Africa’s Own Children

“The little one shall become a thousand, and the small one a strong nation; I, Jehovah, will hasten it in its time.”

— Isaiah 60:22, ASV

Henry Venn

Behind almost every step of Crowther’s career stood one man. Henry Venn was the honorary secretary of the Church Missionary Society from 1841 until shortly before his death in 1873. He was a clergyman from a famous evangelical family, a tireless organiser, and a thinker about missions whose ideas were far ahead of his time.

Venn believed that the goal of a mission was to make itself unnecessary. Missionaries from abroad should plant churches, train local leaders, and then step aside. The new churches should become, in the phrase later associated with his name, self-supporting, self-governing, and self-extending. They should pay their own clergy, run their own affairs, and send out their own missionaries. When that had happened, the foreign mission could be withdrawn, like scaffolding from a finished building. Venn called this, with a phrase that has become famous, the “euthanasia” of a mission: its good and peaceful death, because its work was done.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, when most Europeans assumed that Africans and Asians would need European guidance for generations, this was a radical idea. Venn meant it seriously. And Samuel Crowther was, for him, its living proof. Here was an African who had been a slave, who had become a scholar, a translator, a clergyman, and a leader. If the Niger Mission could be run by Africans under an African, then the principle was established.

The Native Agents

Crowther had been saying the same thing since 1841, and he said it again, more sharply, in 1857. The Church had been slow to trust its African members. “Had not our candles been long kept under a bushel,” he wrote, “and the smoking flax long suppressed, surely the number of faithful native preachers would have been twice as many.” The images are from the Gospels. Jesus said that no one lights a lamp to put it under a bushel (Matthew 5:15), and Isaiah’s servant of the Lord would not quench “a dimly burning wick” (Isaiah 42:3, ASV). Crowther was saying, as politely as he could, that the Church had hidden its African lamps and quenched its African wicks.

The men he sent up the Niger were almost all, like himself, recaptives or the children of recaptives from Sierra Leone. They were Africans, but they were not natives of the Niger. Most of them had to learn the languages of the peoples they served, and some were as foreign in Onitsha as an Englishman would have been. The historian Andrew Walls points out that the Niger Mission was therefore “a compromise, rather than the full expression” of Venn’s principles. It was African, but it was not yet a church of the people of the soil. Crowther knew this. His aim was to train men from the Niger peoples themselves, and in time he would.

Nor were the agents perfect. Crowther had told Venn in 1854 that pioneers could not expect “instruments of the keenest edge.” Some of the men he sent were poorly educated. Some were more interested in trade than in teaching. A few would prove unworthy. But many were faithful, and they went, with their families, to places where no European could live, and stayed.

A Closed River

After the wreck at Jebba, the river was hard to reach. In 1859 a trading steamer, the Rainbow, was fired on from the banks in the Delta, and two men were killed. The trading houses of the coast, the African middlemen who had controlled the trade of the lower river for generations, did not want Laird’s steamers cutting them out, and they were willing to fight. Laird himself died in January 1861. In retaliation for the attack, a British warship shelled and burned the villages that had fired on the steamer. It was an early example of a pattern that would become familiar: trade followed by gunboats.

In the same year Britain annexed Lagos as a colony. The mission, like everything else on the coast, was becoming entangled with British power, whether it wished to be or not.

In 1862 a naval vessel, HMS Investigator, took Crowther up the river again, with a party of about thirty African teachers, wives, and children. They reached Onitsha on 5 September. The mission there had held on through the years when no ship could come. They reached Onitsha on 5 September, but the ship steamed on within hours and Crowther was not allowed to land. The mission there had held on alone.

The First Fruits

Nine days later, on 14 September 1862, at Gbebe near the Confluence, he baptised eight adults and one infant. They were the first people baptised anywhere on the Niger. Crowther called them “the first-fruits of the Niger Mission.”

It is hard now to feel how much that meant. The first European expedition up the Niger with missionaries had been in 1841. For twenty-one years men had died, ships had been wrecked and fired on, stations had been opened and left, and at the end of it nine people of the Niger had been baptised. By the standards of the societies in London it was a small result for a great cost. By the standards of the kingdom of God it was a beginning. The verse at the head of this chapter is God’s promise to Israel in exile: “The little one shall become a thousand, and the small one a strong nation; I, Jehovah, will hasten it in its time.” Crowther believed it. It would take longer than he lived to see it fulfilled, but it would be fulfilled beyond anything he imagined.

The Gbebe station did not last. When its protector, the local king Ama Abokko, died, the town was attacked and the station destroyed, and the Christians moved across the river to Lokoja, where the British had a small post. It was to become one of the centres of the mission.

“By Her Own Sons and Daughters”

J. C. Taylor, the young clergyman at Onitsha, had put the principle in a single sentence. After preaching at Nsube in 1857, Taylor wrote in his journal of Africa’s need to hear the gospel. And how was it to hear? “It cannot be otherwise but by her own sons and daughters.” Before he sailed, an old communicant in Sierra Leone had asked him in wonder, “our children too can go out like white men and preach the gospel?” The answer was yes.

In the Yoruba country, the king of Ketu, whom Crowther visited in 1853, had put it another way. “Hitherto I have had no helper,” he said; “now I have found one, I will hold it fast.” He meant the mission. But the helper he had found was an African, speaking his own language, who had once been carried through that country in chains.

By 1864 the Niger Mission had stations at Onitsha, Lokoja, and Akassa at the mouth of the river, with more planned. It was run, entirely, by Africans. Its leader was a priest who had been in orders for twenty-one years and was now in his late fifties. Henry Venn had a plan for him, and Crowther did not like it at all.