Samuel Crowther

“Wherefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.”

— 2 Corinthians 5:17, ASV

Bathurst

Bathurst was one of the villages in the hills above Freetown where the colony settled the people the Navy rescued. It had been called Leopold; the government renamed it after a British minister. Its people came from dozens of African nations and spoke dozens of languages. They had been torn from their homes, marched to the coast, chained in holds, and set down in a strange land by strangers. Many of them were children. The Church Missionary Society, which had worked in Sierra Leone since 1804, ran the schools and churches in several of the villages, and at Bathurst the missionary was a man named Davey.

Ajayi was put into the school. He learned fast. “In about six months after my arrival at Sierra Leone,” he wrote, “I was able to read the New Testament with some degree of freedom; and was made a Monitor, for which I was rewarded with sevenpence-halfpenny per month.” A monitor was an older pupil who taught younger ones; the system allowed a single master to teach a large school. It is the first sign of the gift that would mark his whole life. As soon as he had learned something, he began to teach it.

At Bathurst he lived in the house of the missionary, Mr. Davey, and his wife. According to Page, he served as their pantry-boy, and in return his mistress taught him for half an hour every evening. Years later, widowed twice, she married another Bathurst missionary, John Weeks, a Cornish mechanic who had reached the colony in 1824 and who taught Crowther carpentry. It is as Mrs. Weeks that she appears later in this story, and she would remember those evening lessons forty years afterwards.

Samuel Crowther

The next part of his story he told in two sentences. “The Lord was pleased to open my heart to hearken to those things which were spoken by His servants; and being convinced that I was a sinner, and desired to obtain pardon through Jesus Christ, I was baptized on the 11th of December 1825, by the Rev. J. Raban.”

It is a very plain account. There is no vision, no crisis, no dramatic moment. He heard the gospel preached, he came to see that he was a sinner, and he wanted the forgiveness that Christ offered. The words “the Lord was pleased to open my heart” echo the story of Lydia in the Acts of the Apostles, “whose heart the Lord opened to give heed unto the things which were spoken by Paul.” That was how he understood it: not as something he had achieved, but as something God had done for him.

At his baptism he took a new name. He was named after Samuel Crowther, the vicar of Christ Church, Newgate Street, in the City of London, who had been one of the founding members of the Church Missionary Society. Henry Venn, the society’s great secretary, later said that it was Mrs. Davey, the later Mrs. Weeks, who chose the name. Before she came to Africa she had taught in Mr. Crowther’s Sunday school in London, and she gave the boy the name of her own pastor. The English clergyman died in 1829. He never met the African boy who carried his name, and could not have known what that boy would do with it.

The name was common among recaptives. Rescued Africans in Sierra Leone were often given the names of missionaries, benefactors, or English clergymen, and many of them, like Crowther, kept their African names alongside. For the rest of his life he signed himself Samuel Crowther, and later Samuel Adjai Crowther, using the old spelling of his Yoruba name. The African name was never lost.

Paul says that if anyone is in Christ, “he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.” For Ajayi of Osogun that was true in a literal way. He had a new name, a new language, a new faith, and a new country. But it would be a mistake to think that the old things were simply thrown away. The boy who had been a Yoruba did not stop being one. As we shall see, he would spend much of his life studying the language, the proverbs, and the customs of his own people, and insisting that the gospel should come to them in their own tongue. What passed away was the old slavery. What remained, and was made new, was Ajayi.

A Visit to England

In 1826 Mr. Davey returned to England on leave, and took Crowther with him. They landed at Portsmouth in August. For a few months Crowther attended the parish school in Liverpool Road, Islington, in north London. “It was my desire,” he wrote later, “to remain for a good while, to be qualified as a Teacher to my fellow-creatures; but Providence ordered it so, that, at my return, I had the wished-for instruction.” In another letter he admitted that he had “begged very hard” to stay, and that when he found it was not God’s will, “I cast myself upon Him, because He knows best.”

He came back to Sierra Leone in 1827 with some English clothes, including a blue suit and a beaver hat, and a mattress that someone in England had given him. Mr. Davey, recommending him as the one lad fit to be sent back to England for training, described him as a boy of “abilities far surpassing any I have met with before,” who “appears to be truly pious.” His only fear was that Crowther “should be lifted up too much” by his visit to England.

