Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Africa's First Anglican Bishop
December 31 · d. 1891
Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c.1809–1891) was the first African bishop of the Anglican Communion. Captured in a slave raid as a boy in Yorubaland and sold to slave traders, headed toward the infamous Middle Passage. He was freed by a British anti-slavery patrol, baptized in Sierra Leone, and eventually became a priest, a pioneering translator who first reduced his own Yoruba tongue to writing. In 1864 he was consecrated as the Bishop on the Niger. His life is the story of a gospel that came to a freed slave and went back through him to a continent that now holds the highest population of Anglican believers in the world.
Samuel Ajayi Crowther was born about the year 1809 in the town of Osogun, in Yorubaland. In what is now southwestern Nigeria, he was first called Ajayi. He was a boy of perhaps twelve when the slave-raiding wars that were tearing Yorubaland apart reached his own town. His hometown of Osogun was burned. Ajayi was seized along with his mother and two sisters. The slavers roped him to the other captives, and marched him away from his home. His father was killed in the attack and they intentionally separated him from the rest of his family, whom he wouldn't see again for twenty-five years. Over the days that followed he was sold and sold again, once, as he later wrote, bartered for a horse, and before that same sun had set traded on again for tobacco. He was being carried down to the coast, where the ships of the Atlantic slave trade waited. He was so young and so despairing that, by his own account, he tried more than once to end his own life on the road, but something stayed his hand. He could not bring himself to draw the noose tight.
In the spring of 1822 the slave ship that carried him was stopped at sea by the British navy's anti-slavery squadron, which patrolled that coast to intercept the trade. The captives were returned to Africa at Freetown, in Sierra Leone, the colony founded as a home for freed and rescued Africans. There, like many others, Ajayi was set free, but he was still 100s of miles from his home with no realistic way to return. He was taken in, taught, and after some years came to faith; he was baptized in 1825, and at the font he received or adopted the name of an English clergyman he likely never knew, Samuel Crowther who was an early supporter of the Church Missionary Society where he was educated. This borrowed name he would make unmistakably his own through his work across West Africa, establishing a beachhead of indigenously led Anglican missions that would one day span the continent.
Samuel proved to have a rare gift for languages and translation. He was the first student enrolled at the new mission college at Fourah Bay, and in time he turned that gift to the tongue he had been stolen from as a child. Ordained in 1843, he went back into the country of his birth with the Niger expeditions. On these missions, at Abeokuta, after nearly twenty-five years he found his own mother again, alive. She was baptized before she died, using a liturgy Samuel had helped translate into Yoruba. That service was a small part of the labor he had set himself what would become his monument. He gave the Yoruba language a writing system, made a grammar and a vocabulary where none had existed, and began to render the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into Yoruba. Through his work his people could read the Scriptures and pray the prayers in the language of their own hearths.
On St. Peter's Day, the 29th of June, 1864, in Canterbury Cathedral, Samuel Ajayi Crowther was consecrated a bishop, the first native African bishop the Anglican Communion had established. The church sent him back to the Niger as its shepherd. He gave the rest of his life to that mission, planting churches along the great river, ordaining African clergy, and pressing always that the Scriptures be carried to each people in its own tongue.
His last years held real sorrow. A younger generation of European missionaries, certain they knew better than the old African bishop, questioned his work and his clergy and stripped much of his authority away, and he died, in 1891 at Lagos, under that shadow. But the seed he had sown was long since in the ground, long past uprooting. Nothing could stop God giving his faithful labor growth. The Yoruba Scriptures he had made endured; the churches he had planted endured; his own son carried on the work after him. The boy who had been sold for a horse had given much of a continent the word of God in its own languages. The church he served on the Niger has become one of the largest in the whole Communion. What men had meant for evil, when they seized a child and sold him toward the sea, God had bent toward a good neither they nor the boy could have possibly imagined.
One of the harder truths that God's Word shows us, a single road that God sends us down can, be both an atrocity and a providence. When Joseph told the brothers who had sold him into slavery that what they meant for evil God had meant for good, he did not pretend the wrong was not a wrong. Nor did it define him or lead him into bitterness; the tragedy did not have the last word. God did through Joseph's faith. Samuel Crowther was sold, as Joseph was, by men who meant him only harm, and carried toward a fate designed to consume and spend him as a commodity. Would any of us, roped in that line of captives, have been able to call that road anything but cursed? And yet the boy who could not bring himself to end his own life on it lived to put the Scriptures into the hands of his own people in their own tongue, and to become the first of his continent to carry a shepherd's staff in the Anglican Communion. The gospel had crossed the continent to a rescued slave in Freetown; and in him it crossed back, and took root, and now shelters tens of millions where he was born. It does not excuse the evil to say that God outran it and redeemed it. Is any wrong so total that grace cannot reach behind it and draw out a harvest the wrongdoers never intended but God sowed in their wake. Crowther seems to have believed there was not, and his life is a long argument that he was right, a testament to God's redemption.
