James "Holy" Johnson, Mọjọlá Agbébí and the generation of Sierra Leonean returnee clergy who took mission Christianity, found it would not admit them to leadership, and built African churches instead.
The men in this file were the second generation of Yoruba Christianity: born in Sierra Leone or in Lagos to liberated African parents, educated at Fourah Bay, formed by the Church Missionary Society, and then confronted in middle age with the fact that the European missionary establishment did not intend to hand over authority to Africans. Samuel Àjàyí Crowther's treatment on the Niger was the demonstration. What they built in response, independent African churches under African leadership using African names, dress and forms, is the origin of a large part of Nigerian Christianity today and one of the earliest expressions of anticolonial cultural nationalism anywhere in Africa.
They are also the immediate context for Samuel Johnson the historian, treated in the next file, and for the Lagos intellectual world that produced the first Yoruba writing about Yoruba people.
Saro is the Yoruba term for the liberated Africans of Sierra Leone and their descendants who returned to Yorubaland from the 1830s onward. Their origin is the Atlantic slave trade run backwards: people captured in the Yoruba wars, shipped from Lagos and Badagry, intercepted at sea by the British anti-slavery squadron, and landed at Freetown, where they were settled, converted, schooled and given English names. From Freetown, a substantial number returned to Abẹ́òkúta and Lagos from the 1840s, sometimes to find kin.
They arrived literate, Christian, English-speaking and commercially connected, into towns where none of those things had existed a generation earlier, and they became the clerks, traders, printers, teachers, clergy and later lawyers and doctors of colonial Lagos. Jean Herskovits Kopytoff's study remains the standard account of the group . Their double position, Yoruba by origin and Victorian by formation, is the thing to hold onto: it made them both the most effective agents of the mission enterprise and the people best placed to see exactly what it refused them.
Born about 1836 in Sierra Leone to liberated African parents of Yoruba descent, he was educated in a CMS school and graduated from Fourah Bay Institution in 1858 . He taught until 1863, entered the ministry, and was sent by the CMS to the Yoruba mission, serving first at Lagos and then at Abẹ́òkúta.
The Abẹ́òkúta posting did not go well, and the reason given in the sources is his moral severity, which is also the origin of the nickname . "Holy Johnson" was not entirely affectionate. He held an exacting standard of Christian conduct and applied it to congregations, to colleagues and to European missionaries equally, which made him formidable and unpopular in roughly equal measure.
In 1880 he became pastor of Breadfruit Church in Lagos, the senior Anglican pulpit in the colony and the position from which his public career ran . When Lagos was separated from the Gold Coast in 1886, Governor Alfred Moloney appointed him one of two African unofficial members of the new Legislative Council, making him among the first Africans in Nigerian legislative politics .
His significance is doctrinal as much as institutional. He argued for a Christianity that was fully evangelical in theology and fully African in form, rejecting the assumption that conversion required the adoption of European dress, names, music and manners . This position, which came to be labelled Ethiopianism after the verse in Psalm 68 about Ethiopia stretching out her hands to God, extolled African capacity, insisted that Africans evangelise Africa, and was self-consciously anti-European in cultural terms while remaining orthodox in doctrine . He was, with Mọjọlá Agbébí, prominent in the Lagos branch of the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society .
He is also a useful corrective to a tidy story, because when Anglicans in Lagos seceded in 1891 to form the United Native African Church in the aftermath of Crowther's treatment, Johnson refused to join them . He argued for African leadership from inside the Anglican structure rather than outside it, and paid for that choice.
In 1900 he was consecrated Assistant Bishop of Western Equatorial Africa with responsibility for the Niger Delta and Benin, a post he held until his death in May 1917; Durham awarded him a Doctor of Divinity in the same year . The appointment was widely read at the time as a deliberate diminishment: an assistant bishopric, in a defined subordinate territory, for the most senior African clergyman of his generation, nine years after the CMS had taken the Niger from Crowther. He accepted it.
E. A. Ayandele's biography is titled Holy Johnson: Pioneer of African Nationalism, and that framing, a churchman as the pioneer of nationalism, is the argument .
Born David Brown Vincent, at Ilesa, to a Yoruba Anglican catechist father who had returned from Sierra Leone . He left the CMS in 1880 and became a Baptist around 1883.
