The Unhappy, Blessed Day

“And as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.”

— Genesis 50:20, ASV

“Which I Shall Never Forget”

When Samuel Crowther sat down at Fourah Bay in February 1837 to tell the missionary society how he had come to Sierra Leone, he began with a day. “I suppose, some time about the commencement of the year 1821,” he wrote, “I was in my native country, enjoying the comforts of father and mother, and the affectionate love of brothers and sisters. From this period I must date the unhappy, but which I am now taught, in other respects, to call blessed day, which I shall never forget in my life.”

He explained the double name at once. It was an unhappy day “because it was the day in which I was violently turned out of my father’s house, and separated from my relations; and in which I was made to experience what is called to be in slavery.” It was a blessed day because it was “the day which Providence had marked out for me to set out on my journey” towards the place where the gospel was preached. He wrote those words sixteen years after the event, as a Christian, and the whole letter is shaped by that double vision. But he did not let the blessing cancel the grief. He told the story of the unhappy day in full.

The Morning of the Raid

“The morning in which my town, Ocho-gu, shared the same fate which many others had experienced, was fair and delightful; and most of the inhabitants were engaged in their respective occupations. We were preparing breakfast without any apprehension; when, about 9 o’clock a.m., a rumour was spread in the town, that the enemies had approached with intentions of hostility.”

The raiders surrounded the town before anyone could escape. The men of Osogun, many of them away and the rest surprised, had six gates and many weak places in the fence to defend. After three or four hours the enemy broke in. Crowther’s description of what followed is one of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of a slave raid ever written:

Here a most sorrowful scene imaginable was to be witnessed! — women, some with three, four, or six children clinging to their arms, with the infants on their backs, and such baggage as they could carry on their heads, running as fast as they could, through prickly shrubs, which, hooking their blies and other loads, drew them down from the heads of the bearers.

Mothers who could not carry both their children and their goods dropped the goods, and then found they could not save all the children either. The raiders caught them “with a noose of rope thrown over the neck of every individual, to be led in the manner of goats tied together, under the drove of one man.” Families were divided among different captors on the spot, “to see one another no more.”

Ajayi was caught with his mother, his two sisters, one of them a baby about ten months old, and a cousin. He had been carrying a bow and five arrows. He had lost the bow in the thorn bushes while trying to free himself, “before I could think of making any use of it against my enemies.” The last time he saw his father was when his father came from the fighting to tell them to run. Much later he learned that his father had been killed in another battle. “Here I must take thy leave, unhappy, comfortless father!” he wrote.

As they were led out through the burning town, some of the Fulani among the raiders took his cousin away from the group. They passed his grandfather’s house, already empty. They saw his grandmother at a distance in the crowd of captives for a few minutes, and then lost sight of her for ever. Old women who could not keep up were threatened with death on the spot. “O pitiful sight! whose heart would not bleed to have seen this?” That night, after a march of twenty miles past towns and villages already burned, they reached the raiders’ camp. “It was almost midnight before we reached the town, where we passed our doleful first night in bondage.”

Sold

The next morning the ropes were taken off their necks and the captives were brought to the chief of the raiders “as trophies at his feet.” The chief took Ajayi and one of his sisters. His mother and the baby went to others. “We dared not vent our grief by loud cries, but by very heavy sobs.” Within a few hours it was agreed that Ajayi should be traded for a horse. “Thus, in the space of twenty-four hours, being deprived of liberty and all other comforts, I was made the property of three different persons.”

The horse was taken on trial and turned out to be unsatisfactory, and after about two months Ajayi was returned to the chief, who took him to his own town. There, to his joy, he found his mother and the baby again. For three months he cut grass for the chief’s horses and visited his mother in her captor’s house, “without any fears or thoughts of being separated any more.” His mother told him that she had heard news of his other sister. He never saw her again.

Then, one evening, he was sent with a man to fetch some money from a neighbouring house, and found himself chained with other captives to be taken to market in the morning. His mother was in the same town, and he had not seen her for a day or two. He lay awake all night. At first cock-crow the traders set out with the captives, “with one hand chained to the neck.” Another boy in the chain, whose mother was also in the town, cried and begged to be allowed to see her, and was beaten into silence. “Seeing this, I dared not speak, although I thought we passed by the very house my mother was in. Thus was I separated from my mother and sister, my then only comforts, to meet no more in this world of misery.” He was wrong about that, as we shall see. But it would be twenty-five years.

The Dark Months

At the market town he was sold to a Muslim woman, who took him with her son southward through many towns towards the coast. He found himself among people who spoke another dialect, “a perfect stranger, having left the Eyo country far behind.” He lived about three months in a town called Toko, where he saw the heads of executed people nailed to the trees in the market-place, and heard of a woman shot for bewitching her husband.

His mistress spoke cheerfully of going on to the Popo country on the coast to buy tobacco and other fine things. Ajayi understood what that meant. It was where the Portuguese bought slaves. He lost his appetite and fell ill with dysentery. And then he did something that he confessed, sixteen years later, with a candour that is still startling:

I determined with myself that I would not go to the Popo country; but would make an end of myself, one way or another. In several nights I attempted strangling myself with my band; but had not courage enough to close the noose tight, so as to effect my purpose. May the Lord forgive me this sin! I determined, next, that I would leap out of the canoe into the river, when we should cross it in our way to that country.

Before he could try, his owner, seeing how he had changed, sold him on. Crowther’s comment on this is one of the most remarkable sentences in the letter: “Thus the Lord, while I knew Him not, led me not into temptation, and delivered me from evil.” He was quoting the Lord’s Prayer, which he would not have known until years later: “And bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” (Matthew 6:13, ASV). Looking back, he saw that the petition had been answered for him before he had ever prayed it.

At the next town he tried again to strangle himself, several times, and failed. “It was very singular,” he wrote, “that no thought of making use of a knife ever entered my mind.” He was traded again for tobacco, rum, and other goods, and kept in chains alone for some time until his new owner had collected enough slaves. He was taken to another town, and after two months more, to a slave market on the shore of a great lagoon. He had never seen so much water. “The sight of the river terrified me exceedingly, for I had never seen any thing like it in my life.” There he was sold again, for tobacco, and taken across the water by canoe at night to Lagos. “Nothing now terrified me more than the river, and the thought of going into another world.”

Ye Meant Evil

It is worth pausing at this point in the story, as Crowther himself did in writing it. A boy of about thirteen had in little more than a year lost his father, his home, his town, his grandmother, his sisters, and twice his mother. He had been sold or bartered at least six times. He had tried to kill himself, and failed. And he was now on the edge of the sea, among people whose language he did not speak, waiting to be sold to white men he had never seen.

Christians have often compared Crowther to Joseph, the son of Jacob, whose brothers sold him to traders for twenty pieces of silver, and who was carried into Egypt as a slave (Genesis 37:28). His first biographer made the comparison, and so do many sermons. It is a true comparison, and Crowther himself would not have objected to it. Years later, when Joseph had become the second man in Egypt and his brothers were afraid of his revenge, he told them: “ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.”

But the comparison can be made too quickly. Joseph did not say that what his brothers did was good. He said they meant it for evil, and it was evil. What he said was that God had been at work in it, for purposes they could not see. Crowther said the same. He called the day of his capture blessed, but he never called slavery good, and he never pretended that his losses were not losses. At the end of his letter he wrote: “Thus the day of my captivity was to me a blessed day, when considered in this respect; though certainly it must be unhappy also, in my being deprived on it of my father, mother, sisters, and all other relations.”

That double sentence is the key to his whole life. He held on to both halves of it, the grief and the gratitude, to the end.