Ajayi of Osogun

“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance; And in thy book they were all written, Even the days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was none of them.”

— Psalm 139:16, ASV

Osogun

The boy who became Samuel Crowther was born in the town of Osogun, in the Yoruba country of what is now south-western Nigeria, about the year 1807. No one wrote down the date. His own account, written thirty years later, does not give his age, and the guesses of his biographers range over eight years. It is fitting, in a way. He was born into a world that kept its history in memory and song rather than in registers, and the first written record of his life would be made by the people who bought and sold him.

Osogun lies today in Oyo State, near the town of Iseyin. In Crowther’s childhood it was a substantial place. He remembered it as a town of about twelve thousand people, able to put three thousand men into the field, surrounded by a wooden fence some four miles round, with six gates. The houses were built of mud, some of them twelve feet high to the eaves, with tall roofs, arranged in square compounds around open courtyards, several of them joined together and belonging to one family, with passages running from one to another. It was, in his words, “the place of my birth, the play-ground of my childhood, and the place which I thought would be the repository of my mortal body in its old age.”

He grew up, as he later wrote, “enjoying the comforts of father and mother, and the affectionate love of brothers and sisters.” We know a little about his family, and much of what we know comes from family memory recorded long afterwards by his biographer Jesse Page, with help from Crowther’s children. According to that tradition, his father carried on the family trade of weaving, farmed, and was a man of some standing in the town; his grandfather had come from Ketu, to the west. His mother, Page says, bore the title Afala, which marked her as a priestess of Obatala, the Yoruba deity of creation and purity, charged with keeping the god’s white cloths clean. Her own name was Ibisomi. Family tradition also held that she was descended from Abiodun, one of the great kings of Oyo. Page admits that these are traditions, and that he could not test them. This book follows his caution.

His name, Ajayi, was one of the names the Yoruba gave according to the circumstances of a child’s birth. Page says it was given to a child born face downward. A story in the family said that a diviner, consulted at his birth, declared that the boy must not be given to the service of any of the old gods, because he was destined to serve Olorun, the high God, alone, and that his parents were troubled by this. It is the kind of story that families tell about a child who has become famous, and it may or may not be true. What is certain is that the God who made him saw him before anyone else did. The prophet says, “Jehovah hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name” (Isaiah 49:1, ASV). “Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance,” the psalmist writes; “in thy book they were all written, Even the days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was none of them.”

The World of Oyo

Osogun belonged to the Oyo empire, which for two centuries had been the greatest power in the Yoruba country. Its king, the Alaafin, ruled from the capital at Old Oyo, far to the north, over a network of towns that paid tribute and sent soldiers. Oyo’s strength lay in its cavalry and in its trade. Some of that trade was in human beings. Oyo had sold captives southward to the coast for generations, to the European ships that carried them to the Americas.

By the time Ajayi was born, Oyo was coming apart. Its rulers quarrelled among themselves. Around 1817 a general named Afonja, who governed the northern town of Ilorin, rebelled against the Alaafin and called on Muslim allies for help. Some of those allies were Fulani, part of the great Islamic movement that had swept across what is now northern Nigeria since 1804. Ilorin passed into Muslim hands and became a base for raiding. At about the same time the southern Yoruba towns fell to fighting among themselves in what became known as the Owu war. The result, over the next twenty years, was the ruin of much of the old Yoruba world. Towns were destroyed, their people scattered, killed, or enslaved. The refugees founded new towns, among them Abeokuta and Ibadan, which would become the centres of Yoruba life in the century to come.

Crowther himself described the wars that reached his town. “For some years,” he wrote in 1837, “wars had been carried on in my Eyo country, which was always attended with much devastation and bloodshed: the women, such men as had surrendered or were caught, with the children, were taken captives.” The raiders, he said, were Oyo Muslims, joined by Fulani and by escaped slaves, “making a formidable force of about 20,000, who annoyed the whole country. They had no other employment but selling slaves to the Spaniards and Portuguese on the coast.”

The Trade

It is important to understand what those last words meant. By 1821, when the raiders reached Osogun, Britain had outlawed its own slave trade for fourteen years, and was trying to stop other nations’ ships from carrying slaves. But the trade went on. Portuguese and Spanish ships, and ships sailing under other flags, still came to the coast of the Bight of Benin to buy captives for the plantations of Brazil and Cuba. Lagos, on its lagoon, was one of the busiest slave ports in West Africa. The wars in the Yoruba interior fed the trade, and the trade fed the wars. Every town that fell produced captives who could be sold for guns, cloth, tobacco, and rum.

Nobody in this story was innocent. African rulers and raiders captured and sold people. African traders marched them to the coast. European and Brazilian merchants bought them and shipped them across the Atlantic, where the plantations of the Americas worked them to death. Crowther, when he came to write about it, did not spare anyone: he described the cruelty of the raiders, the traders, and the Portuguese buyers with the same plain honesty. What he was chiefly concerned to describe, though, was not the system. It was what happened to one boy and his family on one morning in 1821.

A Childhood

Before that morning, he had been a child like others in a prosperous Yoruba town. Page records, again from family memory, that he was the leader of a club of about forty boys who worked the farms together, and that once, when fire broke out in the family compound, he carried the household gods out of the flames. If true, it is a telling detail. The boy who would one day preach against the worship of images was, as a child, devoted to them, as any Yoruba boy of his time would have been.

His family was a large one. He had an elder brother, whom Page calls Bola, and several sisters. His father’s house, his grandfather’s house, and the homes of his aunts and cousins stood near one another in the town. He knew the paths to the farms, the markets, the shrines, and the stream where the women drew water. He knew his own dialect of Yoruba, the one he would later call “my own,” and he knew no other. He had never seen the sea, a great river, or a white man.

He could not have imagined that he would one day stand in the presence of the Queen of England, preach in English cathedrals, and be consecrated a bishop. Nor could he have imagined the road by which he would get there. The psalm at the head of this chapter says that all his days were written in God’s book before one of them came to be. That is a comforting thought, and also a solemn one. The days written for Ajayi of Osogun included the one that was about to come.