Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the First African Anglican Bishop

Samuel Ajayi Crowther told his own story in a letter of 1837: early in 1821 raiders took his town, and he was parted from his mother and sisters and sold from owner to owner until Portuguese traders bought him at a town on the coast that he calls E’-ko (Crowther, Letter of 1837 pp. 371–382). Two British warships seized the slave ship on the river Lagos on 7 April 1822 and landed him at Sierra Leone, where the Church Missionary Society taught him and where he was baptized in 1825 (Crowther, Letter of 1837 pp. 382–384). The Society’s history records that the bishop of London ordained him in 1843 and that in 1846 he went as a missionary to Abeokuta, in the Yoruba country (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 1, pp. 457–458).

Henry Venn, the Society’s secretary, had laid down in 1851 that the aim of a mission was a native church under native pastors, supporting itself, after which the missionary should move on (Memoir of Henry Venn Appendix C, first paper (1851), par. 10, pp. 413–414). When it seemed that Europeans could not live on the Niger, the Society’s historian writes, Venn proposed a purely African mission under an African bishop, and persevered though the English missionaries in West Africa doubted the plan (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 2, p. 454).

The queen’s licence, as the same history reports it, empowered the archbishop of Canterbury to consecrate Crowther as a bishop of the Church of England in the West African territories beyond the British dominions (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 2, p. 454). It records that Oxford gave him a doctorate, for which his Yoruba grammar, his dictionary and his Yoruba versions of many books of the Bible were submitted, and it quotes Venn’s own account of 29 June 1864, when Archbishop Longley consecrated him in Canterbury Cathedral together with bishops for Peterborough and Tasmania (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 2, pp. 455–456). Two years later Crowther gathered his clergy for the first time and reviewed the mission begun in 1857: stations at Onitsha, Gbebe, Lokoja, Idda, Akassa and Bonny, worked by clergy, catechists and Scripture readers (Crowther, Charge of 1866 pp. 5–11).

What follows is the Society’s own account, printed in 1899. In 1890, that history relates, the Society sent a party of English missionaries to the Niger, and at a committee meeting at Onitsha that August they and the African members, the bishop among them, could not agree on the policy or the staff of the mission (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 3, pp. 391–393). The stricter party carried the dismissal of certain agents of the mission, and the English secretary suspended others in the Society’s name; a committee in London afterwards confirmed some of these acts and reversed others (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 3, pp. 391–393). Its historian, who calls Crowther “the first Negro Bishop”, judged eight years later that two leaders of the new party had been “too severe” on their African fellow-workers and impatient with the bishop, though he credited them with the mission’s later improvement, and that Crowther’s death at Lagos on 31 December 1891 was “certainly hastened by anxiety and disappointment” (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 3, pp. 395–396). The Society then chose an Englishman to succeed him, and the churches at Bonny in the Niger Delta declared their independence of the Society, without leaving the Church of England (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 3, p. 397).