In March 1888 he was central to the founding of the Native Baptist Church in Lagos, later the First Baptist Church, generally described as the first indigenous church in West Africa . The immediate cause was a dispute inside the American Southern Baptist mission: the American missionary W. J. David dismissed the Yoruba pastor Moses Ládéjọ Stone without adequate explanation, and the congregation would not accept it . The pattern is identical to the Niger crisis, three years earlier and in a different denomination, which is the point: the problem was structural, not personal to Crowther.
In the late 1880s and definitively by 1894 he stopped using David Brown Vincent and took the name Mọjọlá Agbébí . The name change was a programme rather than a preference. His argument was that African Christians had been required to take European names, wear European clothes, sing European hymns and adopt European manners as though these were part of the gospel, and that stripping that away was necessary to make Christianity African rather than foreign. He preached in Yoruba, wore Yoruba dress, and pressed for African hymnody and liturgy.
The 1902 Inaugural Sermon delivered in Lagos is his best known statement of that position and circulated internationally, including in African American circles . He founded the African Baptist Union of West Africa in 1898 and the Yoruba Baptist Association in 1914, and he presented a paper at the First Universal Races Congress in London in 1911, which places him in the same Pan-African intellectual network as Edward Wilmot Blyden and W. E. B. Du Bois . He died in 1917, the same year as James Johnson.
A note on quotation. The 1902 sermon is frequently quoted in fragments online. This corpus has not been able to retrieve a verified full text against which to check those fragments, and therefore does not quote it. The reader wanting the text should go to the reprint in the BlackPast global African history archive or to Ayandele's and Agbébí's own published collections . This is an instance of the general rule in this section: a widely repeated quotation without a verifiable source is not used.
Moses Ládéjọ Stone, the Yoruba Baptist pastor whose dismissal by the American mission precipitated the 1888 secession .
Jacob Kẹ́hìndé Coker (1866 to 1945), a wealthy Ẹ̀gbá planter and layman who financed and organised the African Church movement and was its most important patron .
Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832 to 1912) was not Yoruba, being a Caribbean-born West Indian who settled in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but no account of this circle is complete without him. His writing on African personality and on the relationship of Islam and Christianity to African societies shaped Johnson's and Agbébí's thinking directly, and he was read across West Africa.
John Payne Jackson (1848 to 1918), editor of the Lagos Weekly Record, provided the press that carried the argument. The Lagos newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s are where this generation conducted its public debate, and they are an underused archive.
The dispute was not about doctrine. These men were, by any measure, orthodox and often severe Christians. It was about whether Christianity carried European culture as a necessary condition, and about who was fit to hold authority in an African church.
They lost the institutional argument in their lifetimes and won it afterwards. The African churches they founded grew; the mission churches eventually Africanised their leadership; and the position that African forms of worship are legitimate Christian forms is now uncontroversial in Nigerian Christianity. The wider argument, about African capacity and the right to self-government, moved out of the churches into politics within a generation, carried in part by the same families. Herbert Macaulay, Crowther's great-grandson, is the connecting figure.
For a Yoruba Christian reader today, this is the most directly usable history in the section. The question of what in one's Christianity is the faith and what is nineteenth-century English culture arriving with it was asked, sharply and publicly, by Yoruba clergymen more than a century ago, and they left the arguments in print.
The pastor at Ọ̀yọ́ who wrote the book that made Yoruba history, the manuscript's loss and reconstruction, and the generation of Lagos men who first wrote Yoruba people into the record themselves.
The Yoruba people who came back, from Sierra Leone and from Brazil and Cuba, and what they built in Lagos: the mosques, the Brazilian quarter, the newspapers, and a babaláwo who carried Ifá back across the Atlantic.
The CMS mission and Crowther, how and why Yoruba people converted to two world religions, the British annexation, indirect rule and what it did to kingship, and the making of "Yoruba" as one identity.
Captured as a boy at Òṣogun and sold three times in a day, he became the first African Anglican bishop, wrote the first serious Yoruba grammar and dictionary, translated the Bible into Yoruba, and was broken at the end of his life by younger European missionaries.
The Kakanfò who went to war over a constitutional principle and lost his town, and the hunter who led the Ẹ̀gbá refugees to the rock at Abẹ́òkúta and governed them without a king.
How Abẹ́òkúta went from a chief without a crown to a crowned Aláké in 1854, and the attempt by returnee intellectuals and traditional chiefs to build a modern state there that collapsed in 1874.