Appendix D: Notes on Sources and Method

“it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order … that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed.”

— Luke 1:3-4, ASV

This appendix explains where the story told in this book comes from, how the sources were weighed, and which popular claims have been corrected. It is written for readers who want to check the story for themselves, and for anyone who will retell it.

Crowther’s Own Writings

Samuel Crowther is unusual among the missionaries of his century in that so much of his own voice survives. Wherever possible, this book has let him speak for himself. The principal writings used are these, all now in the public domain:

• His letter of February 1837 to the Rev. William Jowett, describing his capture, enslavement, and rescue. It was printed as an appendix to the Journals of the Rev. James Frederick Schön and Mr. Samuel Crowther, who, with the Sanction of Her Majesty’s Government, Accompanied the Expedition up the Niger, in 1841 (London, 1842). The same volume contains his own journal of the 1841 expedition and his letter from Fernando Po on native agency. Jesse Page later reprinted the 1837 letter with a number of small errors, so this book quotes it from the 1842 printing.
• Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers (London, 1855), his account of the Pleiad voyage of 1854.
• The Gospel on the Banks of the Niger (London, 1859), with J. C. Taylor, the journals of the Dayspring expedition and the founding of the Niger Mission.
• A Charge Delivered on the Banks of the River Niger in West Africa (London, 1866), his first charge to his clergy.
• His paper on the Niger read to the Royal Geographical Society on 11 June 1877 and printed in its Proceedings.
• His letters and later charges, as quoted by Jesse Page and Eugene Stock.

The Biographers

Jesse Page wrote two popular lives, Samuel Crowther: The Slave Boy Who Became Bishop of the Niger (1888) and The Black Bishop: Samuel Adjai Crowther (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908). The second was written with the help of Crowther’s family, and it preserves many letters and family memories that are found nowhere else, including Abigail Macaulay’s account of her father’s death and the story of the Blucher shoes. Page is indispensable, but he must be read with care. He wrote at the family’s request, but with the society’s co-operation and as its friend, and he smooths over the crisis of 1890, giving almost no names and no details. He sometimes paraphrases letters rather than quoting them exactly, and several of his dates are wrong or inconsistent. He also imagines Crowther’s inner feelings freely, and writes in the language of racial superiority common in his time. This book has used Page for facts and quotations that can be checked or that are plausible, and has marked family stories as family stories.

Eugene Stock’s History of the Church Missionary Society (3 volumes, London, 1899) is the society’s official history, written by a man who was on its staff through the crisis. It is generally reliable on dates and on what the society decided, and it is honest in places, admitting that the young missionaries were “too severe.” But it tells the story from the society’s side, and it too uses the racial language of its time. A short American missionary booklet on Crowther, published at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1903, has not been relied on, as it contains too many errors.

Modern Historians

This book has drawn facts and interpretations, but not text, from the work of modern historians, especially:

• J. F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841-1891: The Making of a New Élite (1965), and his edition of the 1837 letter in P. D. Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered (1967).
• E. A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria 1842-1914 (1966).
• Andrew F. Walls, “The Legacy of Samuel Ajayi Crowther,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 16:1 (1992).
• Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (1989).
• Jehu Hanciles, Euthanasia of a Mission (2002), and his work on Dandeson Crowther.
• G. O. M. Tasie, Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta 1864-1918 (1978).
• P. R. McKenzie, Inter-religious Encounters in West Africa (1976), on Crowther’s approach to Islam and African religion.
• Emmanuel Egbunu, “Racial Tension in Mission,” Anvil 36:3 (2020).

These scholars have been read for what they establish, and are named in the text where their judgements are reported. Nothing from their books has been reproduced beyond short phrases.

Corrections to Popular Accounts

Crowther’s story is often retold, and some common claims are wrong or uncertain. This book has taken the following positions.

