Nigeria: mission ahead of empire

In 1866 Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, himself a rescued slave who grew up in Sierra Leone, addressed a group of Sierra Leonean missionaries who were gathered at Onitsha along the banks of the lower Niger River.

This [historical] review is a necessary preliminary to the special objects for which we this day meet. Such facts teach us God’s mysterious dealings with His people; but especially in connection with our work here; so that we may look back and learn resignation to His will, and patiently to wait His good time, when our own fondest hopes are disappointed, and our well-laid plans are frustrated, and to work on in hope, though for a long time we may not see what good may result from our persevering labour, yet believing that God will fulfill His promise, and accomplish His work in His own good time and way.¹⁹

Though the Niger Mission of the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) at the time was only nine years old, it had been in the making since the late 1830s. Crowther origin­ally joined a British expedition up the Niger River that began in 1841. It was an immediate and indisputable disaster. The expedition was abandoned in 1842, and hopes for a viable mission to the peoples along the Niger were thrown into serious doubt. So disastrous was the expedition that another major effort was not attempted again until 1857, when a British merchant, McGregor Laird, backed financially by the Crown, sought to extend the beneficent effects of Christian commercial activity along the Niger. Missionaries joined in the expedition, establishing mission stations in conjunction with small trading outposts.

Thus, at the earliest stages of missionary expansion up the Niger, the Bible followed the trader more than the flag, though trading was secured occasionally with artillery.²⁰ This early coupling of Protestant Christianity with British commerce would soon bring its host of challenges to the missionaries that staffed the stations, ultimately contributing to Crow­ther’s later humiliation at the hands of zealous young missionaries in the 1880s, discussed below.²¹ Logistically, Crowther’s goal was to create a chain of mission stations/trading outposts to connect missionary efforts among the Hausa in the north with those along the southern portion of the Niger.

We have acted consistently with our profession, by introducing the Gospel and the Plough, or Christianity and Industry; both have worked hand in hand,—the Gospel primarily; Industry, as the handmaid to the Gospel.²²

Such assumptions were widespread among evangelical Britons in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the bundling of Christianity, civilisation and ‘legitimate’ commerce, originally advocated as a means to eliminate the trans-Atlantic slave trade, left an enduring legacy on British missionary consciousness. This association, however, was not without its complica­tions and compromises. In the case of the early CMS missions in Nigeria, it linked mission­run trading outposts with an imperial economy. Missionaries encouraged villagers to industriously gather palm oil, paying them in ‘Manchester goods’ which clothed them more modestly. Sadly, the slaving networks that had supplied the trans-Atlantic trade were employed to supply local chiefs with the oil.

The Niger Mission was dependent upon British companies to sustain their missionary presence along the river. A regular supply of goods was crucial to staying in good graces with chiefs, at whose discretion the trading stations operated, particularly as Bishop Crowther precariously established a station in the southernmost portion of Muslim Hausa land.²³ Some mission trading posts went beyond exchanging typical ‘Manchester goods’ for palm oil, also selling firearms. Beyond the controversial position of missionaries’ involve­ment with arms trading, they were linked inextricably with unsavoury company men who did not uphold evangelical moral codes.

the absence of spiritual life out here in the Church. Conversion is practically unknown, and has certainly not been required as essential to admission to bap­tism...

They quickly turned their attention to taking down the work that Crowther had laboured for decades to build, with an assumption that African Christians were incapable of over­seeing their churches.²⁷ The young Englishmen usurped Bishop Crowther’s authority and suspended for various moral infractions some of the African clergy whom he had ordained—even Archdeacon Dandeson Crowther, his son. Humiliated, Crowther resigned shortly thereafter, and died on 31 December 1891.28

In the example of Bishop Crowther and the Niger Mission, we have an instance of early Victorian ideals being challenged by late Victorian realities. Crowther and his clergy were African missionaries evangelising other Africans. This vision, once heralded as the hope for Christianising the ‘white man’s graveyard’, was wrecked on hardened, late Victorian notions of racial difference and capacity. In the Niger Mission one also finds the uneasiness in which Christian missionaries and commercial companies sometimes existed, despite being animated by the goal of connecting West Africans with a global economy. It was just after Crowther’s humiliation, in 1891, that Nigeria itself came under direct British control, making this a case of missionaries preceding, perhaps even preparing a way for, empire. Nigeria and the Niger Mission, therefore, highlight the complex relationships between pragmatic missionary policy, global commercial networks and the advent of British colonial rule in portions of Sub-Saharan Africa.