Samuel Ajayi Crowther

Ajayi was about twelve when Oyo raiders took his town of Osogun, killed or scattered his family and sold him on. He passed through several hands, was put aboard a Portuguese ship, and was taken off it by a British naval squadron enforcing the abolition of the trade. The ship was landed at Freetown in Sierra Leone, a colony largely populated by people recovered the same way. He was educated at the Church Missionary Society school there, took the name Samuel Crowther at baptism in 1825, and was in the first intake at Fourah Bay. He joined the Niger expedition of 1841, trained in England, and was ordained in 1843. In 1864 he was consecrated bishop of the territories of West Africa outside British jurisdiction, in Canterbury Cathedral, and became the first African bishop in the Anglican communion. His mission on the Niger was staffed mostly by Africans, which was the deliberate policy of Henry Venn at the CMS: build a church that could stand without European staff.

After Venn's death that policy was abandoned. Younger European missionaries brought charges against his African clergy, his authority was progressively stripped, and he surrendered oversight of the mission in 1890. He died at Lagos the next year, and the episode is a standard reference point in the history of race in the mission field.

Crowther's durable achievement is linguistic. Yoruba had no settled written form when he began, and the Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language he published in 1843 established one, working out how to represent tone and the vowel distinctions that Latin letters do not carry. Later editions expanded it into a grammar. He then translated, over decades and with collaborators, the whole Bible into Yoruba, the first translation of the Bible into an African language by a first language speaker of it, and the standard against which later Yoruba prose was measured. He worked on Nupe and Igbo material as well and left vocabularies for both. There is a complication in this for anyone studying Yoruba religion, and it should be stated rather than smoothed.

In fixing a religious vocabulary for Christian use he had to choose Yoruba words for God, spirit, sacrifice and worship, and those choices carried the existing Orisha vocabulary into a new frame. Later writers on Yoruba religion, including E. Bolaji Idowu, worked with terms Crowther had already made decisions about. The record he left is indispensable and it is not neutral, which is true of nearly every early written source on West African religion.