Samuel Ajayi Crowther

Crowther wrote in 1837 that early in 1821 his town, in what he calls the Eyo country, was taken by slave raiders (Crowther, Letter of 1837 pp. 371–382). He was captured with his mother and sisters, parted from them, and sold from one owner to another 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 on 17 June (Crowther, Letter of 1837 pp. 382–384). There, under the care of the Church Missionary Society, he learned to read and was baptized on 11 December 1825 (Crowther, Letter of 1837 pp. 382–384).

The history of the Church Missionary Society records that the bishop of London ordained him in 1843 and that in August 1846 he entered Abeokuta with the first mission to the Yoruba country (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 1, pp. 457–458). By 1864, it says, he had written a Yoruba grammar and dictionary and translated many books of the Bible into Yoruba, and on 29 June of that year he was consecrated bishop in Canterbury Cathedral (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 2, pp. 454–456). In his charge of 1866 he dates the Niger Mission from 1857 and lists its stations along the river (Crowther, Charge of 1866 pp. 5–11). The same history gives his death at Lagos on 31 December 1891 (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 3, p. 396). See Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the First African Anglican Bishop.