Reverend Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1808–91), a Yoruba ex-slave who had been rescued from bondage in the early nineteenth century and sent to train for the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in London. In 1864 Crowther was the West African to be ordained a Bishop in the Anglican Church, and his life is characterized by ground-breaking translation work, including a Yoruba translation of the Bible and the West extensive Yoruba vocabulary.
Bishop_Samuel_Ajayi_Crowther_and_son_Dandeson_1870
Crowther’s several journals describe his expeditions up the River Niger in the mid nineteenth century to establish mission stations and to ‘work for the conversion of the heathen from idolatry’ (quote from his journal). These journals provide a captivating record of early missionary activity in Islamic areas of West Africa during a period of political turmoil and fragmentation in the region.
A brilliant linguist and an active transcriber, or ‘reducer’, of African languages to the Roman script, Crowther was hyper-sensitive to the ideological effects of the written word in Africa. Anticipating (post-) modernism by a century, he recognized that the form of a text was of equal value to its content. In consequence, he carried copies of an Arabic Bible around on most of his journeys. ‘Judicious arrangements should be made’, he wrote in 1859, ‘so as to induce a spirit of inquiry after the way of arriving at the truth, through the only channel they have, via the reading of the Arabic Bible’.
Crowther cleverly utilized people’s literacy in the language of the Qur’an to ‘host’ the new message of the Christians. In the process, he carefully accommodated Islam within his own discourse. A cynical interpretation of this African missionary’s behaviour is that he mimicked the postures and gestures of Islamic teachers, subverting their message with his careful parody of their style. Such an interpretation can readily be made when one reads his description of public meetings with local chiefs: for instance, in the town of Gbebe on the River Niger, he writes,
‘I carefully placed my books on the mat, after the custom of the mallams’ ; ‘I carefully introduced myself to him as a mallam sent by the great mallams from the white man’s country’, he writes later of an important meeting to negotiate a site for a mission house and European trading station.
Whenever the opportunity arose, he also inserted stories from the Qur’an into his speech, anchoring Christianity to Islam. Crowther’s subversive but intensely careful and self-conscious imitation of Islamic practice provides an excellent example of what postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha describes as ‘mimicry’ in colonial discourse.
The Christians accommodated Arabic by learning to speak and write it, rather than by forcing new scripts and languages upon the communities they encountered. From this position, Crowther expresses feelings of revulsion even as he imitates the gestures of Islam and shows great familiarity with the Qur’an. ‘Mallams are the people Christian missionaries have to withstand and oppose’, he writes in his journal: ‘their false doctrines have to be exposed, their errors corrected’ Crowther’s mimicry of the mallams is thus designed for self-protective ends.
He later then recognized that ‘a Mohammedan can never be brought round by his religion being quarrelled with, but by kind treatment he may be led to read and study the Christian’s Bible, which by the blessing of God, may lead him from the error of his way.
The Christian missionaries appropriated Arabic, using it to print a Bible: in this way, they exposed the Holy Qur’an as one printed text amongst many. As Crowther openly stated, if the Arabic alphabet is in common usage it will be deprived of its holiness, and Muslims’ ‘artful cheat would be laid open’ .
Simultaneously, he worked to transcribe the Hausa language into the Roman script, gently ‘converting’ it away from the Arabic ‘ajami’ script in which it had appeared, and in so doing, reorienting it towards western genres and narratives. Using the Roman Hausa script, he printed copies of the Christian scriptures to be used in the classroom for the teaching of Hausa literacy.
This effort to marginalize ‘ajami’ literature continued into the twentieth century, when creative writing competitions run by colonial oficials at the Translation Bureau in Zaria, Northern Nigeria, introduced the West Africa prose fiction to the area in 1933–34.
We can say that his efforts was not largely effective due to the still large Muslim population in Northern Nigeria.
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