Cotton Gins and Gin

“And he will judge between the nations, and will decide concerning many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

— Isaiah 2:4, ASV

The Gospel and the Plough

Crowther believed that honest trade could help to end the slave trade. It was not an original idea. Thomas Fowell Buxton had argued it in the 1830s, and David Livingstone would make it famous with his call, at Cambridge in 1857, for “commerce and Christianity.” The reasoning was simple. The African rulers who sold captives to the coast did so because captives were the one thing European buyers would pay for. If they could sell palm oil, cotton, ivory, and shea butter instead, and get the same guns, cloth, and salt in return, they would have less reason to raid their neighbours for slaves. And a people who could grow and sell their own produce would be less easily exploited.

Crowther took this seriously and practically. In 1851, at Abeokuta, he began a small experiment with cotton. The mission bought a saw gin, a machine for separating cotton fibre from its seeds, and a deaf and dumb boy named Thomas Craig turned out to love working the gin, which everyone else avoided as too laborious to turn all day. He worked most of the five hundred pounds that were the first clean cotton produced at Abeokuta. From that small beginning, Crowther wrote nine years later, the chiefs and people of Abeokuta had begun “consigning their cotton to merchants in England of their own choice, being taught … to develop the resources of their own country.”

On the Niger he did the same. At the mission station at Gbebe there were cotton gins and a press for making bales. When a messenger came from the Nupe king, who suspected the mission of hostile intentions, Crowther showed him the schoolroom, the gins, and the bales, and sent him back with a message:

that we are Anasara; there, pointing to the schoolroom, we teach the Christian religion; pointing to the cotton gin, I said this is our gun; and to the clean cotton puffing out of it, that is our powder; and I said the cowries which are the proceeds of the operation are the shots which England, the warmest friend of Africa, earnestly desires she should receive largely.

“This is our gun.” It is a vivid picture of the prophet’s vision at the head of this chapter, in which the nations “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.” Crowther had seen what guns had done to the Yoruba country. He wanted the peoples of the Niger to fight with cotton gins instead.

The Royal Geographical Society

By the 1870s he knew the Niger better than any other living person, African or European. On 11 June 1877 he read a paper on the river to the Royal Geographical Society in London. He described its geography, its peoples, its trade routes, and its politics, and gave a survey of thirteen languages met along the Niger and the Benue. Hausa, he said, was “to Africa, what the French is to Europe,” a common tongue of trade that could carry the gospel far. He described the Fulani wars and the Nupe kingdom, and told the society that he had given a Hausa trader a letter for an old white man he had heard of far to the south-east, hoping it might reach David Livingstone. The trader brought it back undelivered; the white man, he had heard, was dead. “Whoever it might be,” Crowther said, “the trial to communicate was worth making.”

He argued that legitimate commerce would in time be “a silent but a sure death blow” to the domestic slavery of the interior, and gave as evidence that more than a thousand slaves had bought their freedom with money earned in the Lagos trade. The society later gave him a gold watch.

He also did not hesitate to criticise European traders. The closing of the river’s outlets by the Delta chiefs, he said, was partly the fault of “civilized interested influence also.” Some of the Europeans on the coast were no better than the people they called savages. Years before, in his journals, he had written of an English captain who ill-treated his Kru sailors: “what recommendation can it be to the character of civilized Englishmen, who come to civilize … Africa? … ‘Physician, heal thyself.’”

The Henry Venn

For years he had asked for a mission steamer, so that he would not have to travel in trading ships and gunboats. In March 1878 one was sent out, named after the man who had made him a bishop. The Henry Venn was built on the Clyde and launched as a “temperance ship,” carrying no alcohol. It was managed by a lay agent of the society named J. H. Ashcroft, who also took charge of the mission’s business affairs. That arrangement, as we shall see, would bring trouble.

Gin

The greatest evil of the trade on the Niger, in Crowther’s view, was not slaves but spirits. European traders, with spirits shipped mostly from Hamburg, poured cheap gin and rum into the Delta and up the river. It was the easiest thing to sell and the most profitable. Crowther had seen what drink did in the villages. In 1886 a town on the Niger complained that he had not brought a case of gin to open a meeting, as the traders did. “I told them plainly,” he wrote, “that it is against God’s religion to give them poison to drink, therefore they must never expect any from me.” The prophet had pronounced a woe on the man who did exactly what the traders were doing: “Woe unto him that giveth his neighbor drink, to thee that addest thy venom, and makest him drunken also” (Habakkuk 2:15, ASV).

He was not alone among African rulers in his view. The Muslim Emir of Nupe, Maliki, sent Crowther a letter, through one of Crowther’s African clergy, which was translated from the Hausa and preserved:

Salute Crowther, the great Christian minister. … it is about Barasa (rum or gin), Barasa, Barasa, Barasa — my God, it has ruined my country, it has ruined our people very much, it has made our people become mad!

The Emir had forbidden its sale in his kingdom. He begged Crowther to ask the society to ask the Queen to stop the traders bringing it. “For God and the prophet’s sake,” he wrote, “he (Crowther) must help us in this matter.” In December 1884 the society sent a deputation to the Foreign Office to plead against the liquor trade on the Niger. Little came of it. The liquor traffic was too profitable, and it paid too much of the cost of governing the coast.

It is a striking scene: a Muslim emir and an Anglican bishop, united against the gin of Christian Europe.

The Company

Crowther’s hopes for commerce were not entirely fulfilled. The trade that came up the Niger in the 1870s and 1880s was dominated by British firms, and after being merged into a single company they were chartered in 1886 as the Royal Niger Company, with power from the British government to govern the river. The company’s interest was profit, not the welfare of the peoples of the Niger. It fought wars, imposed monopolies, and in time handed over its territory to the colony of Nigeria. The trade that Crowther had hoped would free Africa from the slave trade became, in part, the road by which Africa was brought under colonial rule.

He did not live to see all of that, and it is not fair to blame him for it. His vision was of African farmers and traders freely selling their own produce, “consigning their cotton to merchants … of their own choice.” What came instead was a trading monopoly under a foreign flag. The prophet’s vision of swords beaten into ploughshares was not fulfilled on the Niger in his lifetime. But the vision was right, and so was his refusal to bring gin.