William Wadé Harris

On July 27, 1913, a man from Cape Palmas, a small port town in southeastern Liberia, set out walking east. He wore no shoes. He had on a white robe with black bands across the chest and a white turban on his head. In his hand he held a long staff with a crossbar, so that it formed a cross. He also carried an English Bible, a gourd rattle and a bowl for baptismal water.

Two women walked with him: Helen Valentine, a widow who had learned to read and write, and Mary Pioka. They sang and kept the beat with gourd rattles, and wherever they went, crowds gathered. The little company crossed the Cavally, the border river, and entered the Ivory Coast, a French colony.

The man was around fifty. His name was William Wadé Harris. A few years earlier he had been in a Liberian prison for treason. A year and a half after this journey, according to estimates by French colonial administrators, some one hundred thousand to one hundred and twenty thousand people had been baptized by him. Historian Elizabeth Isichei wrote in Christian History magazine that he was “without a doubt the most successful missionary in West Africa’s history.” He was no Western missionary. He was a Grebo from Liberia, and he died poor.

To understand why he walked barefoot, we have to go back to the coast where he grew up.

A GREBO BOY IN THE MINISTER'S HOUSE

Liberia holds a special place in the history of Africa. From 1822 onward, freed Black Americans came ashore there, with support from the United States. In 1847 they declared independence. Their descendants, the Americo-Liberians, formed the country’s upper class. From 1878 their True Whig Party governed, until a military coup in 1980. The peoples who already lived there, such as the Grebo and the Kru, were driven out and ruled by the newcomers. In 1873 the Kru and Grebo even tried to found a Christian state of their own, with the motto “In God We Trust”. It did not succeed.

Into that world Harris was born, around 1860, in the village of Half-Graway near Cape Palmas. Nobody knows the exact year; the sources give something between 1860 and 1865. His Grebo name was Wadé. His father was not a Christian and followed the traditional religion of the Grebo. His mother was a Methodist, according to one source. Harris later said himself that he had been “born a Methodist”.

When he was about twelve, an uncle, the Methodist minister John Lowrie, took him to Sinoe, further along the coast. There the boy learned to read and write, in English and in Grebo. He also learned bricklaying. As a young man he sailed several times on ships along the West African coast, as a laborer, as far as Nigeria.

Around 1881 or 1882 he came to faith in a Methodist service, under the preaching of a Liberian minister named Thompson. He was baptized and began to preach as a layman. A few years later he moved to the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Anglican church. In 1888 he was confirmed by Bishop Samuel Ferguson. Around the same time he married Rose Farr, the daughter of a teacher at the Episcopal boarding school in Half-Graway. The sources differ on the year. They had six children.

A BRITISH FLAG ON PUDUKE BEACH

From 1892 Harris worked for the Episcopal mission as an assistant teacher and catechist, someone who gives instruction in the faith. Later he ran a school. He also became a government interpreter for the Grebo. He read a great deal, including the pamphlets about the end times by the American Bible teacher Charles Russell. The Liberian thinker Edward Blyden, who urged Africans to go their own way, influenced him, writes mission historian David Shank.

Harris saw himself as a spokesman for his people. That brought him into conflict with the government in Monrovia. Many Grebo and Kru hoped that Great Britain would take them under its protection. In 1908 Harris lost his job as interpreter and as teacher.

In February 1909, on Puduke Beach, he hauled down the Liberian flag and raised the British Union Jack. He was convicted of treason. The sources differ on the sentence: Shank mentions a fine of five hundred dollars and two years in prison, a later study a suspended sentence. In January 1910 war broke out between the Grebo and the Liberian government. Harris was locked up again. The Grebo uprising failed.

He was around fifty. He had lost his work, his church had withdrawn his license as a lay preacher, and his people had lost the fight. What is left for you when everything you have worked for has collapsed within a few years?

THREE TIMES WATER ON HIS HEAD

It happened in that prison. Around June 1910, as Harris later told it, the angel Gabriel appeared to him. It happened three times. The angel told him that he would be a prophet, the prophet of the last days. The Spirit came upon him, Harris said, like water on his head, and that too three times.

The instructions were concrete. He was to put off his Western clothes, down to his patent leather shoes, and wear a white robe. He was to drink no more alcohol. He was to go out to preach and to baptize. He later saw his role in the light of Elijah, the prophet who took on the idols of his day. He called himself a black Elijah.

What exactly happened in that cell we know only from Harris himself. He did not write it down. According to Shank, he left no writings apart from a few signed letters. His story reached us through people who spoke with him, among them the Ghanaian lawyer Casely Hayford in 1914 and the Methodist missionary Pierre Benoît in 1926. Historians cannot check the vision. What they can see is what it did to him. The man who came out of prison was not the man who went in.

I notice that with a story like this I quickly want to know whether it was “real”. Harris himself never doubted it. He staked the rest of his life on it.

