Samuel Àjàyí Crowther

Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, born Àjàyí at Òṣogun around 1809 and dead at Lagos on 31 December 1891, is the single most consequential Yoruba figure of the nineteenth century by almost any measure. He was enslaved as a boy, liberated by the British anti-slavery squadron, educated in Sierra Leone, ordained in England, made the first African bishop in the Anglican communion, and led the Niger Mission for three decades. He also produced the first substantial grammar and vocabulary of the Yoruba language, translated the Bible into Yoruba, and did more than any other individual to establish Yoruba as a written language. In his last years the mission he had built was taken from him by European missionaries young enough to be his grandsons, on grounds that were racial and were understood as such at the time, and the reaction to that produced the independent African church movement.

His life is documented to an unusual degree because he wrote constantly, in letters, journals and reports preserved in the Church Missionary Society archive, and because he wrote an account of his own capture that is one of the very few first-person narratives of enslavement by a Yoruba person.

Òṣogun, 1821

Àjàyí was born at Òṣogun in the Ẹ̀gbá area of what was then Ọ̀yọ́ territory, around 1809. His father was named Àyẹmí and his mother Àfàlà 1. The town was destroyed in March 1821, during the collapse that followed the Ọ̀yọ́ revolution, by raiders described as Fulani and Ọ̀yọ́ Muslim 1.

He wrote his own account of it on 22 February 1837 from Fourah Bay, in a letter to the Reverend William Jowett, then a secretary of the Church Missionary Society 2. Its restraint is what makes it hard to read.

The morning in which my town, Ocho-gu (Osogun), shared the same fate that many others had experienced, was fair and delightful.

Your humble servant was thus caught with his mother, two sisters (one an infant about ten months old), and a cousin, while endeavouring to escape.

Thus, in the space of twenty-four hours, being deprived of liberty and all other comforts I was made the property of three different persons.

He was sold on repeatedly, at one point to a Muslim woman, at one point bartered for tobacco and rum, and passed down the chain toward the coast 2. He was put aboard a Portuguese slave ship at Lagos. The ship was intercepted on 7 April 1822 on the Lagos river by two British naval vessels, which he names as the Myrmidon and the Iphigenia, and he records the moment in a single sentence:

In the very same evening, we were surprised by two English men-of-war, and on the next morning found ourselves in the hands of new conquerors.

He reached Sierra Leone on 17 June 1822 2.

Notes on the text. The letter is in English, written by a man who had then been fifteen years out of Yorubaland and was writing to his mission's secretary, so it carries the register of that relationship. The phrase "new conquerors" for his liberators is not a slip. It is a precise description of what had happened to him from his own position: he had not been freed into anything he chose, he had been taken by a different power. The corpus notes that this is the reading a modern historian would give and that Crowther does not elaborate on it himself.

The three-layer translation rule does not apply here because Crowther wrote in English. That is itself a fact worth holding onto: the most important Yoruba writer of the century wrote his own life in the language of the people who had taken him, and then spent decades building the tools that would let Yoruba be written in Yoruba.

Sierra Leone

He was settled at Bathurst village in the Freetown area. He was baptised on 11 December 1825 by the Reverend John Raban, taking the name of Samuel Crowther, an English clergyman and CMS committee member, and he kept Àjàyí throughout his life 1. He was among the first students at Fourah Bay Institution, founded by the CMS in 1827, where he studied Latin, Greek and Temne, and he stayed on as a teacher 1.

He married Asano, a Muslim woman also liberated from a Portuguese slave ship in 1822, baptised Susan 1. Their descendants include Dandeson Coates Crowther, who became archdeacon of the Niger Delta, and their daughter Abigail, who married Thomas Babington Macaulay; the child of that marriage, Herbert Macaulay, became the founding figure of Nigerian nationalist politics 1. The line from the boy sold three times in a day to the man who organised the first Nigerian political party is three generations.

The 1841 Niger expedition and ordination

Crowther was attached to the 1841 British Niger expedition, an attempt to combat the slave trade by establishing legitimate commerce and agriculture upriver, travelling with the Reverend James Schön 1. The expedition was a disaster in health terms, with heavy European mortality from fever, and its most consequential outcome was that Schön and Crowther's joint report argued that the evangelisation of West Africa would have to be carried out by Africans. That argument, taken up by Henry Venn, the CMS secretary who became Crowther's patron, became CMS policy in the form of the "native pastorate" and the goal of self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating African churches.

He was brought to England for training at Islington and ordained in the Church of England in 1843, the first African to be so ordained by the CMS 1.

Abẹ́òkúta

He was sent to the Yoruba mission and in 1846 opened the CMS station at Abẹ́òkúta with the Reverend Henry Townsend 1. Abẹ́òkúta was the natural target: a new town formed by Ẹ̀gbá refugees, containing large numbers of people with kin among the Sierra Leone liberated Africans, and receiving a steady return migration of Saro from Freetown.

There he found his mother, Àfàlà, from whom he had been separated in 1821. She was baptised, taking the name Hannah. Nothing else in his life is recorded with quite that force of coincidence, and it is the episode that made him famous in the British missionary public.

The linguistic work

This is the part of his achievement that outlasts everything else, and it is the part most often mentioned in one line and passed over.

When Crowther began, Yoruba had no settled written form. Missionary attempts to write it produced inconsistent spellings and, critically, failed to represent tone, without which the language is ambiguous on the page in ways it never is in speech. Crowther's Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language appeared in 1843, with a grammar, and a much expanded edition in 1852 which included a collection of proverbs 1 3. He worked on the orthography that, with later revision, underlies the standard Yoruba writing system in use today, including the sub-dot letters for the open vowels ẹ and ọ and for ṣ.

