Samuel Ajayi Crowther (For Teens)

A Yoruba man from what is now south-western Nigeria, born about 1807. He was captured in a slave raid in 1821, freed from a slave ship by the Royal Navy in 1822, and became a teacher, a Niger explorer, the leading translator of the Yoruba Bible, and in 1864 the first African bishop of the Anglican Church.

Yes. It tells how, as a boy, he tried more than once to take his own life, and how he later confessed it. It also tells the story of his last years, when young European missionaries suspended his African clergy over his head, without pretending that his mission had no real problems.

It is from a letter Crowther wrote in 1841, after a disastrous expedition in which many Europeans died of fever. He meant that Africans, who could live there and speak the languages, should be trained, trusted and sent to reach their own people with the gospel.

Yes, in 1851 at Windsor Castle. She came in quietly while he was showing Prince Albert some maps, lit the candles herself when the lamp went out, and heard him pray the Lord’s Prayer in Yoruba. She said it was “soft and melodious.”

No. In 1890 a committee at Onitsha suspended or dismissed some of his African clergy, including his own son. He withdrew from the committee in protest but remained bishop until he died. In 2014 the Archbishop of Canterbury said of how he was treated: “It was wrong.”

With patience and respect. He believed Christ is the truth and said so plainly when asked, but he told his clergy not to dispute with Muslims or insult the worshippers of the old gods. He wanted them to show “sympathy with all classes of hearers.”

From the full-length biography of Crowther, which draws on his own letters and journals and checks them against the missionary records and modern historians. A few stories were remembered by his family long afterwards, and this edition says so when it tells them.

That God can be at work in the worst thing that ever happens to you without making it any less bad; that your own language and people are worth something to God; and that you can answer people who wrong you without becoming like them.