# Samuel Ajayi Crowther ## Intro Samuel Ajayi Crowther was a Yoruba boy captured by slave raiders, freed at sea, and educated in Sierra Leone, who became the first African bishop in the Anglican Communion in 1864. He translated the Bible into Yoruba, wrote grammars of several Nigerian languages, and led an all-African mission on the Niger River. Late in life young European missionaries undermined him and his African clergy, and when he died no African was allowed to succeed him. His life shows both the best of the missionary movement and its racism. ![Nineteenth-century portrait photograph of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther in Anglican episcopal dress](/codex/assets/samuel-ajayi-crowther-1867.jpg) *Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther at the time of the first Lambeth Conference, 1867. Photo: unknown photographer, public domain ([Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bishop_Samuel_Ajayi_Crowther_1867.png)), resized.* ## In full Crowther's career runs through the central questions of [Christianity and Colonialism in Africa](/codex/christianity-and-colonialism-in-africa/). He was a victim of the Atlantic slave trade rescued by the British anti-slavery squadron, a product of the Church Missionary Society's (CMS) school system in Freetown, and the embodiment of the CMS secretary Henry Venn's policy that African churches should become "self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating." His consecration as bishop was that policy's high point. His humiliation by a younger generation of European missionaries, influenced by the racial thinking of the late nineteenth century, was its collapse. Historians including Andrew Walls, J. F. Ade Ajayi and Jehu Hanciles treat his story as a hinge in African church history. ## Life - **Birth and capture.** Born around 1809 in Osogun, in the Oyo region of Yorubaland. In 1821, during the wars that broke up the Oyo empire, Fulani slave raiders captured him with his family, and he was sold to Portuguese slave traders. - **Rescue.** His slave ship was intercepted by the British Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, and he was landed at Freetown, Sierra Leone, the settlement for freed captives. - **Conversion and education.** He was baptized on 11 December 1825, taking the name of Samuel Crowther, a CMS supporter in England. He studied briefly in Islington and in 1827 became the first student enrolled at Fourah Bay College in Freetown. - **The Niger Expedition.** In 1841 he joined the British government's Niger Expedition with the missionary James Schön. His journals helped persuade the CMS that the Niger could be evangelized by Africans. - **Ordination and translation.** He was ordained in England in 1843 and the same year published a grammar of Yoruba. He worked in the CMS mission at Abeokuta from 1846, where, according to his own account, he was reunited with his mother, who later became a Christian. - **Bishop.** On 29 June 1864 he was consecrated bishop in Canterbury Cathedral, with oversight of the Niger mission, beyond the territory then under British rule. He was the first African bishop of the Anglican Communion. - **The Niger mission.** For a quarter century he led a mission staffed almost entirely by Africans, mostly Sierra Leoneans of Yoruba and Igbo descent, along the Niger and in the Niger Delta. - **Crisis and death.** He died in Lagos on 31 December 1891. ## Translator and linguist - Yoruba grammar (1843) and *A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language* (1852) - Leadership of the Yoruba Bible translation, completed in the 1880s - Primers in Igbo (1857) and Nupe (1860), and a Nupe grammar (1864) Lamin Sanneh used Crowther's Yoruba work as a prime example of how translation dignified African languages and placed Scripture in African hands. See [Missionary Translation and African Languages](/codex/missionary-translation-and-african-languages/). ## The undoing of the Crowther episcopate By the late 1880s a new generation of CMS missionaries, younger, university-educated and shaped by a more racial view of African capacity, arrived on the Niger. Two of them, Graham Wilmot Brooke and John Alfred Robinson, pressed for European control, a European successor to Crowther and the removal of African agents they judged unworthy. - Around 1890 a mission finance committee dominated by the Europeans suspended or dismissed several of the African clergy Crowther had ordained. - Crowther, then over 80, resigned from the committee in protest. - After his death the CMS did not appoint an African to his see. The Niger and Yoruba missions were placed under a European bishop, J. S. Hill. - The Niger Delta churches responded by organizing their own pastorate under Crowther's son, Archdeacon Dandeson Coates Crowther, and the episode fed the growth of independent African churches in Nigeria. See [African Initiated Churches](/codex/african-initiated-churches/). Historians differ on how much weight to give genuine administrative problems in the Niger mission against the racial attitudes of the critics. There is broad agreement that the treatment of Crowther was a betrayal of Venn's policy and set African church leadership back by decades. For decades afterward, Africans in the Anglican missions of the region were made assistant bishops under European diocesans rather than diocesan bishops themselves. ## Significance - **The "white man's religion" charge.** Crowther was an African evangelizing Africans, in an African language, under African leadership, in the nineteenth century. See [Christianity Is the White Mans Religion Objection Defeater](/codex/christianity-is-the-white-mans-religion-objection-defeater/). - **The honest counterpoint.** His fall shows that racism in mission circles was real and consequential. A fair account of [Christianity and Colonialism in Africa](/codex/christianity-and-colonialism-in-africa/) has to include it. - **The slave trade.** A survivor of the trade who became a bishop is a living rebuttal to the idea that Christianity and slavery were one cause. See [African Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade](/codex/african-participation-in-the-atlantic-slave-trade/). ## See also - [Christianity and Colonialism in Africa](/codex/christianity-and-colonialism-in-africa/), paternalism and complicity alongside African agency - [Missionary Translation and African Languages](/codex/missionary-translation-and-african-languages/), the translation principle Crowther embodied - [African Initiated Churches](/codex/african-initiated-churches/), partly a response to episodes like Crowther's - [Lamin Sanneh](/codex/lamin-sanneh/), who treated Crowther as a model of mother-tongue mission - [Africa and Christianity](/codex/africa-and-christianity/), the master hub - [African Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade](/codex/african-participation-in-the-atlantic-slave-trade/), the trade Crowther survived
## Common questions this page answers **Q: Who was Samuel Ajayi Crowther?** He was a Yoruba man, captured as a boy by slave raiders in 1821 and freed by the British navy, who became the first African bishop in the Anglican Communion in 1864. He translated the Bible into Yoruba and led an African-staffed mission on the Niger River. **Q: Who was the first African Anglican bishop?** Samuel Ajayi Crowther, consecrated in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 June 1864. **Q: Did Samuel Ajayi Crowther translate the Bible into Yoruba?** Yes. He published a Yoruba grammar in 1843 and led the translation of the Yoruba Bible, completed in the 1880s, with African and European colleagues. **Q: Why was Bishop Crowther removed from leadership?** Around 1890 younger European missionaries on the Niger, including Graham Wilmot Brooke and John Alfred Robinson, took control of the mission's finance committee and suspended African clergy Crowther had ordained. Crowther resigned from the committee in protest and died in 1891. The Church Missionary Society then chose a European successor. Historians widely see it as a case of missionary racism. **Q: Was Samuel Ajayi Crowther a slave?** He was captured in 1821 and sold to Portuguese slave traders, but the ship carrying him was intercepted by the British Royal Navy, and he was freed in Sierra Leone before crossing the Atlantic.