Below are 10 things you probably didn’t know about Bishop Crowther.
Glamtush reports that award-winning writer/researcher, Pelu Awefeso has highlighted a few facts you probably didn’t know about Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther.
He was a Nigerian linguist, clergyman, and the first African Anglican bishop of West Africa.
Ajayi, the boy, was born in Osoogun, Oyo State, Western Nigeria. His exact date of birth is not known, but historians put it between 1806 and 1809. At the Crowther Project, we have settled for 1809.
He was captured as a slave – along with his mother, siblings and cousins – from their family compound sometime in 1821. That put him at around 12 years of age.
He was exchanged multiple times for different items: a horse, rum, tobacco – to mention a few.
For 14 months, he was moved from one town to the next, one slave market to the next – from Iseyin through Toko to Eko (Lagos), where he was eventually sold to Portuguese slavers and put on a ship bound for South America.
A British naval patrol attacked the Portuguese slave ship and rescued Ajayi and 186 other slaves in 1822, and where all taken to Freetown (Sierra Leone).
Freetown was where he learned to read and write. It was where he wore a pair of shoes for the first time. It was where he started to learn Greek, Latin and Creole. It was where he later married another former slave.
Ajayi was baptized in December 1825, after which he took the name Samuel Crowther, one of the founders of the Church Missionary Society (CMS). He was 16.
Crowther was the first to be enrolled in the CMS College at Fourah Bay, where he stood out as a brilliant student. Afterwards, he became a tutor.
Crowther was ordained a priest in London in 1843, aged 34. On his way back from that journey by sea, he started translating the English Bible into Yoruba language, beginning with the book of Romans.
Crowther lived in Badagry for 18 months, between January 1845 and June 1846. He didn’t translate the entire Bible there, but only a part of it. Translating all books of the Bible took about 40 years, completed in the late 1880s.
