Asano

“Set me as a seal upon thy heart, As a seal upon thine arm: For love is strong as death; Jealousy is cruel as Sheol; The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, A very flame of Jehovah. Many waters cannot quench love, Neither can floods drown it: If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, He would utterly be contemned.”

— Song of Songs 8:6-7, ASV

The Other Half of the Story

Most of this book has followed Samuel Crowther up rivers, into kings’ courts, and across the sea to England. It has said little about the woman who stayed behind. That is partly the fault of the sources. Crowther’s journals are the journals of a travelling man, and his wife appears in them mostly as someone he left on the shore. We have none of her letters. But the silence does not mean that she was unimportant. For fifty-one years the missionary’s journeys rested on her.

Asano had been a slave child like him, rescued from a slave ship like him, and landed in Sierra Leone the same year as him. They had grown up in the same mission world, learned in the same schools, and married in 1829 when he was a young schoolmaster of about twenty-two. From 1830 the society’s reports list her as “Susanna Crowther, school-mistress.” She taught in the schools of the colony while he taught, and later kept the home at Abeokuta and at Lagos while he travelled. When he sailed with the Niger Expedition in 1841, he left her, as he wrote, “near her confinement, and four children.” When he went to England for ordination, and again and again up the river, she stayed.

Jesse Page, who wrote with the help of the family, put it simply. During her husband’s long journeys as explorer and as bishop, “Mrs. Crowther felt her part was to spare him, and faithfully fulfil the not less sacred ministry of home and children.”

The Children

They had six children, usually listed as Samuel, Abigail, Susan, Josiah, Juliana, and Dandeson. We have met some of them already. Samuel, the eldest, drew the little map that his father showed to the Queen. Juliana, as a small girl, was carried on the march up to Abeokuta in 1846, and a letter she wrote from there in 1849 survives. Dandeson shared his father’s captivity in 1867 and became Archdeacon of the Delta. Abigail married Thomas Babington Macaulay, an African clergyman who founded the CMS Grammar School at Lagos. It was Abigail who nursed her grandmother at the end, and Abigail who was with her father when he died. Her son, Herbert Macaulay, born in 1864, became a pioneer of Nigerian nationalism, and is often called its father. The slave boy from Osogun was the grandfather of one of the first men to demand that Nigeria govern itself.

The family remembered the home as a strict one. Crowther’s household, they told Page, was “very strict in discipline and in the observance of religious truths, which may be said to be bordering on a puritanic method.” No one missed church, class, or prayer meeting without giving a reason. Once one of the sons disobeyed his schoolmaster, was punished, and ran home in tears expecting sympathy. His father took him back to school himself, found out what had happened, and had the schoolmaster give him a dozen strokes of the birch in front of the other pupils, with a lecture that a schoolmaster was to be obeyed “in all things lawful and right.” It is not a story that modern parents will admire. It is typical of Victorian households, black and white, and it was told by his family with pride.

The Blucher Shoes

But the same father was, as Page put it, “a bright and entertaining father among his children.” In the evenings they gathered round his knees to hear stories of Osogun: of monkeys and rats, of the great family farm where he had hoed his heaps for the yams and then sat in the shade laughing at the slower boys. He taught them Yoruba proverbs and the fables that the language is full of.

Their favourite story was about his first shoes. At Fourah Bay (the family’s account dates it to the 1830s, which cannot be quite right, since by then he had been to London and was a married schoolmaster), he and three other students were made monitors, and to mark their new dignity they were given shoes, heavy army boots from the soldiers’ barracks called “Blucher shoes,” to wear to church every Sunday. None of them had ever worn shoes. When they laced them up in the dormitory that evening, none of them could take a step, and the pupils laughed at them. Crowther, as he told it, crawled to a corner, knelt, and then stood up holding on to the wall, and walked round and round the room with his hand on the wall until he could let go. The others followed. For months afterwards they would walk barefoot to church, carrying the shoes, and put them on at the church porch. Later they bought their own boots, “and were careful to buy those that made noise and creaked as we stepped with them, to our great delight and the admiration of our pupils.” He acted it out, and the children clapped and shouted.

It is a small story, but it tells us something. The bishop who was received by the Queen and given a doctorate by Oxford never forgot that he had once been a boy who could not walk in shoes. He did not tell the story with embarrassment. He told it as a joke against himself.

