Samuel Adjai Crowther |
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SAMUEL ADJAI CROWTHER, foe of the slave trade and the liquor traffic in Africa and pioneer of civilization in the basin of the Niger, was the first Negro on record to be ordained a bishop of the United Church of Great Britain and Ireland. Crowther was born in West Africa about 1806, and belonged to the Yoruba, one of the oldest and most advanced of the tribes of Africa. His father, who was a bale, or duke, was wealthy, having made his fortune by the weaving of a certain fabric of his own design. Adjai--he was so named because he was born with his face to the ground--showed spirit and enthusiasm from his earliest years. He was only ten years old when he rescued a family from a blaze, which destroyed his home, plunging through the flames to do so. He started on his own as a breeder of poultry and cultivator of African yams, walking seven miles each morning to his fields. He was successful and prosperous. The town in which he lived had 12,000 inhabitants and was protected by stockades and a force of 3000 fighting men. One morning as he was about to leave for his farm, he heard a great uproar. Rushing out he found that a battle was in progress with an army of slave raiders. Victorious, the attackers seized him, his mother, and his brothers and took them to the coast where Adjai was torn away from his mother and sold. In riveted chains, he and a group of others were put aboard a Portuguese ship, the Esperanza Feliz, for transport to America. In the filthy hold where he and his fellows were packed, young Adjai suffered frightfully from nausea and seasickness. On the third day out, sounds of a commotion on deck came to him in the hold and soon afterward uniformed men came below and marched him and the other terrified captives out. Adjai thought his end had come. But the newcomers were English sailors, whose ship, the Myrmidon, had captured the Portuguese vessel. It was not easy to reassure the slaves that they were really saved, and Adjai when taken aboard the warship was alarmed when his glance fell on a side of newly-shaved pork glistening white in the sunlight. It looked so much like the color of his captors that he felt sure he had fallen among cannibals. Years later when he met the captain of the same warship under altogether different circumstances, both laughed heartily at the incident. Adjai was taken to Sierra Leone and placed in a missionary school, where he was baptized and given the name of Crowther. From there he was sent to England for further training and upon graduation he was sent back to Sierra Leone to teach. His salary was only $5 a month, but he was grateful. In those days Sierra Leone was very unhealthful for Europeans. It was known as "the white man's grave." Many missionaries succumbed to its fevers. The Church Missionary Society decided, therefore, that if West Africa was ever to be won over to Christianity, it would have to be largely through native missionaries. Crowther seemed to them to be promising material in way. Like a true missionary, Crowther was self-sacrificing. Upon return from England he had brought back with him many among them white stockings, clothes, and a fine mattress that been a gift from his English friends. When the head Haensal, a white man, advised him to part with these and live the simpler life of the native in order to gain more readily, Crowther gave them up without a murmur. To thirst for classical knowledge, the young missionary added a desire to know all the native tongues. The most enthusiastic reports of his conduct were sent to England by his superior, and his salary was increased to $ 10 a month. Soon afterward he married a native woman named Susan Thompson. Crowther was particularly grieved by the slave trade and the whiskey traffic--the two great curses of Africa-and fought them where he could. In 1838 he saw slavery and slave trading formally abolished-but in the interior of the continent both went on as actively as ever. Queen Victoria, determined to end this, sent the First Royal Niger Expedition to explore the basin of the Niger. The party consisted of 150 Europeans and only one Negro official-Crowther. Not all the white men were equal to the task. Jungle diseases struck the party. First three white missionaries and three doctors died. In two months forty-two of the whites were dead while the remaining 108 had been stricken and more or less seriously incapacitated. The bulk of the work fell on Crowther, who alone remained well. Thanks largely to him the expedition did not return empty-handed. Instead it brought back valuable knowledge of native life and languages; of more effective methods for combating slave dealers, and of building up legitimate trade. It also demonstrated that Africa's own sons were best fitted, physically and psychologically, for doing missionary work. Crowther won high praise for his work. He was recalled to England to complete his studies, after which he was regularly ordained. His first sermon, which was preached to a white congregation at Northrup Church, was warmly praised by Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, noted abolitionist, and others who had journeyed especially to hear him. Upon his return to Sierra Leone Crowther was joyously received by his fellow blacks, who were proud to see one of their number a regular ordained minister. Then, to crown all, he was unexpectedly reunited with his mother, from whom he had been separated for twenty years and whom he had thought dead. In 1851 he was again called to England, this time to discuss the slave question with Queen Victoria herself. Arriving at Windsor Castle, he was ushered into a magnificent drawing room, and when a handsomely dressed lady wearing a long train entered, Crowther, thinking it was the Queen, stood up. But it was only one of her maids-of-honor, who had come to escort him to an upper drawing room. There Prince Albert, the Queen's husband, the Prince of Wales, and other members of the royal family awaited him. Prince Albert, with maps of Africa spread out before him, plied Crowther with questions, which Crowther respectfully answered. But as he went on to tell of the slave traffic, the bringing in of rum, and the injustices done his people, he was swept away by emotion. Almost forgetting the rank of his auditors, he did not spare their feelings. "It is the people in England," he said, "who are to blame for sending out rum which destroys the natives physically and morally, increasing the death rate