24 FACTS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BISHOP SAMUEL AJAYI CROWTHER
Leke Beecroft
1. Samuel Ajayi Crowther was born in 1807 in Osogun in what is now Iseyin Local Government in Oyo State of Nigeria, he was of Yoruba descent.
2. At 12, he was captured with his mother, brother, family members and entire village, by Muslim Fulani slave raiders and sold off to Portuguese slave traders.
3. His slave ship was boarded by a British Royal Navy ship and he was taken to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he was released.
4. In Sierra Leone Crowther was catered for by the Church Missionary Society and was taught English. He soon became a Christian and on the 11th of December 1825 was baptized.
4. He began to develop interest in languages. In 1827, on return from the U.K, he became the first student to enrol at the newly opened Fourah Bay College, an Anglican missionary school, where his interest in language found him studying Latin, Greek and Temne.
5. Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone, founded on 18 February 1827, is the oldest university in West Africa and the first western-style university built in West Africa.
6. He married a schoolmistress, Asano (Hassana) a former Muslim who was baptised as Susan.
7. Ajayi Crowther accompanied the missionary James SchΓΆn on the Niger expedition of 1841. He was expected to learn Hausa and the goal of the expedition was to spread commerce, teach agricultural techniques, spread Christianity, and help end the slave trade.
8. He oversaw J.C Taylor's groundbreaking work in Eastern Nigeria leading to the evangelization of Eastern Nigeria, the next major influence after perhaps only the Catholic Church during which he also directed the evangelization of the Niger Delta.
9. Following the expedition, he was recalled to England, where he was trained as a minister and ordained by the Bishop of London.
10. In 1843 along with Henry Townsend, Ajayi Crowther opened a mission in Abeokuta, in today's Ogun State, Nigeria.
11. Samuel Crowther began translating the Bible into the Yoruba language and compiling a Yoruba dictionary. In 1843, a grammar book which he started working on during the Niger expedition was published; and a Yoruba version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer followed later.
12. He also compiled A vocabulary of the Yoruba language, including a large number of local proverbs, published in London in 1852.
13. He then began codifying other languages. Following the British Niger Expeditions of 1854 and 1857, Crowther produced a textbook for the Igbo language in 1857, another for the Nupe language in 1860, and a full grammar and vocabulary of Nupe in 1864.
14. In 1864, Crowther was ordained as the first African bishop of the Anglican Church; he was consecrated a bishop on St Peter's day 1864 despite great protest, by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He later received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from the University of Oxford.
15. Crowther completed the supervision of the translation of the Yoruba Bible (Bibeli Mimα») in the mid-1880s.
16. Regarded as the father of Anglicanism in Nigeria, Bishop Crowther, is credited with bringing many Nigerians to Christ.
17. Despite his passion and achievements, Bishop Crowther’s mission was undermined and dismantled in the 1880s by racist white Europeans, including some of his fellow missionaries.
18. Samuel Ajayi Crowther died on 31 December 1891.
19. About 39 years later, with a bell and a Yoruba Bible in hand, Apostle Joseph Ayo Babalola started the first major Christian revival at Oke-Ooye, in the western part of Nigeria.
20. Crowther's grandson Herbert Macaulay became one of the first Nigerian nationalists and played an important role in ending British colonial rule in Nigeria
21. In 2014, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Church of England, Justin Welby apologised for the church's mistreatment of Africa's first bishop, Samuel Ajayi Crowther in a service titled ‘thanksgiving and repentance’ service marking the 150th anniversary of Bishop Crowther’s ordination.
22. In August 2014, a 6th generation descendant of Bishop Crowther, Dr Stella Ameyo Adadevoh, led the team that detected the first case of Ebola in Nigeria, Patrick Sawyer, placing him on quarantine despite pressures from the Liberian Government and in the process paid with her life thereby stopping what would have been a catastrophic spread and explosion of the Ebola Disease in Lagos, a city inhabiting about 20 million people and infact the 170 million Nigerian population.
23. In 2016, the Anglican church in Nigeria which is the largest province in the Anglican Communion and led by Archbishop Okoh requested for a “special status” within the Anglican Communion as she continues to uphold the traditional biblical standard on marriage and homosexuality.
24. Today well over 80 million Christians in Nigeria are spiritual heirs to Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther.
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