Christian History Magazine Collection

Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s consecration as the first African Anglican bishop looked like a great leap forward for the church. But the talented ex-slave collided with the roadblock of racism

Ted Olsen from Christian History magazine no. 79

“And he never saw his family again.”

For the millions of Africans taken as slaves between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, this sad statement is their story. But not so with Ajayi. In 1821, the 13-year-old member of the Yoruba tribe, from what is now western Nigeria, was eating breakfast when word came that Muslim slave raiders from another tribe were attacking his town.

“The most sorrowful scene imaginable was to be witnessed,” Ajayi would later recall. “Women, some with three, four, and six children clinging to their arms, with the infants on their backs, running as fast as they could through prickly shrubs. … While trying to disentangle themselves from the ropy shrubs, they were overtaken and caught by the enemies, by a rope noose thrown over the neck of every individual, to be led in the manner of goats tied together.”

Many families were separated this way, Ajayi wrote. But he, his mother, two sisters, and other family members ended up roped together. (He never again saw his father, who survived the raid but later died in a similar battle.)

But as Ajayi was bought and sold six separate times, he did become separated from his family. Despondent and suicidal, he was placed (with about 190 other captives) on a Portuguese slave ship near Lagos, bound for the transatlantic market.

The slavers, however, did not control the seas. Great Britain, which had abolished the slave trade the year Ajayi was born, was now feverishly atoning for its national sin through international abolitionist activities, including steaming its navy along the African coast. The Portuguese slave ship, the Esperanza Felix, hadn’t even traveled a day when the Myrmidon and Iphigenia began their attack.

More than half of the slaves died in the attack, but Ajayi survived, even encountering his Portuguese owner bound in fetters aboard the British ship. “[I] had the boldness to strike him on the head while he was standing by his son,” Ajayi later wrote. “An act, however, very wicked and unkind in its nature.”

British policy sent Ajayi not back to Nigeria, but to Sierra Leone, where abolitionists and missionaries had set up an evangelistic community—a light for the “dark continent.”

Eventually, Ajayi would not only return to Nigeria, but he would find his mother and other family members there. “We could not say much, but sat still, casting many an affectionate look towards each other, an affection which 25 years had not extinguished,” he said.

In the intervening time, Ajayi had been ordained as an Anglican priest and missionary to his native land. His mother was one of the first converts he baptized. She took the Christian name Hannah, because of its biblical significance. It is the name of the mother of the prophet Samuel—and by then Ajayi was already becoming widely known in English missionary circles under his new name: Samuel Ajayi Crowther. As Anglicanism’s first African bishop, Crowther would become the most famous African Christian of the century. But his struggles in that position—and the reasons behind them—are still debated today.

“White Man’s Graveyard”

“About the third year of my liberation from the slavery of man, I was convinced of another worse state of slavery, namely, that of sin and Satan,” Crowther wrote. “I was admitted into the visible Church of Christ here on earth as a soldier to fight manfully under his banner against spiritual enemies.”

The church embraced him quickly, and he soon became a model for what the missionaries had hoped for African converts. After a few years of schooling in the colony, he went to London, then returned to Sierra Leone to become one of the first four graduating students of Fourah Bay College, sub-Saharan Africa’s first university. He soon developed a reputation for linguistic skills and was recruited by the Church Missionary Society to work on the Niger Expedition of 1841.

This was only one year after David Livingstone had first left Scotland as a missionary to southern Africa, and if British Christians thought about Africa at all, it was usually as the White Man’s Graveyard. Nevertheless, the idea that drove Livingstone—Thomas Fowell Buxton’s belief that “Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization” in Africa could end slavery for all—was also behind the Niger Expedition. Crowther, along with a missionary of German descent named J. F. Schön, was to implement the Christianity part of the triad.

Two months into the journey, the chief medical officer wrote, “Fever of a most malignant character broke out on the Albert, and almost immediately on the other vessels, and abated not until the whole expedition was paralyzed.”

Discovery of the malaria parasite was still more than half a century away—Europeans knew nothing about how to protect themselves against it, thinking it was caused by “bad air” (thus the name of the disease). But they knew it could be deadly, as indeed it was to the Niger contingent.

One ship was loaded with the ill and sent back. Within two days there were enough casualties to send another. Eventually, all but 15 of the 145 Europeans on the Niger Expedition contracted malaria, and 40 died.

The mission is usually remembered as “ill-fated.” But Schön and Crowther survived—and Crowther’s reputation thrived. Not only was his work the most thorough of any on the journey, but he was an African, and thus deemed more fit for African travel. Schön urged the CMS to make Africans like Crowther a key part of evangelism on the continent.

A colleague in Sierra Leone agreed: “There is no one more fit to be entrusted with the ministry of the gospel, among his own brethren, than Samuel Crowther. However rarely the solid knowledge of Samuel Crowther is found among his brethren, it is so far more rarely combined with such modesty as his.”

The CMS head at the time, Henry Venn, needed little convincing. He believed overseas churches should be “self-supporting, self-governing, and self-extending,” and therefore wanted African priests and bishops to oversee the African churches. Crowther was an ideal candidate.

Crowther was summoned back to England and made a priest on Trinity Sunday, 1843. Then he returned to Sierra Leone and began preaching in both English and a language on which he had begun to write linguistic texts—his own native Yoruba.

This was probably the first time that an African language had been used in liturgy. It was certainly the first time the Yoruba had heard the gospel in their own tongue—something that Crowther himself found overwhelming.

“Although it was my own native language, with which I am well acquainted, yet on this occasion it appeared as if I were a babe, just learning to utter my mother-tongue,” he wrote. “The work in which I was engaged, the place where I stood, and the congregation before me, were altogether so new and strange, that the whole proceeding seemed to myself like a dream. … At the conclusion of the blessing, the whole church rang with ke oh sheh—so be it, so let it be!”

Shortly after his arrival, Crowther was sent to Abeokuta, Yorubaland (western Nigeria) with a German missionary named C. A. Gollmer, several Yoruba Christians from the Sierra Leone mission, and English missionary Henry Townsend—who would go down in history less for his mission work (he was reportedly an excellent linguist, devoted to Abeokuta) than for his opposition to Crowther.

Crowther’s team was greeted warmly, and each morning, between 100 and 200 of the town’s 50,000 people listened to him preach in Yoruba under a tree between two markets. Crowther’s mother, with whom he reunited during this time, was not his only convert.

Some historians suggest that the response was so positive because a local pagan oracle urged the town to be hospitable to the missionaries. Other forces were at work, too. When the missionaries organized British military reinforcements to help Abeokuta repel an invading army of some 10,000 to 15,000 men (and women!), it was hardly a surprise that other local chiefs asked for their own holy men with such friends. Buxton’s plan seemed to work in Abeokuta, as the town left the slave economy for the cotton trade.