SIX SHILLINGS

There was a hard part to the vision. According to Shank, Harris was told that his wife would die after she had given him six shillings for his journey. Rose died. Exactly when is uncertain. One study gives May or June 1910, the year of the vision. Isichei writes that Rose assumed her husband had gone mad, and that she fell ill and died.

We know nothing more about her. She had borne him six children. Her husband came out of prison with a story about an angel and wanted to go preaching in a white robe. It is not hard to understand that she was alarmed.

By around 1912 Harris was free. He preached first in Liberia, including in the capital, Monrovia, and was briefly jailed there again. In Liberia it never grew large. On July 27, 1913, he crossed the border.

ACROSS THE CAVALLY RIVER

In 1913 the Ivory Coast was a French colony, and the French Catholic mission had been working there since the 1890s. It had not produced much. In 1911 the Catholic leader, Monsignor Jules Moury, reported that after more than fifteen years of work and eight large mission stations there were about two thousand baptized believers. Most people along the coast lived by their traditional religion, with images and objects meant to give protection. The Europeans called those objects fetishes.

Harris walked along the coast and the lagoons, the area between Grand-Lahou and Bingerville. He spoke English and Grebo, not French and not the languages of the lagoon peoples. He preached through interpreters, often clerks of European trading houses. The two women sang. He set Christian words to melodies the people knew.

His message was short. There is one God. Burn your fetishes. Keep Sunday as a day of rest. Be baptized. He taught people the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. Whoever gave up their fetishes could be baptized at once. In this he differed from the mission churches, which required months or years of instruction before someone was baptized. Harris baptized with water from his bowl and laid the Bible on people’s heads.

In Grand-Bassam and Bingerville the people streamed to him. One of them was a young choir singer from the Ebrié people, Jonas Ahui. In 1914 he was baptized in Bingerville together with his father. We will meet him again at the end of this story.

“BURN THE FETISHES”

According to oral tradition in the Ivory Coast, in 1913 Harris cried out in the village of Louzoua: “Brûlez les fétiches”, burn the fetishes. That is how a villager remembered it, and that is how it appears in a 2016 study by Gabriel Leonard Allen. Isichei gives an English version of the same idea: “God has sent me to burn the fetishes.”

Whole villages did it. The Catholic leader Moury wrote in 1914 of entire peoples destroying their fetishes and asking for baptism. Stories quickly grew up around the prophet. He was said to have healed the sick and to have had power over the rain. Opponents were said to have gone mad. Hidden images were said to have burst into flame by themselves. A man who lied about a fetish he had hidden was said to have died within a few hours. Isichei explicitly presents such stories as legends. They have never been verified, and that is how I pass them on too.

Harris himself seemed afraid of that veneration. He sometimes destroyed his own staff, Isichei writes, because he feared people would begin to worship it. When someone in Kraffy asked him whether he was the great spirit, he answered, according to tradition, that he was a man who came in the name of God.

TWELVE APOSTLES IN EVERY VILLAGE

Harris stayed nowhere for long. What did he leave behind in the villages he passed through? In each new congregation he appointed twelve men as “apostles” to lead the group. He had houses of prayer built. He let village chiefs keep the leadership, so that existing ties stayed intact. And he told the people that Christians with Bibles would come later to teach them further.

According to tradition, he also told them they could pray and sing in their own language, because God would understand them.

He encouraged people to send their children to school. The French lieutenant governor Gabriel Angoulvant wrote in 1915 about the enthusiasm with which children in Jacqueville went to school.

On one point he later clashed with Western missionaries. Harris accepted polygamy, marriage to more than one wife, as a given of African life. He did not condemn it. He himself had several wives, and some of them traveled with him. Mary Pioka bore him a son. In 1926 he admitted to a visitor that he had six wives. Methodist missionaries questioned him sharply about it.

A LAWYER IN AXIM

In 1914 Harris crossed the border into the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana, a British colony. He preached there for about three months, mainly in Apollonia, the coastal region in the far west. A Methodist minister, Charles Armstrong, found some eight thousand people there in early August 1914 who had been baptized by Harris.

In July 1914, in the small town of Axim, the prophet had a long conversation with Joseph Casely Hayford. Hayford was a lawyer and one of the best-known African nationalists of the Gold Coast. He was impressed by the man’s humility and spiritual power. In 1915 he wrote the first book about him. For historians that book is valuable: it is an account by someone who spoke with Harris himself, in the middle of his greatest year.

There is one more name from that time. In Assinie a woman named Grace Tani joined him. She had been a priestess of the traditional religion. She would later become one of the leaders of the Church of the Twelve Apostles in Ghana. She regarded herself as one of Harris’s wives.

In the autumn of 1914 Harris had his base in Kraffy, in the Ivory Coast. Meanwhile, the First World War had broken out in Europe.

DECEMBER 1914

At first the French colonial government had let the prophet be. He called for hard work, and that pleased them. But the larger the movement grew, the more nervous the French became. A mass movement among Africans, led by a man from an English-speaking country, while France was at war: the administration saw that as a danger.

