Abeokuta
Town of the Egba people in the Yoruba country, north of Lagos, where Anglican missionaries, Samuel Crowther among them, began work in 1846 and where Crowther found his mother again.
The historian of the Church Missionary Society, writing in 1899, says that the Egba, scattered by slave raids, had gathered again round a rock called Olumo and named their new town Abeokuta, “Under-stone”; that freed Egba from Sierra Leone settled there and asked for missionaries; and that Henry Townsend and Samuel Ajayi Crowther entered the town on 3 August 1846 (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 1, pp. 456–458). Crowther’s journal, quoted by his biographer, tells how his mother, from whom he had been taken twenty-five years before, came to him there (Page, The Black Bishop pp. 95–96). See Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the First African Anglican Bishop.
What happened here
- 29 June 1864, firm dateSamuel Ajayi Crowther, the First African Anglican Bishop
Samuel Ajayi Crowther, enslaved as a boy and freed at Sierra Leone, is consecrated at Canterbury as bishop for the Niger, to lead a mission planned as purely African. By the mission society’s own account, English missionaries sent in 1890 override him; he dies the next year.