Eighteen Months

In the late 1870s Susan fell seriously ill. For eighteen months, as he wrote in 1880, his mind was “exercised … at the bedside of my dear sick wife.” He had hoped that she would recover in time for him to make his annual visitation of the Niger. She did not, and he faced the hardest choice of his ministry. On the one hand was his duty to his dying wife. On the other was the mission, which, as he wrote, was at that very time “disorganized in various ways which threatened its prosperity.” He chose his wife. “I was obliged to perform the first duty of charity at its proper place, for ‘charity begins at home.’”

For a man who had given his life to the mission, and who had so often left his family to go up the river, it was a significant decision. The mission could wait. His wife could not. He saw the illness, too, as part of God’s dealing with them both, “a rod in the Father’s hand to correct and cure the soul.”

They celebrated their golden wedding. Page, writing later, says that after it she was taken ill again while her husband was up the Niger on the Henry Venn, and that when he returned to Lagos he found her at the point of death. “It was,” he said, “one of her earnest wishes, during her long illness, that she might die in my arms, and this was granted her, though she never knew it, for she lay unconscious till her death.” Susan Crowther died at Lagos on 19 October 1880. Page says that he “mourned her loss with secret tears, and went about his work again.”

The words at the head of this chapter come from the Song of Songs, the Bible’s great poem of married love. “Many waters cannot quench love, Neither can floods drown it.” Asano and Ajayi had both been carried across the waters in slave ships. The waters had separated them from their homes and families. They had not separated them from each other. The Proverbs describe the worthy wife in words that Crowther’s children might have used of her: “Her children rise up, and call her blessed; Her husband also, and he praiseth her” (Proverbs 31:28, ASV).

The timing of her death was cruel. In the same weeks, a report on the state of the Niger Mission, written by a European missionary, reached Lagos for the bishop’s comments. It was the beginning of the long trial that would darken the last decade of his life. He had to face it without her.

His Mother

Three years later another death followed. His mother, Afala, baptised Hannah, had lived her last years under his roof at Lagos. She had kept to the end the resolution she had made when he found her again in 1846: that her son was “no longer my son, but the servant of God,” and that he must go about his work without worrying about her. He was up the Niger when she died, in October 1883, at an age thought to be ninety-seven. Abigail, her granddaughter, was with her. The old woman told Abigail not to write to her father about her illness, for fear of troubling his mind in his work. Near the end she said to her: “You are as good as your father’s being at home; keep near to me, you have a great work to do.”

He learned of her death when he came down the river. Writing in February 1884, he was thankful that she had been “spared to us so long in the midst of so many adverse changes in her course of life,” and that she had come at last “to know the Saviour in whom she placed her trust as her Good Shepherd to the end of her life.” He told the story of her last words, he said, “that you may know what value she placed on my missionary work among our heathen countrymen.”

Caleb’s Prayer

Between these two griefs he wrote one of the most hopeful letters of his life. On 26 February 1883, at Bonny, he wrote to his clergy of the good way the Lord had led him. He was about seventy-five. “I have been blessed with unbroken health,” he wrote, “that I have not been laid aside any day, week, month, or year from pursuing my duty, which is a rare blessing.” It was not quite true, since his journals record fevers, but it was how the years felt to him.

He told them that he had often made two “timid requests” in prayer, which he feared might “savour of selfishness.” The first was Caleb’s. When the Israelites divided the promised land, Caleb, at eighty-five, reminded Joshua of the promise that Moses had made him forty-five years before, when he had been one of the spies: “And now, behold, Jehovah hath kept me alive, as he spake, these forty and five years … As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me” (Joshua 14:10-11, ASV). And Caleb asked for the hill country, where the giants lived in great fortified cities.

Crowther had first gone up the Niger in 1841, a little over forty years before. The mountain he asked for, he said, was “the countries of the Niger territory.” The great fenced cities were “the strongholds of Mohammedanism and heathenism, fenced with deluding religions and strong shackles of slave system.” His second request was that before he was laid aside, every station should have a good and permanent church, so that his successors would be able to build a church that supported itself.

It is the prayer of an old man who does not think of himself as old. He had lost his wife. He would soon lose his mother. The trial of his mission had begun. And he asked God, like Caleb, for more hill country.