In December 1914 Harris and the women traveling with him were arrested, on the initiative of Lieutenant Governor Angoulvant. They were locked up and badly beaten. Helen Valentine, the young widow who had set out with him from Cape Palmas a year and a half earlier, died from the effects of those beatings. That is how Shank records it.

In January 1915 Harris was expelled from the country. Another study gives April 1915; here too the sources differ. He was taken hundreds of kilometers to the Liberian border and was not allowed to return to French territory. According to an old account quoted in a theological journal, he was arrested during a baptismal service at Port-Bouët, near present-day Abidjan, and the soldier and the boy who came to take him away had themselves baptized by him. That story appears in only one source and has not been verified.

Afterward the French government banned preaching in languages other than French. Houses of prayer his followers had built were burned down.

How do you look back on a winter like that? In eighteen months Harris had baptized more people than the Catholic mission had in more than fifteen years. He paid for it with his freedom, and one of the women who sang with him paid with her life.

EIGHT TIMES AT THE BORDER

Harris was back in Liberia. He made at least eight attempts to get back into the Ivory Coast, Isichei writes. Each time he was turned back at the border.

He kept preaching. In 1917, 1919 and 1921 he walked to Sierra Leone. Around 1921 he married Letitia Williams in Freetown. A great movement like the one in the Ivory Coast never came again in Liberia.

Meanwhile, in the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast, something happened that he himself never saw. His converts went to the churches that were already there. Among the Catholics, the number of baptisms rose from eighty in 1914 to some 6,700 a year from 1917 onward. In 1923 the Catholic church in the Ivory Coast had 13,000 members and more than ten thousand people preparing for baptism. In Apollonia, where in 1914 there had not been a single baptized Catholic, there were thousands of members by 1920.

Many villages waited. Harris had said that people with Bibles would come. He had advised his followers to join the Methodists. In 1924 the English Methodist William Platt arrived in the Ivory Coast, and he found villages that had been waiting for him for ten years. Within sixteen months more than 160 chapels had joined the Methodists, with over 32,000 names in the registers. The Methodist church in the Ivory Coast dates its beginning to 1914, the year of Harris.

There was friction too. The missionaries asked for a fixed contribution of ten percent, while the villagers were poor and also paid taxes to the French. And they disapproved of plural marriage, which Harris had allowed. Not everyone stayed. Some people went their own way.

BEGIN AGAIN

In 1925 Harris had a stroke. He only partly recovered. A year later the Methodist missionary Pierre Benoît visited him. Harris had just returned from a journey on which he had baptized more than five hundred people. Benoît took back a “testament”, a statement from the old prophet that, according to Shank, leaned strongly toward the Methodists and was meant to lead doubters into the Methodist church. According to Isichei, Benoît described Harris as a man who lived in a supernatural world that was more real to him than the visible one.

I find that a moving picture of a sick old man in a poor house. He had nothing left, except the reality he had chosen in 1910.

In December 1928 one more visitor came. It was Jonas Ahui, the choir singer from Petit-Bassam who had been baptized in Bingerville in 1914. He had traveled to Liberia because he was worried. In his region the old religion was coming back, and the British Methodists were active. Harris gave him his blessing, his cross-staff and his Bible, and a letter for Ahui’s father. He charged him to begin again.

In April 1929 William Wadé Harris died at Spring Hill in Liberia, nearly seventy years old. He was utterly poor, Shank writes. He died in his daughter’s house, according to Isichei. The local Episcopal minister led the funeral. Another source gives October 10, 1929, as the date of death, and his gravestone even says 1928. What is certain: he died in Liberia, and outside the villages of the Ivory Coast and Ghana almost nobody knew who he was.

A CROSS-STAFF IN PETIT-BASSAM

Ahui did what he had been asked, though it took a while. In 1931 the Harrist Church was founded in the Ivory Coast. After an illness in 1936 that nearly killed him, Ahui began actively leading the work, in defiance of the colonial government. For fifty-seven years he was the church’s chief preacher, until he died in 1992. The church spread to Liberia, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo and Benin. Shank estimated the number of adherents in 1986 at about two hundred thousand, and Isichei arrived at the same figure in 2003. In Ghana his work lived on in the Church of the Twelve Apostles. Other prophetic movements in the Ivory Coast saw him as their forerunner.

Whether he himself wanted to found a church is unclear. He sent people to the Catholics and the Methodists. Because of that, his legacy lies in many churches at once. The mission expert Edwin Smith already called him Africa’s most successful evangelist in 1926. Not everything Harris said came true. He expected great world events in which he himself would play a part, and they never came. He was a man with a strong vision and with clear limits.

What would you do with a calling you received in the darkest period of your life, with no one else there to confirm it? Harris took off his shoes for it.

In churches that trace themselves back to him, such as the Church of the Twelve Apostles in Ghana, four signs still stand today: a bowl, a Bible, a gourd and a cross. They are the things a barefoot man carried across the Cavally in July 1913.