The Helper of the Fatherless

“Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand: The helpless committeth himself unto thee; Thou hast been the helper of the fatherless.”

— Psalm 10:14, ASV

Going Home

In the late 1830s something unexpected began to happen in Sierra Leone. Some of the recaptives, having saved a little money by trade, bought ships and sailed back down the coast to the places from which they had been taken. Many of them were Egba Yoruba, and they found that their scattered people had built a new city, Abeokuta, among great granite rocks in the forest north of Lagos. Some of the returnees were Christians. They sent word back to Sierra Leone asking for missionaries to come and teach their people.

The Wesleyan missionary T. B. Freeman reached Abeokuta in 1842, and Henry Townsend of the Church Missionary Society visited soon afterwards. The society decided to open a mission to the Yoruba. It was the obvious work for its new African clergyman. On 18 December 1844 Crowther sailed from Freetown with Townsend and his wife, a German clergyman named C. A. Gollmer and his wife, and several African assistants, among them Mark Willoughby, who had been freed from the same slave ship on the same day as Crowther twenty-two years before.

They landed at Badagry, on the coast west of Lagos, on 17 January 1845. There they were held up for eighteen months. The chief of Abeokuta who had invited them, Shodeke, died just before they landed, and his successors hesitated. Mrs. Gollmer died. A Brazilian slave-trader named Domingo, who had no wish to see missionaries in the interior, did his best to block the road. The missionaries used the time to build, to preach, and to study. Crowther translated parts of the Prayer Book into Yoruba. At last the chiefs of Abeokuta sent word that they would receive them, and in the last days of July 1846 Crowther and Townsend set out along the forest road. They entered Abeokuta on 3 August 1846.

Twenty-Five Years

Crowther had been in the city less than three weeks when he received news he could hardly believe. His mother was alive. She was living with his sisters in a nearby town. He sent for them. His sisters, Page says, would not believe the message, but his mother came, with one of his half-brothers.

On 21 August 1846 he wrote in his journal:

The text for to-day in the Christian Almanac is “Thou art the Helper of the fatherless.” I have never felt the force of this text more than I did this day, as I have to relate that my mother, from whom I was torn away about five-and-twenty years ago, came with my brother in quest of me. When she saw me she trembled. She could not believe her own eyes. We grasped one another, looking at one another in silence and great astonishment, while the big tears rolled down her emaciated cheeks.

She held his hand and called him by the pet names his grandmother had used for him as a child. “We could not say much,” he wrote, “but sat still, casting many an affectionate look towards each other, a look which violence and oppression had long checked.” The two sisters who had been captured with him were living with her, with their children. “I cannot describe my feelings. I had given up all hope, and now, after a separation of twenty-five years, without any plan or device of mine, we were brought together again.”

There is a small puzzle in the sources. Jesse Page printed this journal entry twice, in 1888 and in 1908, and in one version Crowther speaks of “an affection which twenty-five years had not extinguished,” while in the other it had “nearly been extinguished.” We cannot now tell which is right. Both are true enough. Twenty-five years of separation, in which each believed the other lost for ever, would test any love. It had not died.

Her Story

His mother had her own story to tell, and it was a hard one. The two main sources tell it slightly differently. According to Eugene Stock, she had never been sold to the coast, but had remained a slave in the interior until her daughters were able to redeem her. According to Page’s 1908 account, she and her daughters had first regained their freedom through a half-brother. Years later, going to market, she and her eldest daughter had been kidnapped again. The daughter was ransomed by her husband, but the old woman was dragged from market to market, and sold as a domestic slave. She was sent by her mistress towards Abeokuta, captured again on the road, and sold again into hard bondage, until her daughter managed to scrape together enough cowrie shells to buy her back for four pounds ten shillings.

Whichever version is right in its details, the outline is the same. The woman who had been led away with a rope round her neck from the burning town of Osogun had spent a large part of the next twenty-five years as a slave. She was now old and thin. Her husband was dead, and so was the grandmother whose pet names for the boy she still remembered. And she had found her son again, not as the boy who had been taken, but as a clergyman in the dress of a white man, who had come back to her people with a message about a God she did not know.

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from a psalm that cries out against the violent and the oppressor, the men who lie in wait to catch the poor and drag them off in their net. “Thou hast seen it,” the psalmist says to God; “for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand: The helpless committeth himself unto thee; Thou hast been the helper of the fatherless.” Crowther read it on the morning of the day his mother came back to him, and it described his life exactly. He had been fatherless and helpless, and God had helped him. God had seen the raiders, the traders, and the slave-dealers, and had not forgotten.

Hannah

His mother came to live with him. At first she still worshipped the old gods. She believed that the spirit of her dead husband had brought her son back to her. Crowther was grieved to see her, as Page puts it, still without knowledge of the true God. She attended the services at the mission. Then she fell ill, and afterwards she told her son: “Had I been left alone I should have attributed my sickness to this or that deity, and should have made sacrifices accordingly; but now I have seen the folly of so doing, all my hopes are in the Lord Jesus Christ, whom now I serve.”

In February 1848 she was baptised, among the first converts of the Abeokuta mission. Page says it was on the 5th, and that her son baptised her himself; Stock says the 6th, and names only Henry Townsend as her teacher. What is agreed is the name she took. She was baptised Hannah, the name of the mother of the prophet Samuel.

The choice was deliberate. In the Bible, Hannah was a woman who had prayed for a son, and when her prayer was answered she gave him to the service of God. “For this child I prayed; and Jehovah hath given me my petition which I asked of him: therefore also I have granted him to Jehovah; as long as he liveth he is granted to Jehovah” (1 Samuel 1:27-28, ASV). Hannah Crowther had not given her son to God. He had been taken from her by force. But now she was given back to him, and she gave him, as it were, a second time. When he warned her that his work would keep him travelling, and that he could not stay at home with her as other members of the family might, she told him: “You are no longer my son, but the servant of God, whose work you must attend unto without any anxiety for me.” He recalled the words after her death, nearly forty years later.

She lived for another thirty-seven years, her last ones in Lagos, where she kept her Yoruba dress and sat in the market “like a true Yoruba woman,” as Page puts it. She died in October 1883, aged about ninety-seven, “as was supposed.” No one knew her real age either.

Abeokuta

The mission at Abeokuta grew. By August 1849 Crowther could report five hundred regular worshippers, eighty communicants, and two hundred people preparing for baptism. Other missionaries joined them, among them a German, David Hinderer, who came in 1849 and was later joined by his English wife Anna; they would work in Ibadan. In May 1849 a letter from Queen Victoria to the chief of Abeokuta was read in the town, sent with two Bibles and, from Prince Albert, a corn mill. Crowther’s daughter Julianna, then a girl, dictated a letter from Abeokuta, written out in her father’s hand, that survives. The family was together, in the Yoruba country, among his own people.

It was not a peaceful place. The Egba of Abeokuta had powerful enemies, among them the kingdom of Dahomey to the west, whose army raided for slaves to sell at the coast. In March 1851 the Dahomean army attacked Abeokuta. The Egba drove them off. Crowther knew as well as anyone what would have happened to the city’s people if they had not.

He had read the psalmist’s words on the morning his mother came back, and they had proved true. God had been the helper of the fatherless. He had seen the mischief and spite. He had given a Yoruba slave boy back to his mother, and a Yoruba mother back to her son, and both of them to himself.