• His birth year is unknown. Popular accounts give 1806, 1807, 1809, or 1810 with confidence. His gravestone implies about 1802. No record exists. This book says “about 1807” and means it as an estimate.
• “The first African bishop.” He was the first African bishop of the Anglican Church, and the first African consecrated a bishop by the Church of England. He was not the first African bishop in history; the ancient churches of North Africa and Ethiopia had African bishops for centuries.
• “The first African Anglican priest.” He was not. Philip Quaque of Cape Coast was ordained in the Church of England in 1765. Crowther was, in Stock’s words, “the first African clergyman of our day,” and the first African ordained for the Church Missionary Society’s work in West Africa.
• The name of the slave ship. It is usually given as the Esperança Feliz. Crowther’s own letter does not name it. The name rests on mission tradition.
• He did not meet Asano on the slave ship. She was freed from a different ship, some months later.
• His mother’s baptism. Sources disagree on whether it was 5 or 6 February 1848, and on who baptised her. This book says only February 1848.
• “Never ill.” Page wrote that Crowther’s constitution was proof against fever. His own journals record bouts of fever and dysentery.
• The kidnapping by Abokko took place in September 1867, as his diary and the letters of the time show, not 1868, as he said himself ten years later.
• The Onitsha crime was real. Some modern retellings present all the charges against the Niger Mission as racist fabrications. A girl was killed at Onitsha by two of the mission’s African employees, about 1877, and they were convicted at Sierra Leone in 1882. No source suggests that the bishop knew of the crime, but one of the men, dismissed by him, had later been re-employed out of pity.
• He was not deposed. Popular accounts sometimes say that he was removed from his bishopric in 1890. He was not. He withdrew from the mission’s finance committee in protest, and remained bishop until his death.
• Numbers of clergy dismissed. A figure of “twelve of fifteen African pastors” dismissed circulates widely. This book has not been able to verify it, and does not use it. Stock’s own figures for the collapse of the mission’s staff between 1890 and 1893 are given in Chapter 23.
• The Delta Pastorate was not a secession from the Anglican Church. It was a withdrawal from the financial control of the missionary society. It remained part of the Church of England, and in time came back into closer relations with the society.
• The date of his death. His memorial and his church commemorations give 31 December 1891. His daughter’s account puts his death at a quarter to one in the morning, strictly 1 January 1892.
• The 2014 apology. Archbishop Justin Welby’s words at Canterbury were spoken in a sermon at a service of thanksgiving and repentance. This book has not found a separate formal resolution of apology by the Church Missionary Society, though the society’s own journal has since published a Nigerian archbishop’s account of the crisis as a racial injustice.
• Commemoration. The Episcopal Church in the United States and the Church of Nigeria commemorate him on 31 December. He does not appear in the national calendar of the Church of England.

Language

The nineteenth-century sources describe Africans in terms that are offensive today, and some of them, including Page and at times Stock, assume that Africans are an inferior race. Crowther himself sometimes used the language of his time, speaking of “heathen” and “savages” and of the people as “children.” This book has quoted such language only where it was necessary to show what Crowther faced or how he thought, and has tried to make clear where it stands. The terms “heathen” and “idolatry” are used, as Crowther used them, to describe religious practice from a Christian point of view, not to judge the worth of the people who practised it.

Scripture

All Scripture quotations are from the American Standard Version (1901). Crowther himself read the Authorized (King James) Version in English, and where he quotes Scripture in his own words, his wording has been kept.

Method

This book is not a work of original research in archives. It is an attempt to tell a true story accurately, for general readers, from the published sources. Where the sources are uncertain, the book says so. Where they disagree, it has preferred Crowther’s own contemporary writings to later recollections, and contemporary records to family memory. Where a detail rests only on a family story or on Page’s imagination, it has been marked as such or left out. No conversations have been invented. Every quotation attributed to Crowther or to anyone else comes from the sources named above, except Archbishop Welby’s words, which are from his sermon at Canterbury on 29 June 2014 as reported by Anglican News and quoted in Anvil.