Crowther is exceptionally well documented for a nineteenth-century African churchman, and much of the record is in his own hand. He published journals of the Niger expeditions of 1841, 1854, and 1857, and his Yoruba grammar and vocabulary; his celebrated 1837 letter to the Church Missionary Society secretary William Jowett, recounting his capture and rescue, survives in the appendix to the 1842 Journals. The standard older life is Jesse Page's The Black Bishop (1908), reverent and full of quoted correspondence; the authoritative modern scholarship is J. F. A. Ajayi's Christian Missions in Nigeria (1965), with the interpretive essays of Andrew Walls and the translation studies of Lamin Sanneh.
Crowther was born about 1807 to 1809 (the sources vary; c.1809 is the usual form) at Osogun in the Oyo Yoruba country. Captured in the Yoruba wars around 1821 and sold through several hands toward the coast, he was aboard a Portuguese slaver when it was taken by the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron in 1822 and was landed and liberated at Freetown, Sierra Leone. He was baptized on 11 December 1825, taking the name of the Rev. Samuel Crowther of Christ Church, Newgate. The first pupil admitted to the CMS college at Fourah Bay, he accompanied the 1841 Niger Expedition, trained for orders, and was ordained deacon and then priest in 1843. He opened the CMS mission at Abeokuta in 1846, where he was reunited with his mother; led the Niger missions after the 1854 and 1857 expeditions; and produced foundational work in Yoruba, Igbo, and Nupe, above all the Yoruba Bible, completed in the mid-1880s.
On 29 June 1864 he was consecrated at Canterbury by Archbishop Charles Longley and licensed, in the formula of the day, bishop "in the said countries in Western Africa beyond the limits of our dominions," the see lying outside British territory. Oxford gave him the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity the same year. The legal form is worth noting: because his jurisdiction lay beyond the Crown's dominions, his consecration followed the same "beyond the dominions" pattern as the bishops of the young American church, rather than the colonial Letters Patent under which Charles Inglis had become the first overseas bishop of the Church of England in 1787. Crowther belongs, in strict mechanism, to the missionary rather than the colonial line; but both are fruit of the one nineteenth-century conviction, of which Inglis was the first instance and George Augustus Selwyn a leading Victorian example, that Anglican episcopacy could be planted in any land on earth.
The end of his episcopate was painful, and honesty requires it be told. In the 1880s a party of younger European CMS missionaries, led by Graham Wilmot Brooke and J. A. Robinson, challenged Crowther's policy of an African-staffed pastorate, imposed new financial and disciplinary controls, brought charges against his African clergy, and in effect took the mission out of his hands; he resigned from its finance committee in 1890 and died on 31 December 1891 at Lagos, aged about eighty-two. He was succeeded not by an African but by a European bishop, Joseph Sidney Hill, and the independent African episcopate he represented was not resumed for two generations. Later scholarship has read the episode as a case study in the racial retreat of late-Victorian mission, and has largely vindicated Crowther; his standing as the pioneer of an indigenous African church has only risen since.
Crowther is commemorated on 31 December, the day of his death, in the Episcopal Church and in the Church of Nigeria and other Anglican provinces; his liturgical color is white.
The collect appointed for him in the Episcopal calendar gathers the whole shape of his life into a single prayer:
Almighty God, you rescued Samuel Ajayi Crowther from slavery, sent him to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ to his people in Nigeria, and made him the first bishop from the people of West Africa: Grant that those who follow in his steps may reap what he has sown and find abundant help for the harvest; through him who took upon himself the form of a slave that we might be free, the same Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
He has no ancient iconographic attribute; the church remembers him instead through the nineteenth-century photographs and portraits of a dignified, bearded African bishop in rochet and chimere, and above all through the Yoruba Bible that remains in use. His truest monument is a linguistic one: he is honored as the pioneer who first gave the Yoruba their own written Scriptures, and as the first African to bear the office of bishop in a Communion whose center of life has since moved decisively toward the continent he served. He stands in Anglican memory beside the other bishops of the great missionary expansion, George Augustus Selwyn in the Pacific and Jackson Kemper on the American frontier.
Primary sources. Crowther's own writings are the place to begin, and they are freely available. The Journals of the Rev. James Frederick Schön and Mr. Samuel Crowther (1842) records the 1841 Niger Expedition and carries, in its appendix, his 1837 letter recounting his capture and rescue, the canonical text of that famous account. His Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers (1855) and, with J. C. Taylor, The Gospel on the Banks of the Niger (1859) record the later missions and the founding of the Onitsha station. His Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language (1852) is the foundation of written Yoruba.
Principal biography. Jesse Page's The Black Bishop: Samuel Adjai Crowther (1908) is the fullest older life, Edwardian and reverent, rich in his quoted letters; a shorter popular version, Samuel Crowther: The Slave Boy Who Became Bishop of the Niger, is on Project Canterbury.
Modern study. J. F. A. Ajayi's Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891 (1965) is the authoritative academic history of the mission and the crisis of Crowther's last years. Andrew F. Walls's essay on Crowther in The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (2002) is the single most-cited modern treatment, and Lamin Sanneh's Translating the Message (1989) sets Crowther at the heart of its account of Christianity as a translating, vernacular faith.
Online resources. His shorter Page biography and other texts are at Project Canterbury, and the Dictionary of African Christian Biography carries a full scholarly life.