“Good Night”

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith:”

— 2 Timothy 4:7, ASV

The Stroke

Samuel Crowther had been remarkably strong. He had survived the fevers that killed so many of his European companions, the wreck at Jebba, the captivity with Abokko, and fifty years of travel by canoe and steamer in one of the unhealthiest climates on earth. In 1883 he had thanked God for “unbroken health.” He was now in his eighties, as nearly as anyone could tell, and still travelling.

In the summer of 1891, at Bonny, it ended. As he got up from his desk, he had a stroke. In October he described it in a letter to a friend in England: “I was laid aside by a sudden attack of paralysis, as I got up from my desk, which paralyzed my right hand and leg and affected my speech for many days, so that I could not speak audibly.” The doctor ordered a change of air, and he left Bonny on 25 September and reached Lagos three days later, to stay at the house of his daughter Abigail Macaulay. “I am thankful to say that I am improving,” he wrote, “hoping to be all right again in a few weeks. … Wishing soon to recover my health, to spend the remainder of my days in the service of our Divine Master.” In a later letter he apologised for his shaky handwriting.

A missionary who called on him found him slowly recovering but not himself. For hours he would sit in thought, looking out across the sea.

Stock, the society’s historian, was frank about the cause. “In his case,” he wrote, “as in Robinson’s, death was certainly hastened by anxiety and disappointment. For he on his part was also deeply dissatisfied with the Society’s decisions, although it was his full purpose to accept and act upon them.”

The Last Weeks

He did not stop working. On Christmas morning he walked to Christ Church, Lagos, for the last time. In the last days of December Archdeacon Hamilton, his old friend from the years of reform, landed at Lagos and spent an hour with him. Then he took the bishop on his arm to a meeting to send out seven schoolmasters from the training institution. At the end, the old man stood up and gave them his blessing, as Page put it, “tenderly, fatherly, with slow and faltering speech.” It was his last act of public service. The next day he spent much of the time on diocesan business with his visitors. He spoke of going back to Bonny in the first week of January, and wrote to the British consul for the Oil Rivers, who happened to be in Lagos, to ask for a passage in his steamer.

Hamilton and another visitor from the society brought him, in those last days, what Stock called “the assurance of the Committee’s unabated respect and affection.” There had been a letter from the society’s secretary in London, too, which his daughter read to him more than once. In an old diary, after his death, was found the draft of a reply, written in a feeble hand and never sent. A pencil note said that the doctor had forbidden him to write any more.

The letter is confused in places, as a letter written after a stroke might be. But its last lines are clear. The secretary seems to have sent him a memorandum about his good character, and he wrote that it was an answer to his prayer, that the God who had called him first from among his people “may give me grace to set a good example for others to follow.” And then: “Since my appointment to the superintendent of the Niger Mission in 1857 to the present I never refuse any suggestion made by the committee for the improvement of the Niger Mission. Though I am single-handed, I like to be improved by the ideas of others.”

It is a humble ending to a long correspondence. He did not defend himself. He did not accuse anyone. He simply said that he had always been willing to learn.

“Good Night”

Abigail Macaulay, in whose house he spent his last days, wrote down afterwards what happened on the last day of the year. Here is her account, in part.

He was up as usual on the morning of the 31st, dressed, and went through the morning devotions as he did every day; then had his tea after seven o’clock. About eight o’clock he sent to call me to read a letter to him. I took the letter and read it, and said: “Father, I have read this letter to you several times.” He said: “I have read it too.”

She left him sitting at the table with his Prayer Book, his hymn book, and some papers, and went to see about his breakfast. Later that morning an old Christian woman named Emma Taiwo came to visit him, and came back in haste to say that something was wrong. Abigail ran in just in time to catch him before he fell from the sofa. It seems he had had another stroke. The doctor was sent for. He spoke little after that, but answered when spoken to. In the afternoon he was helped to his bedroom. He took his medicine patiently, and when she asked about his cough he said, “No pain.”

At midnight when I came in to give him his medicine he sat up and said he hoped it was the last dose. He lay down, and as I covered him I said, “Good night, father,” and he said, “Good night.” Half an hour later I heard movements in his room and saw father just lying down, and I jumped on the bed, for I saw he was dying. “Father! father!” I cried. He heaved a sigh, and all was over. He passed away at a quarter to one in the morning.

His daughter’s account places his death, strictly, in the first hour of 1 January 1892. His memorial, his biographers, and the church calendars that remember him all give the date as 31 December 1891. Either way, he died at the turn of the year, quietly, in his daughter’s house, with his daughter beside him.

His last word was “Good night.” It is a word of trust. The psalmist said: “In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety” (Psalm 4:8, ASV). The boy who had lain awake in chains the night before he was taken to market, and the old man who had slept on a ridge of earth in Abokko’s camp with his cap under his head, lay down at last in peace.

The Funeral

He was buried on 1 January 1892, at Lagos. The funeral service was held at Christ Church, and the address was given by the Rev. James Johnson, one of the most outspoken African clergymen of his generation. The Governor of Lagos and most of the senior European officials attended. Ten clergymen, African and European, walked before the coffin, which was strewn with ferns and frangipani. He was laid in the grave beside his wife and his mother, and the mourners sang together, “Hush, blessed are the dead.”

Six years later a marble monument was unveiled over the grave by the Governor. Its inscription called him “a native of Osogun,” the first student of Fourah Bay College, and a servant of the Church Missionary Society for sixty-two years. It gave his age as “about 89 years.” No one knew his birthday. The inscription’s estimate would put his birth around 1802, several years earlier than most modern historians think likely. The uncertainty is itself part of his story. He had been born into a world without written records, and had spent his life giving that world a written language.

The Successor

The society chose an Englishman to succeed him. Joseph Sidney Hill, a gentle and able man who had served in West Africa and New Zealand, was consecrated in St. Paul’s Cathedral on 29 June 1893, twenty-nine years to the day after Crowther’s consecration at Canterbury. The diocese was enlarged to take in the Yoruba country, and renamed Western Equatorial Africa. With Hill two African clergymen, Charles Phillips and Isaac Oluwole, were consecrated as assistant bishops. It was a gesture of goodwill, and it was received as one. But it was also a sign of what had changed. In 1864 an African had been made the bishop. In 1893 Africans were made the assistants.

Hill barely began the work. He sailed in November 1893, reached Lagos in December, and within a month he and his wife were both dead, as so many Europeans before him had died. It would be many decades before another African was made a diocesan bishop in the Anglican Church in Nigeria.

Paul wrote to Timothy near the end of his life, in the words at the head of this chapter: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.” He was writing from prison, with many of his friends gone and some of them turned against him. It was not a triumphant ending, in the world’s eyes. But he knew what he had done, and to whom he had done it. So did Samuel Crowther.