Introduction: The Bishop and His Biographers

“And Jehovah answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tablets, that he may run that readeth it.”

— Habakkuk 2:2, ASV

A Man Who Wrote It Down

Most of the people in this series left little writing behind them. Samuel Crowther was different. He was a careful, methodical man who kept journals on every voyage, wrote long letters to the Church Missionary Society in London, compiled grammars and vocabularies, translated large parts of the Bible, and published his charges to his clergy. He was also, from his teens, a teacher, and he knew the value of writing things down so that others could read and act on them. The verse at the head of this chapter is God’s command to the prophet Habakkuk to write his vision plainly, so that anyone who read it could run with it. Crowther wrote plainly, and he meant to be read.

The most important document for his early life is a letter he wrote on 22 February 1837, from Fourah Bay in Sierra Leone, to the Rev. William Jowett, secretary of the Church Missionary Society. It tells the story of his capture, his sale, his rescue, and his conversion. It was printed in 1842 as an appendix to the journals of the Niger Expedition of 1841, and it has been reprinted many times since. This book quotes it from that 1842 printing. Later copies, including the one in Jesse Page’s 1908 biography, contain small errors, some of which change the meaning. In one place Page’s version says the rescued captives began to have a “poor opinion” of the British sailors who had freed them; what Crowther wrote was a “good opinion.”

Page and Stock

Jesse Page, an English writer of Christian biographies, published two lives of Crowther. The first, in 1888, was written while Crowther was still alive, and Page says that he read the proofs aloud to the bishop, who corrected some of the dates. The second, The Black Bishop, published in 1908, is much longer and was written with the help of Crowther’s son Dandeson and with access to the missionary society’s archives. Both books are full of Crowther’s letters and journals, and both are indispensable.

But Page wrote as an admirer and as a friend of the missionary society, and in the racial language of his age. He calls Crowther “a little black boy,” speaks of “the peculiar temperament of the negro race,” and in one passage makes a remark about Jews and Africans that would be unprintable today. This book does not repeat that language except where it is needed to show how Crowther’s contemporaries thought. Page also records, from family tradition, stories about Crowther’s childhood that have no other support: that his mother was descended from a king of Oyo, that a diviner foretold he would serve the high God, that he saved the household gods from a fire. Page himself warns that the family’s genealogy should not be taken “too seriously”; the other stories he tells without any caution at all. This book tells them as family memory, not as fact.

Eugene Stock’s History of the Church Missionary Society, published in 1899, is the society’s own history, written from its archives. It is reliable on dates and names. On the crisis that darkened Crowther’s last years, it is the society’s side of the story, and it too uses racial language that would not be used now. Yet Stock, writing only eight years after Crowther’s death, admits that the young missionaries who purged the Niger Mission were “too severe,” and he says of Crowther that no tongue, “however malicious,” ever ventured to whisper a word against his personal character.

The Historians

Since the 1960s, historians have told Crowther’s story afresh. The great Nigerian historian J. F. Ade Ajayi studied the Christian missions of Nigeria from 1841 to 1891 and edited Crowther’s 1837 letter. E. A. Ayandele, another Nigerian historian, wrote about the missionary impact on Nigeria and was frank about Crowther’s weaknesses as an administrator. Andrew Walls, a Scottish historian who spent much of his life studying Christianity in Africa, called him “probably the most widely known African Christian of the nineteenth century,” and described his legacy as a faith that was “essentially African and essentially missionary.” Lamin Sanneh, from the Gambia, saw in Crowther’s translation work a turning point in the history of Christianity, because it put the Bible into African languages and so gave those languages new dignity. Jehu Hanciles, from Sierra Leone, has written about the church that Crowther’s son led after his death.

This book has learned from all of them, and it will say where they disagree. It does not reproduce their books, which are in copyright.

What Is Uncertain

Some things about Crowther’s life cannot now be known. The most basic is the year he was born. He never gave it. His first biographer’s dates imply about 1808 or 1809; the missionary society in 1842 said he was about eleven when he was captured in 1821, which would make it about 1810; his gravestone says he died “aged about 89,” which would make it about 1802. Andrew Walls’s estimate of about 1807 is followed in this book, always with the word “about.”

It is uncertain, too, whether his people should be called Egba or Oyo, two branches of the Yoruba. The name of the slave ship on which he was captured, usually given as the Esperança Feliz, rests on mission tradition, not on any record of the ship itself. Page’s two books give different versions of what Crowther said when he met his mother again after twenty-five years. And his daughter’s account of his death, read carefully, places it at about a quarter to one in the morning of the first day of 1892, although every record gives the last day of 1891. This book notes such things as they arise, without making too much of them.

The Harder Story

The most important question on which the sources disagree is the story of Crowther’s last years. The older books, Page’s especially, tell of a saintly old man, a mission troubled by some unworthy African agents, and a painful but necessary discipline carried out by the society. Modern historians tell of a bishop whose clergy were dismissed and suspended over his head by young Europeans who had lost faith in African leadership, in a decade when the racial attitudes of the British Empire were hardening. The truth is not simple. Some of the charges against some of Crowther’s agents were true; one of them concerned a real and terrible crime. Crowther was, by common consent, too lenient a disciplinarian. But the way in which his work was taken from him was unjust, and it was shaped by a belief that Africans could not lead their own church. This book will tell that story as carefully as it can.

The psalmist promised that the people of God would not hide the works of God from their children, but would be “telling to the generation to come the praises of Jehovah, And his strength, and his wondrous works that he hath done” (Psalm 78:4, ASV). Crowther’s life is one of those wondrous works. It deserves to be told truthfully, with its sorrows as well as its triumphs.