Samuel Crowther: The Boy from the Slave Ship

When Samuel Crowther was a boy in Africa, he was not called Samuel at all. His name was Ajayi, and he lived in a town called Osogun, in the land of the Yoruba people, in what is now Nigeria. He had a mother and brothers and sisters and a home he loved.

One terrible morning when he was about twelve years old, raiders swept into the town. They set the houses on fire and dragged the people away in ropes to be sold as slaves. Ajayi was torn from his mother. He was sold once, and then again, and again, until at last he was pushed onto a crowded ship bound across the sea. Below the deck it was dark and hot and full of frightened people. He did not think he would ever see his home, or the sky, again.

But God had not forgotten the boy in the dark. Out on the water, a British ship came sailing after them. Its sailors hunted for slave ships and set the captives free. They caught Ajayi's ship, struck off the chains, and carried the freed people to a town called Freetown, in Sierra Leone, where they could begin a new life.

In Freetown, Ajayi did something he had never been allowed to do before: he went to school. He turned out to be a wonderful learner. He soaked up reading and writing the way dry ground soaks up rain. When he was baptised as a Christian, he took a new name — Samuel Crowther — but he never forgot Ajayi, or his people, or the language they spoke.

That last thing became his life's great work. Samuel had heard the good news of Jesus in English. But his own people, the Yoruba, could not read English. So Samuel sat down and began the long, patient job of putting the Bible into the Yoruba language, word by word, so that mothers and children and old men in his homeland could read it for themselves. He helped write down the Yoruba language for the very first time.

Samuel grew up to be a minister, and then, in 1864, something happened that had never happened before: he was made a bishop — the first African bishop in his church. The boy who had been sold in chains now led others in following Jesus, and he did it as an African, proud of the people he came from.

Samuel Crowther could have grown up bitter about all that had been done to him. Instead he spent his life giving his people the greatest gift he had been given: the words of God, in the language of home.