9-th, 2004 - 09: 1   (Posted By: Webmaster)
Samuel Adjai Crowther

Samuel Adjai Crowther
EXPLORER, AFRICAN EDUCATOR, AND BISHOP OF THE BRITISH REALM (1806--1892)

SAMUEL ADJAI CROWTHER, foe of the slave trade and the liquor traffic in Africa and pioneer of civilization in the basin of the Niger, was the first Negro on record to be ordained a bishop of the United Church of Great Britain and Ireland.
Crowther was born in West Africa about 1806, and belonged to the Yoruba, one of the oldest and most advanced of the tribes of Africa. His father, who was a bale, or duke, was wealthy, having made his fortune by the weaving of a certain fabric of his own design.

Adjai--he was so named because he was born with his face to the ground--showed spirit and enthusiasm from his earliest years. He was only ten years old when he rescued a family from a blaze, which destroyed his home, plunging through the flames to do so.

He started on his own as a breeder of poultry and cultivator of African yams, walking seven miles each morning to his fields. He was successful and prosperous. The town in which he lived had 12,000 inhabitants and was protected by stockades and a force of 3000 fighting men. One morning as he was about to leave for his farm, he heard a great uproar. Rushing out he found that a battle was in progress with an army of slave raiders. Victorious, the attackers seized him, his mother, and his brothers and took them to the coast where Adjai was torn away from his mother and sold. In riveted chains, he and a group of others were put aboard a Portuguese ship, the Esperanza Feliz, for transport to America. In the filthy hold where he and his fellows were packed, young Adjai suffered frightfully from nausea and seasickness. On the third day out, sounds of a commotion on deck came to him in the hold and soon afterward uniformed men came below and marched him and the other terrified captives out.

Adjai thought his end had come. But the newcomers were English sailors, whose ship, the Myrmidon, had captured the Portuguese vessel. It was not easy to reassure the slaves that they were really saved, and Adjai when taken aboard the warship was alarmed when his glance fell on a side of newly-shaved pork glistening white in the sunlight. It looked so much like the color of his captors that he felt sure he had fallen among cannibals. Years later when he met the captain of the same warship under altogether different circumstances, both laughed heartily at the incident. Adjai was taken to Sierra Leone and placed in a missionary school, where he was baptized and given the name of Crowther. From there he was sent to England for further training and upon graduation he was sent back to Sierra Leone to teach. His salary was only $5 a month, but he was grateful.

In those days Sierra Leone was very unhealthful for Europeans. It was known as "the white man's grave." Many missionaries succumbed to its fevers. The Church Missionary Society decided, therefore, that if West Africa was ever to be won over to Christianity, it would have to be largely through native missionaries. Crowther seemed to them to be promising material in way.

Like a true missionary, Crowther was self-sacrificing. Upon return from England he had brought back with him many among them white stockings, clothes, and a fine mattress that been a gift from his English friends. When the head Haensal, a white man, advised him to part with these and live the simpler life of the native in order to gain more readily, Crowther gave them up without a murmur. To thirst for classical knowledge, the young missionary added a desire to know all the native tongues.
The most enthusiastic reports of his conduct were sent to England by his superior, and his salary was increased to $ 10 a month. Soon afterward he married a native woman named Susan Thompson. Crowther was particularly grieved by the slave trade and the whiskey traffic--the two great curses of Africa-and fought them where he could. In 1838 he saw slavery and slave trading formally abolished-but in the interior of the continent

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