frightfully and arousing the worst instincts in them. Liquor is far worse than the idols we used to worship." At times, out of respect, he checked himself, but his royal hearers, who listened breathlessly, urged him to go on. Then, as it got dark, the Prince Consort said, "Will Your Majesty kindly bring us that candle from the mantelpiece?" It was only then that Crowther knew that the Queen had been present. He had seen the stout and plainly dressed woman enter but had taken no special notice of her. Fearing that his outspokenness might have offended his sovereign, he apologized, but she assured him that she would not have had-him speak otherwise. She agreed with him that Lagos was serving as the center of the slave traffic and said that warships should be sent there to stop it. The Prime Minister, who was present, told of Crowther's translation of parts of the Bible into the Yoruba language, and at the Queen's request he recited the Lord's prayer in that language. In addresses at the University of Cambridge and to leading organizations in England he stirred his hearers with his ness, his scholarly manner, and his wide and authentic of Africa. Knowing that he would interest the majority of hearers more by presenting Africa as a commercial proposition, told of its wealth in ivory, gold, palm oil, lumber, and pointed that the present exports, which did not exceed two million sterling, could easily be increased ten times if this commerce protected till it had gained a foothold. The result was that the British government sent another expedition up the Niger. Again the Europeans suffered heavily in loss of lives and again Crowther won added honor, the more so as it was this expedition that broke the back of the West African slave trade. In doing this he was aided by the native chiefs, who were so won by his sincerity that some of them became Christians. In I864 he was again called to England, this time for an unusual honor--to be made a bishop of the Anglican Church. Some objected on the grounds that this was too great an honor for a black man--nevertheless, on June 29, 1864, in the historic Cathedral of Canterbury, he was ordained with the title: His Lordship, Bishop of the Niger. Special trains were run from London and elsewhere for the occasion, and the cathedral was filled to overflowing. Among those who stood near Crowther on the occasion was the former captain of the Myrmidon, now Admiral Sir H. Leeke. Crowther returned to his work. The years that followed, however, were to be the hardest and most trying of his career. War broke out once more in Dahomey. The slave traders were inciting the native chiefs to rebellion. Deprived of their revenues, the chiefs yielded readily in the hope that the sale of their subjects would start again. Christian natives were persecuted. Crowther went boldly into the midst of all this, in the name of Christ. On one occasion he was kidnapped by Aboko, a cruel and treacherous chief, who held him for a ransom of $5000. White men sent to free him were killed by poisoned arrows. Crowther finally escaped. He also succeeded in stopping several native customs, one of which was the killing of twins and the banishment of their mother. He ended this by preaching sermons from Genesis XXV: 24: "And the Lord said to her: Two nations are in thy womb." No home, he told them, could ever be looked on as having a full share of heavenly blessings unless it had twins. Everywhere he opposed the witch doctors and the means by which they kept the people in terror. To show that Christ was superior he would walk boldly into their Ju-ju huts, seize the most sacred idol there, and break it to pieces before a horrified audience! He also believed in "the gospel of the plough," and introduced modern agricultural methods. Kindly, unobtrusive, upright, even his enemies liked him. But his diocese was too vast. It stretched a full thousand miles up the Niger. Age and overwork were beginning to tell on him, and his vigilance relaxed. Some of his native assistants, lacking his moral stamina, broke their religious oaths. Conditions went from bad to worse. Some of his missionaries, both white and colored, were guilty of grave religious misconduct, others grew lax and negligent, while some of the native members who were pledged to one wife returned to the African custom of taking several. For this Crowther was being blamed in England. Religious leaders there did not seem to realize that it was as difficult to make European ways work in Africa as it would have been to make African ones work in England. Both represented thousands of years of evolution. They could not understand polygamy was as much a part of African life as monogamy, adultery, and prostitution were a part of European; and that the best the new ways would be able to accomplish for some time to was a slight modification in the existing customs; in short, cannot change the habits of a people overnight. At last came a horrible murder followed by a report from body of missionaries that Christianity on the Niger had sunk to low level. The central missionary body in London sent out commission of inquiry, which found that many of the char made were true. Some of Crowther's assistants were discharged. As to Crowther, he was absolved from all blame. It was edged that to "his labors, life and unique personality the work the Niger had owed its very existence," that "his stainless was associated with every step of its advancement," and "when the storm of trial came and it seemed as if shipwreck inevitable, his courage and loyalty were not counted on in vain.' Page, his biographer says: Amid circumstances of almost unexampled difficulty, in the face discouragements, he went steadily on his way with indomitable severance in a holy cause.... He lived in an atmosphere of sus and scandal, yet no tongue, however malicious, of black man white man, ventured to whisper reproach against his personal reputation. Knowing that the charges against some of his native assistants were not true, Crowther defended these individuals. Under the strain and deep distress the whole situation had caused him, his health gave way, and he died at Lagos on January 9, 1892, at the age of eighty-six, after nearly sixty years of continuous labor. Before his death the Royal Geographical Society presented him with a splendid gold watch in recognition of his services to science. In 1932 a costly stained-glass window was unveiled in his memory in the Cathedral Church of Christ at Lagos.
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