In Our Own Language

“And how hear we, every man in our own language wherein we were born?”

— Acts 2:8, ASV

Writing Down a Language

When Samuel Crowther was born, Yoruba had hardly ever been written, except here and there by Muslim scholars in Arabic script. It was a rich language, full of proverbs, poetry, praise-songs, and the verses of the Ifa diviners, but all of it lived in memory and speech. By the time he died, there was a Yoruba Bible, a Yoruba Prayer Book, grammars, dictionaries, schoolbooks, and newspapers, and the language had a standard written form that is still, with changes, the basis of the one used today. Crowther was not the only person responsible for that change, but he was, as Andrew Walls puts it, the principal influence in it.

He had begun collecting Yoruba words in Sierra Leone in the 1830s. On the 1841 voyage he filled in the Yoruba column of the government’s vocabulary. In 1843, while he was studying for ordination, the society published his Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language, with a short grammar. It was the first such work by a native speaker. An enlarged grammar and vocabulary followed in 1852. He translated parts of the Bible and the Prayer Book, beginning with Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles on his voyage home in 1843, and he never stopped.

Writing down a language is harder than it sounds. Yoruba is a tonal language, in which the same syllable spoken on a high, middle, or low pitch may have entirely different meanings. It has sounds that the English alphabet has no letters for. Missionaries in different places had been spelling it in different ways. In the 1850s the society brought together Crowther, Henry Townsend, and several European scholars to settle a common system, with marks under certain letters and tone marks over vowels. The system owed much to Henry Venn and to the German scholar Richard Lepsius, and to careful proof-reading by others. The resulting orthography was not perfect, and it has been revised since, but it made possible a Yoruba literature.

The translation of the whole Bible was a team effort, over forty years. Townsend, Hinderer, Gollmer, the Yoruba clergyman Thomas King, and others all took part. Crowther’s part was the largest, and his instinct for the living language shaped the whole. The complete Yoruba Bible was published in 1884, a few years before his death. Popular accounts sometimes say that he translated it alone. He would have been the first to correct them.

Listening to the Elders

He was a native speaker, working in his mother tongue, and that was his great advantage over every European translator. He noticed that some Yoruba customs resembled those of the Old Testament, and wondered at it. And he insisted, all his life, that missionaries must do the same. “The plan of studying the language of the people, and translating the Scriptures into it,” he had written in 1841, “ought to be immediately adopted by every Missionary.”

The historian Lamin Sanneh, from the Gambia, argued that this commitment to translation was one of the most important things that ever happened to African Christianity. When the Bible is translated into a people’s language, he pointed out, that language is declared worthy to carry the word of God. The people who speak it are no longer required to become someone else in order to become Christians. Crowther did not use those words, but he acted on the idea. For him the gospel was not an English possession that Africans had to learn English to receive. It could speak Yoruba.

The verse at the head of this chapter describes the day of Pentecost. The disciples, filled with the Spirit, began to speak, and a crowd of Jews from all over the world, from Parthia and Mesopotamia, from Egypt and Libya and Rome, heard them in their own languages. “And how hear we,” they asked in amazement, “every man in our own language wherein we were born?” The first sign of the Spirit’s coming was that the gospel was heard in many languages at once. From that day, Christianity has been a translated faith, never bound to the language of its founders. Crowther’s work stood in that tradition.

England, 1851

In 1851 Crowther returned to England. Henry Venn, the society’s secretary, wanted him to help persuade the British government to act against the slave trade at Lagos, where a ruler named Kosoko was protecting the slave-dealers. Crowther met the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, at his house in August. The society remembered, and Stock repeated, that Palmerston asked him in astonishment whether he meant to say that he had himself been a slave. Palmerston afterwards wrote him a letter promising the government’s concern for Abeokuta.

In November he went to Windsor Castle. He had an appointment to see Prince Albert, who was interested in Africa and in the campaign against slavery, and he went with Lord Wriothesley Russell, a clergyman and friend of the society. He left an account of the day, and it is one of the pleasantest things he ever wrote.

He talked with Prince Albert about Abeokuta and Lagos, and showed him a small map that his eldest son, Samuel, had drawn. While they were talking, a lady came quietly into the room and joined them. She was dressed simply, and Crowther did not at first realise who she was. It was Queen Victoria. “She did not come in state,” he wrote, “but simply like any other lady.” When the lamp by which they were looking at the maps went out, the Queen herself lit candles. Lord Wriothesley Russell asked Crowther to say something in Yoruba. He repeated a Yoruba proverb, and then, so that the Queen could hear the language better, the Lord’s Prayer. The Queen said it was “soft and melodious.” She stayed nearly half an hour. Crowther was with the Prince for an hour and a quarter.

This story has often been embellished, with the Queen summoning the former slave to her throne and demanding to hear the prayer. The truth, as he told it, is gentler and more human: a lady “simply dressed,” a lamp that went out, and a Yoruba clergyman saying “Our Father” in his own language to the Queen of England by candlelight.

Lagos

There is another side to the story. Prince Albert, looking at the map, remarked that Lagos “ought to be knocked down.” A month later, in December 1851, the Royal Navy attacked Lagos, drove out Kosoko, and put his rival Akitoye on the throne, on condition that he end the slave trade. Crowther’s visit was one of many voices urging action, and it would be wrong to say that it caused the attack. But he was part of the campaign that brought it about, and he welcomed the result. Ten years later, in 1861, Britain annexed Lagos as a colony. It was the beginning of British rule in what would become Nigeria.

Crowther, like most African Christians of his generation, saw British power as a protection against the slave trade that had destroyed his childhood. He was not wrong about the slave trade. He could not foresee what British rule would become. This book will return to that tension more than once.

“A Real Man of Africa”

Before he left England, Crowther spoke to students at Cambridge. He reminded them of Paul’s vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over into Macedonia, and help us” (Acts 16:9, ASV). Then he said: “It is no vision that you see now; it is a real man of Africa that stands before you.” He met again the naval captain who had freed him, Henry Leeke, now Sir Henry, and embraced him, and preached in his parish church in Kent. At a farewell meeting in Islington in December, the society sent him back to Africa with its blessing.

He had been a slave boy who could not speak English. He had now spoken, in his own language, before the Queen. But what mattered to him was not that he had been heard at Windsor. It was that the people of the Yoruba country, and of the Niger beyond it, should hear the gospel in the language wherein they were born.