Fourah Bay

That same year the society opened a training institution at Fourah Bay, on the edge of Freetown, to prepare African teachers and ministers. It would become Fourah Bay College, for many years the only institution of higher education in West Africa. The first name on its roll of students was Samuel Crowther.

The principal was a German missionary, the Rev. C. L. F. Haensel, a strict and devout man who made his students clean their own rooms, wash their own clothes, and carry loads of rice on their heads, “just to remind them that they are not above” it. When Crowther arrived with his English mattress, Haensel forbade it. “This was too great a luxury,” he reported, “I at once forbade its entrance, to which he readily consented. I wish for the good of his own soul to see him in that state of lowliness of mind which Africans so easily lose by visits to England.” Haensel’s remark about Africans says more about Haensel than about Crowther. But Crowther took the mattress away without complaint, and years later he spoke of Haensel with admiration as “a peculiar person altogether; we could never find one to match him.”

Haensel, for his part, soon recognised what he had. “He is a very clever lad,” he wrote, “and it is a real pleasure to instruct him.” Later: “He is a lad of uncommon ability, steady conduct, a thirst for knowledge, and indefatigable industry.”

There was one complication. Haensel reported to his committee in March 1827 that Crowther was being admitted only on probation, “owing to the information which is received of an attachment entertained by him towards a girl who is schoolmistress at Bathurst.” Crowther said it would not interfere with his studies. Haensel was ready to trust him, but doubted “whether he knows himself sufficiently.”

Asano

The girl was named Asano. She was a Yoruba like him, and had also been rescued from a slave ship, captured by HMS Bann on 31 October 1822 and landed at Freetown the same year as Crowther. Page says that she had learned her letters at his side at Bathurst. At her baptism she took the name Susan Thompson. By the time Crowther went to Fourah Bay she was herself teaching in the school at Bathurst.

Crowther did not let her go. Two years later, when he was schoolmaster at the village of Regent, earning twenty-four pounds a year, he applied to the missionaries in council for permission to marry her. The council recorded that it had received “a satisfactory account … of the girl’s suitableness for a fellow-worker with him,” and gave its consent. They were married on 21 September 1829. The marriage lasted fifty-one years, until her death in 1880. By 1837 they had a son and two daughters; in the end there were six children.

Some popular accounts say that Crowther and Asano met on the slave ship. They did not. They were freed from different ships, six months apart. They met as two recaptive children in a mission school, two survivors of the same catastrophe, who had lost their homes and families and found each other.

“Pray for Africa”

In January 1829, while he was an assistant to Haensel at Fourah Bay, Crowther wrote a letter to the society in London. It is the earliest of his letters to survive in any length, and it shows a young man already thinking about his calling. He was not satisfied, he wrote, to be an assistant: “I am desiring to be instructed by God’s Holy Spirit that I may soon rise up and become a teacher to the others. I have hope that Africa will soon stretch forth her hands unto God.” He asked for prayer for a few African teachers who felt very few against so great a task. He reminded his readers that Elijah had stood alone against four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal, and that God had answered him (1 Kings 18:22). And he ended: “Pray for Africa is the prayer of your most humble, thankful, and obliged servant, Samuel Crowther.”

Over the next twelve years he taught at Regent and then at Wellington, and from 1834 he was a tutor at Fourah Bay. He studied Greek and theology. He began to collect words and phrases in Yoruba, the language of his childhood, which many of the recaptives in the colony spoke, and which had hardly yet been written down. He preached and taught in the villages. He was a respected member of the small African Christian community of Sierra Leone, a schoolmaster and a family man. It might have been his whole life.

He ended his 1837 letter to Mr. Jowett with a sentence from the Book of Common Prayer, where the service of God is called “perfect freedom.” “May I ever have a fresh desire to be engaged in the service of Christ,” he wrote, “for it is perfect freedom!” For a man who had been chained by the neck in a Lagos slave pen fifteen years earlier, the phrase was not a cliché. He had known the other kind of service. He knew what freedom was. And he had found, as Jesus promised, that “If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36, ASV).