The Delta Churches

“Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee.”

— Psalm 76:10, ASV

Dandeson

The work in the Niger Delta became, in the 1870s and 1880s, the most fruitful part of Crowther’s diocese, and much of it was done by his youngest son. Dandeson Coates Crowther was named after a lay secretary of the missionary society in London. He had shared his father’s captivity at Abokko’s village and refused to leave him. On 19 June 1870, in St. Mary’s Church, Islington, in London, the parish where his father had gone to school as a young man, Samuel Crowther ordained his son deacon. The text was Paul’s word to Timothy: “Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” Page called it “the first time that a black Bishop had ordained his black son.” In 1878, by Stock’s account (1876 in some modern accounts), Dandeson became Archdeacon of the Lower Niger, which meant chiefly the Delta, with his base at Bonny.

The Delta was a hard field. Its trading towns, Bonny, Brass, New Calabar, and Okrika, were rich and proud, ruled by great trading Houses whose heads were among the most powerful men on the coast. Their wealth had once come from the slave trade and now came from palm oil. They were suspicious of anything that might upset the order on which their power rested, and Christianity, with its refusal of the town’s jujus and its insistence that slaves and masters were equal before God, threatened that order at its root.

Persecution at Bonny

In Bonny the chiefs turned against the Christians in the 1870s. Converts were beaten, starved, and killed. When the persecution was at its height, Crowther went to Bonny himself. He sat for hours under a tree waiting for the chiefs to meet him, and when they did, he spoke plainly. “I struck at the root at once,” he wrote. Some of the English traders, among them a captain named Boler, took the side of the mission. Slowly the persecution eased.

The converts’ faith was simple and strong. One of them said: “Jesus has taken charge of my heart, and padlocked it. The key is with Him.” A persecuting chief named Hart, on his deathbed, warned his people against the idols. St. Stephen’s Church at Bonny, first opened on New Year’s Day 1872, was reopened in 1880, and a chief named Squiss gave it a clock.

The Bonny chiefs also passed a law that twins, who had been killed there as elsewhere in the Delta, should be handed over to the mission instead. When one set of twins was born, a crowd came to seize them, and Dandeson stood at the door facing them while the pastors escaped through a window with the babies. The surviving twin was baptised Theodora Kezia Powell. Later the juju priest who had led the crowd was himself baptised.

Brass and Akassa

At Brass, further west, a chief named Thomas Spiff held firm through years of persecution. One of the persecutors, a chief named Oruwari, was eventually converted, and explained his change of heart with rueful honesty: “Those whom we persecuted … are growing fat, … we … are growing lean.” At Akassa, at the mouth of the Nun, the chiefs declared: “God be true, Juju be lie.”

The greatest event at Brass was the conversion of its king. Ockiya had renounced his household gods at the end of 1876 and handed three of them over to the mission. For three more years he prepared for baptism. He was required to keep only one wife, and he did. On Advent Sunday 1879 he was baptised, taking the name Josiah Constantine. He died two weeks later, calling on Christ. In 1883 Dandeson went to England to buy two iron churches for Brass, and when they arrived, two of the Christian chiefs, William Kennmer and Christopher Iwowari, fixed the first plates.

At Okrika, the Christian wife of a chief named Atorodibo refused to be chalked by the juju priest. That night enemies from Okoni ambushed the market women and killed nearly all of them. She was taken captive, and when she told her captor of the God of heaven he secretly paddled her home. In June 1881 Crowther confirmed converts at Nembe. In a village called Ayambo, the missionaries reported, there were no idols left at all, and they called it “the land of Israel.”

Onitsha

On the upper river, the work was harder. Onitsha, the first station, went through many troubles. In 1875 Crowther found some of the men at the trading posts, some European and many of them educated Africans, arguing from the Old Testament that polygamy was allowed, and some of the women converts hiring out their slaves as prostitutes. He preached against the traders from the pulpit. He also sent home some of the teachers from Sierra Leone whose “former habits” had made them unfit for the work. The mission was not a church of saints, and he knew it.

At one point the chiefs of Onitsha demanded that he order the Christian converts to go back to their old religion. He stood before them with a Bible in his hand and said: “to command these converts to return to idolatry is out of my power. I cannot do it, and I dare not do it.” It was the answer Peter and John had given the rulers of Jerusalem: “Whether it is right in the sight of God to hearken unto you rather than unto God, judge ye” (Acts 4:19, ASV).

In October 1879, after attacks on British traders, a Royal Navy gunboat, HMS Pioneer, shelled and burned Onitsha. The mission moved for a time across the river to Asaba. It was another of the episodes that tied the mission, in the minds of the Niger peoples, to British power, and it was not one that Crowther could prevent.

He went on working at translation. He had begun learning Igbo in the 1850s. In 1875 he chose the Isuama dialect as the standard for Igbo translation, because it seemed to be understood most widely. The choice was debated, and later translators chose differently, but it was the beginning of Igbo as a written language of the church. At Kipo Hill, a new station far up the river near Egga, the bishop, now nearly seventy, made bricks with his own hands.

The Wrath of Man

The verse at the head of this chapter is one that Crowther quoted about Bonny. It comes from a psalm celebrating God’s victory over the enemies of his people. “Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee.” The persecution meant to destroy the church had in the end made it stronger. The persecutors had become converts, and the martyrs had become seeds.

It would be too simple to say that the Delta churches grew only through persecution, or only through the courage of their members. They grew also because Christianity offered things that the old order did not: education, contact with the wider world, a religion in which slave and master stood equal, and freedom from the fear of the jujus. Some people came to church for those reasons and not for love of Christ, and Crowther knew it. But the courage was real. Men like Joshua Hart, the protomartyr of Bonny, and women like the chief’s wife at Okrika, paid for their faith with their lives or risked them. Years before in Freetown, Crowther had been silenced by a Shango drummer who charged that the Christians there lived no better than the heathen, and he had admitted that “the charge was too true.” The Christians of the Delta were answering that charge.

By the 1880s the Delta churches were largely supporting themselves. They were led, under the bishop, by an African archdeacon, and staffed by African clergy and teachers. They were, as nearly as any church in Africa at the time, what Henry Venn had dreamed of. They would soon be tested in a way that no one expected.