Africa’s Own Children

“But ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” — Acts 1:8 (ASV)

For twelve years Crowther was a schoolmaster and tutor in Sierra Leone. Then, in 1841, the British government sent three iron steamers up the Niger River to make treaties against the slave trade, start a model farm, and bring the gospel. The missionary society sent two missionaries with them. One was “Mr. Samuel Crowther.” He was in his early thirties, with a wife expecting another child and four children at home. His prayer as he left: “May the Lord, who has been my guide from my youth up until now, keep them and me.”

On the river he taught sailors the alphabet, led prayers, and worked on a Yoruba vocabulary. At one town he met Yoruba people for the first time in twenty years and heard what had happened to his homeland in the wars. Some Muslim traders there told him God approved of the slave trade. He let the argument go and simply told them that the God who had brought him so far could do greater things. When he described how freed Africans lived in Sierra Leone, people said they could judge how good it was “merely by my appearance.” Without trying, he was the expedition’s best argument.

Then the fever came. Almost every European fell ill. Men jumped overboard in delirium. The captain of Crowther’s ship, a godly man who had invited him to his Bible class, died. Of about 150 Europeans, 42 died within about two months. The model farm was abandoned. The society itself called the expedition an “admitted failure.” But most of the Africans had stayed well.

On 2 November 1841 Crowther wrote a letter to London. He was careful. He did not want to say Europeans were not needed. He even wrote that he and his fellow Africans were “not sufficiently qualified for so great a work.” But he said it anyway: “I am reluctantly led to adopt the opinion, that Africa can chiefly be benefitted by her own Children.”

That sentence became the idea of his whole life. Not that Africans were better than Europeans, but that Africans could live where Europeans died, already spoke the languages, and could go where others couldn’t. The question was whether the church would train them, trust them and send them. A German missionary on the expedition wrote home asking whether Crowther himself might be ordained and sent. Within two years, he was.

Look at the order in Acts 1:8: Jerusalem first, then Judea, then Samaria, then the ends of the earth. The witness starts at home and spreads out, carried by people in their own place. You are somebody’s “own.” There are people in your school, your family, your street and your language that you can reach more naturally than any missionary from outside.

Crowther did not wait until he felt qualified. He said plainly that he wasn’t. He went anyway, and he trusted that “human learning will be of very little avail, if the heart is not inspired by the Holy Spirit from above.”

One thing to do this week: write down the names of three people who are “your own”: same school, same team, same family, same language. Pick one and pray for them by name every day this week. If a natural moment comes to talk about what you believe, don’t dodge it.