Onitsha, 1890

“For it was not an enemy that reproached me; Then I could have borne it: Neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; Then I would have hid myself from him: But it was thou, a man mine equal, My companion, and my familiar friend. We took sweet counsel together; We walked in the house of God with the throng.”

— Psalm 55:12-14, ASV

A New Generation

In the late 1880s a new kind of missionary began to arrive in Africa. They were young, well educated, and intensely earnest. Many came from Cambridge. Many had been shaped by the holiness movement associated with the Keswick Convention, with its call to a life of complete consecration, and by a fresh wave of missionary zeal in the English universities. They were ready to give up everything for Christ, and many of them did, dying of fever within months of landing. They also had very high standards, for themselves and for everyone else, and very little patience.

Two of them came to the Niger. John Alfred Robinson, a Cambridge graduate, became secretary of the mission in 1887. Graham Wilmot Brooke, a former cadet of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, longed to reach the Sudan, the great Muslim belt of Africa north of the Niger, and planned to reach it from the river. Together they drew up a plan for a new mission to the Hausa and the Muslim north. They meant to live as simply as the people, in local dress, and to renounce any claim to British protection. Their courage and self-denial were real. So was their low opinion of the African Christians they found at Lokoja.

The society accepted their plan and reorganised the Niger Mission around it. The Upper Niger, from Lokoja northwards, became the base for the new Sudan party. The Lower Niger and the Delta became a separate mission, with three English missionaries, one of whom, F. N. Eden, was its secretary. Both were to remain, in name, under the bishop. Some African agents on the upper river were moved or removed to make room for the new arrangements. Archdeacon Henry Johnson was asked to go to Lagos to await instructions.

On 20 January 1890, at a great valedictory meeting at Exeter Hall in London, the new missionaries were sent out. Crowther, who had been in England while the plans were made, was on the platform, and gave them his blessing. In February they all sailed for West Africa together, the old African bishop and the young Englishmen who would take his mission apart.

Lokoja

At Lokoja the Sudan party set to work with great energy. Stock, who admired them, described their work as partly “a work of correction.” They judged the Lokoja congregation unsatisfactory, and believed, in phrases they borrowed from the prophet Jeremiah, that they must “root out” and “pull down” before they could “build” and “plant.” They examined the African agents, kept some whom they judged truly godly, and got rid of others. Their letters home, printed in the society’s magazine, were full of zeal and full of criticism.

Their standard was that of the committee’s own words: missionaries must be “vessels meet for the Master’s use.” The phrase comes from Paul: “If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified, meet for the master’s use, prepared unto every good work” (2 Timothy 2:21, ASV). No one could object to the standard. The question was who was to judge, and how, and with what mercy.

The Meeting at Onitsha

In August 1890 the new committee for the lower mission met at Onitsha. Its members included the English missionaries, Bishop Crowther, Archdeacon Dandeson Crowther, and another African clergyman, the Rev. J. Boyle. Stock’s account of what happened is brief and careful. The two sides “entirely failed to agree as to either the policy or the personnel of the Mission.” The English members succeeded in carrying the dismissal of certain agents. They did not think it enough. So “the Secretary, acting for the C.M.S., gave separate notice, in its name, of suspension of some others from its employment.” Stock adds: “It is needless now to mention names.”

Nigerian historians, working from the society’s own archives, have filled in what Stock left out. Among those suspended were African clergy whom Crowther had himself ordained, and they were suspended in his presence. Among them was a veteran clergyman, Charles Paul, who had served the mission for decades. And among them was the bishop’s own son, the Archdeacon of the Delta, Dandeson Crowther. The English secretary, it seems, claimed the power to act for the society regardless of the committee. The old bishop, by these accounts, rose trembling to his feet to dissociate himself from what had been done, and withdrew from the committee.

He did not resign as bishop, and he was not removed. Popular accounts sometimes say that he was deposed or forced out. He was not. He remained Bishop of the Niger until he died. But he had seen his clergy suspended over his head by young men who had been in Africa a few months, and his authority over the mission that he had founded had been badly broken.

The psalm at the head of this chapter is David’s lament over betrayal by a friend. “For it was not an enemy that reproached me; Then I could have borne it.” Crowther had faced enemies all his life: the raiders who burned Osogun, the slave-dealers of Lagos, the chiefs of Bonny, Abokko. He had borne them. What he found hardest to bear came from his own side, from members of his own society and his own church, men he had blessed at Exeter Hall and sailed with to Africa. “We took sweet counsel together; We walked in the house of God with the throng.”

The Report

The news caused a storm on the whole West African coast, and deep division in London. The society’s committee sent a solemn letter to all its agents and congregations in West Africa, promising an impartial inquiry and restating its principles. A special sub-committee sat for many weeks. Eden and Brooke came to England to explain themselves. Stock, who was there, wrote that in twenty-five years there had been no question on which the committee had been so divided.

The report was issued in January 1891. On the individual cases, the action taken in Africa was “confirmed in some cases and reversed in others.” On the state of the mission, it made admissions on both sides. It confessed “the inadequacy of the provision made for the superintendence of the Mission.” It found that “the moral and spiritual condition of the congregations generally has in it at the present time much that is extremely lamentable.” And it added: “it is but just to the Bishop to say that from the commencement of the Mission most serious difficulties have beset him and surrounded every station.”

“Both sides on the Niger,” Stock wrote, “were grievously disappointed.” The young Englishmen thought the society had not gone far enough. The Africans thought it had endorsed an injustice. Crowther, according to Stock, “was also deeply dissatisfied with the Society’s decisions, although it was his full purpose to accept and act upon them.”

“Too Severe”

The young men did not live long. Robinson died in June 1891. Brooke died in March 1892. Eden resigned at the end of 1891. Their Sudan mission collapsed.

Eight years later Stock gave his judgement. “Robinson and Brooke — Brooke especially — were severe in their judgment of their African fellow-workers,” he wrote. “They were, indeed, too severe. They did not make sufficient allowance for racial weaknesses, and they were not patient enough with those who, like the venerable bishop himself, honestly differed from them. Their campaign against the evils on the Niger undoubtedly alienated the minds of many West Africans from the C.M.S., and it was long before confidence was restored.”

It is a revealing sentence. Stock thought the young men were wrong to be so harsh, though in the next breath he defended them, crediting their severity with the mission’s later improvement. But even in correcting them he speaks of “racial weaknesses,” as if Africans as a race were weaker than Europeans. That assumption, held even by the kind, was the real enemy of Crowther’s work. When Venn had made him a bishop in 1864, the society had believed that Africans could lead their own churches. By 1890 many in the society no longer believed it. The historian J. F. Ade Ajayi called these years “the turning of the tide.” The problems on the Niger were real. But the way they were handled, by young Englishmen overruling an old African bishop and his clergy, showed that something had changed in the way the society thought about Africans.

There were Christians on both sides who acted in good faith, and there was sin on both sides. Some of the African agents had been unfit for their work, and some had done great wrong. Crowther had been too slow to act. But the society had also failed him, by giving him an impossible task, by leaving him without support for years, and then by allowing young men who barely knew Africa to humiliate him and his clergy in public. The report of 1891 admitted part of this. It would take more than a century for the Church of England to admit the rest.