Samuel Ajayi Crowther

As a boy he was seized in a raid on Osogun and put aboard a slave ship, which was intercepted by a British naval squadron. He was landed at Freetown in Sierra Leone, educated in mission schools there and at the Church Missionary Society institution at Fourah Bay, and later studied in London.

He joined the Niger expedition of 1841 and afterwards worked as a missionary at Abeokuta and along the Niger. He compiled a Yoruba grammar and vocabulary — among the earliest systematic work on the Yoruba language — and led the translation of the Bible into Yoruba, work that shaped written Yoruba as it is used today. He also produced language material on Igbo and Nupe. In 1864 he was consecrated Bishop of the Niger Territories in Canterbury Cathedral, the first African bishop in the Anglican communion. His later years in that office were marked by conflict with younger European missionaries over the running of the Niger mission.

Crowther's translation work is the foundation of written Yoruba as a literary language, and his career is central to accounts of how Christianity in West Africa came to be led by Africans. His treatment by the mission establishment late in life is a documented episode in that history.