked, so that they could hear them as they were meant.

His translation proved lasting, writes Walls. In Abeokuta a mother once sat beside her son. They said nothing. She held his hand.