Preface

“Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall haste to stretch out her hands unto God.”

— Psalm 68:31, ASV

The first four volumes of this series told the stories of Watchman Nee in China, John Hyde in the Punjab, Corrie ten Boom in Haarlem, and Mary Slessor in the forests of south-eastern Nigeria. Mary Slessor’s story ended on the Cross River in 1915. This fifth volume goes back a generation and a little to the west, to a boy who was born in the Yoruba country of what is now south-western Nigeria some time around 1807, and who died in Lagos as a bishop of the Church of England on the last night of 1891.

His name at birth was Ajayi. When he was about thirteen, raiders burned his town, tied a rope around his neck, and led him away with his mother and sisters. He was sold six times. He tried, more than once, to kill himself. He was put in chains on a Portuguese slave ship bound for the Americas, and that same evening two British warships stopped it. He was landed in Sierra Leone, a colony for people rescued from the slave trade. There he learned to read, came to faith in Christ, and was baptised with the name of an English clergyman he never met: Samuel Crowther. Forty-two years later, in Canterbury Cathedral, he was consecrated the first African bishop of the Anglican Church. In the congregation that day sat the woman who had taught him the alphabet, and, according to his biographer, the naval captain who had freed him.

Why Courage?

It would be easy to tell his life as a story of rising, from the slave pen to the bishop’s chair. It was that. But it was not a story of arriving. Crowther spent almost his whole life on the move, by canoe and steamer and on foot, up the Niger River and its tributaries, in country where he was often a stranger and sometimes a prisoner. He was shipwrecked and lived for a year beside the wreck. He was kidnapped and held for ransom, and the man who rescued him was killed. He preached to kings and to slaves, to Muslim scholars and to worshippers of the old gods, and he did it with a patience that his European colleagues sometimes mistook for weakness.

His hardest courage was needed at the end. In his last years, a new generation of young European missionaries decided that African clergy could not be trusted with the church he had built. They dismissed and suspended his African clergy over his head, including his own son. He did not fight back with the weapons they used. He protested, withdrew from their committee, and went on being their bishop. He died some sixteen months later. The man chosen to succeed him was a European, and for decades afterwards the African bishops on the Niger served only as assistants. It took the Church of England until 2014 to say publicly, in Canterbury Cathedral, that he had been “betrayed and let down and undermined,” and that “it was wrong.”

How This Book Is Written

Unlike Mary Slessor, Samuel Crowther left a great deal of writing in his own words, and almost all of it is in the public domain. There is the letter he wrote in 1837, describing his capture and rescue, one of the most vivid accounts of the slave trade by anyone who survived it. There are his journals of three expeditions up the Niger, published in 1842, 1855, and 1859. There are his sermons and his charges to his clergy. This book quotes him freely, and wherever possible it lets him tell his own story.

There are also two biographies by an English writer, Jesse Page, published in 1888 and 1908, and the official history of the Church Missionary Society by Eugene Stock, published in 1899. These are valuable, and they are also partial. Page was an admirer who wrote in the racial language of his day, and both he and Stock took the side of the missionary society in the crisis that clouded Crowther’s last years. Modern historians, many of them Nigerian, have told that story very differently. This book draws on all of them, and it will tell the reader which is which.

Scripture in This Book

As in the earlier volumes, all Scripture quotations are from the American Standard Version of 1901, which is in the public domain. Each chapter opens with a passage that carries its theme, and further passages are woven through the narrative.

The verse at the head of this preface was one Crowther loved. In a letter he wrote in 1829, while he was still a young schoolmaster in Sierra Leone, he said he had hope “that Africa will soon stretch forth her hands unto God.” The psalm speaks of Ethiopia, which in the Bible stands for the peoples of Africa beyond Egypt. For nineteenth-century Christians it became a prophecy of Africa’s turning to Christ. Crowther lived to see the first small churches of the Niger, and to see them humbled. He did not live to see what came after: the growth of Christianity in Nigeria into one of the largest churches in the world, most of it led, as he always believed it should be, by Africans. Paul told the Athenians that God “made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth … that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him” (Acts 17:26-27, ASV). This is the story of a man whom God found in a slave pen, and who spent his life helping his own people to find him too.