He translated the Book of Common Prayer into Yoruba and worked on the Yoruba Bible, Bíbélì Mímọ́, completed in the mid-1880s 1. He also produced an Igbo primer in 1857 and a Nupe primer in 1860 with a grammar and vocabulary in 1864 1. He was, in effect, the first professional linguist of West African languages who was himself a speaker of one of them.

The translation questions this raises, principally what happens when a missionary translator must choose Yoruba words for God, spirit, sacrifice and sin, and what theological freight those choices carry in both directions, are treated in the language section of this corpus. The short version is that Crowther's choices, above all the use of Ọlọ́run for God, made the Yoruba Bible legible within an existing Yoruba religious vocabulary and simultaneously bound that vocabulary to Christian meanings. Neither the mission nor the tradition was unchanged by it.

Bishop

On 29 June 1864 Crowther was consecrated at Canterbury Cathedral by Archbishop Charles Longley as the first African bishop in the Anglican communion. Oxford gave him an honorary Doctor of Divinity 1.

The terms of the appointment were the problem, and they were deliberate. His licence from Queen Victoria empowered him as bishop "of the United Church of England and Ireland in the said countries in Western Africa beyond the limits of our dominions" 1 He was made a bishop of territory outside British jurisdiction and, in practice, outside the areas where European missionaries worked. The European missionaries in Yorubaland, Townsend among them, would not accept his jurisdiction over them, and had lobbied against his appointment 4. So the first African bishop was given a diocese carefully drawn to exclude the white clergy who would have had to obey him.

He had no European clergy under him and built the Niger Mission with African agents, mostly Sierra Leonean, working among Igbo, Nupe, Ijaw and Hausa communities along the river from the 1850s onward. For roughly thirty years it was an African-staffed, African-led mission, which is exactly what Venn's policy had been designed to produce.

The destruction of the Niger Mission

Venn died in 1873. The CMS that followed him was a different institution, shaped by the Keswick holiness revival, by a new generation of Cambridge-educated volunteers, and by the hardening racial theory of the late Victorian period. The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and the partition of Africa provided the political frame.

In 1887 John Alfred Robinson, a Cambridge scholar, was appointed joint secretary of the Yoruba and Niger missions 4. In 1890 Graham Wilmot Brooke, aged twenty-five, was given leadership of a new missionary party to the Niger, made up of young middle-class Englishmen who took Hudson Taylor's radical methods as their model 4. They came to purge what they saw as sin and laxity in the Niger church.

What followed at Onitsha in 1890 is documented in the CMS records and is not seriously disputed as to facts. The new party scrutinised Crowther's policies, methods and agents, brought charges against African pastors, and convened the finance committee to examine them. Archdeacon Eden overruled the bishop as chairman and pronounced the pastors suspended. Two European clergymen and one European layman suspended three African clergymen in the presence of the African bishop who had ordained them 4. Robinson circulated damaging reports about Crowther's administration 4.

The charges concerned laxity in discipline, financial irregularity and insufficient rigour. Some of the individual complaints had substance; mission stations run on tiny budgets across enormous distances generate exactly such problems, and Crowther was over eighty. But the standard applied was not one applied to European-run missions, the men applying it had been in Africa for months against Crowther's decades, and the framing was understood by contemporaries in racial terms. J. F. Ade Ajayi's assessment, which set the terms for later scholarship, is that the episode was the collapse of Venn's policy of African church leadership under the pressure of late-Victorian racism 5.

Crowther resigned his commissary functions in 1890 and had a stroke in 1891. He died on 31 December 1891 in Lagos 1. He was buried at Ajele Cemetery; his remains were later moved, an exhumation delayed from 1971 and carried out in 1976, with a cenotaph at the Cathedral Church of Christ, Lagos 1. He was succeeded on the Niger not by his son Dandeson but by a European bishop, which had been the point.

The consequence

The African church movement in Nigeria dates from this. The United Native African Church was founded in 1891, the year of Crowther's death, and the Native Baptist Church, the African Church and others followed. Yoruba Christians who had accepted mission authority on the understanding that it led toward an African-led church concluded from Crowther's treatment that it did not, and left 5 6. James Johnson and Mọjọlá Agbébí, treated in the following file, are the figures of that generation.

Reading him honestly, from both directions

Two verdicts circulate and both are partial.

The first makes him a hero of African achievement, which he was, and stops there. This version has to skip the fact that Crowther worked within and for a mission enterprise that was an arm of British expansion, that he supported the extension of British influence as a means of ending the slave trade, that his mission's activity helped prepare the ground for colonial rule on the Niger, and that his translation work bound Yoruba religious vocabulary to Christian meanings in ways that the corpus's language section treats as a live problem.

The second makes him a collaborator, a man who took the coloniser's religion and name and turned it on his own people. This version has to skip that he was a child who was sold three times in a day by people acting within a Yoruba and Muslim slaving economy, that he had no route back to Òṣogun because Òṣogun no longer existed, that the abolition he served was the thing that had saved his life, that he spent his career arguing for African leadership against Europeans who did not want it, and that he was destroyed at the end by the very institution he is accused of serving.

What can be said without either distortion: he was a man whose life was determined by two systems of violence, the Atlantic slave trade and European racial imperialism, who made from the space between them an achievement in language and institution-building that neither system intended and that outlasted both. The Yoruba Bible is still read. The orthography is still used. The dismissal at Onitsha is still the founding grievance of a large part of Nigerian Christianity.