“That is a big proverb!” (Mis)representing the Crowthers in the British Periodical Press
Exciting Intense Interest
As a reward for collecting at least a farthing a week, the children who supported the Anglican Church Sunday School received a richly illustrated monthly periodical, A Quarterly Token for Juvenile Subscribers. Like the missionary periodicals designed for a more general audience, the Quarterly Token contained short excerpts of letters written by missionaries abroad, but it was far more richly illustrated than the Gleaner or the Record. One such article and its accompanying illustration described a familiar event in an unfamiliar setting: a magic lantern show in Lagos.The editor frames the account by summarizing the results of missionary efforts:
As a representation of a magic lantern show, the article’s structure reflects the visual effect described in Dandeson Crowther’s letter. Crowther did not have an ordinary lantern but two, which meant that he could simultaneously project two images. As one dimmed, the other would brighten, causing one image to slowly fade into the other. The editor’s framing parallels the visual displacement of the dissolving view. Like the day-to-night transitions popularized by Carpenter and Westley, the narrative uses two images of the same location to track change over time. The pens used by the slave traders transition a view of the prayer houses filled with converts, and the vestiges of the slave trade appear to fade in light of the gospel. The letter describes how the exhibition of the magic lantern raised £4 to build churches in Nigeria. The editor concludes by drawing the reader’s attention to the images on screen— “the capture of Thomas King by the kidnapper.” As the first scene in a conversion story of a formerly enslaved man who became a catechist for the Church Missionary Society, the editor describes the lecture as “a subject well calculated to excite intense interest in an assembly of Africans!”The island of Lagos, at the mouth of the river Ogun, which flows from Abbeokuta into the Bight of Benin, was the stronghold of the slave-dealers only a few years ago. A more happy change has been effected there since England took possession of it. Houses of prayer have taken the place of slave-barracoons; and, very lately, Africans themselves have been raising funds for their enlargement by public collections of a somewhat curious kind. Mr. D. Crowther, a son of the good Bishop, possesses a magic lantern— a novel and wonderful thing on the shores of Africa.[1]
What makes this account extraordinary is not the literary description of Lagos or the images pictured on screen but the projectionist. Dandeson Crowther was the son of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, one of the most influential missionaries in the nineteenth-century.[2] Born in Osogun in what’s now Nigeria, the elder Crowther was captured as a young boy by Fulani raiders and sold to Portuguese slave traders. The ship was intercepted the same day it left port by a British patrol vessel, and Crowthers reached Sierra Leone in June 1822. There, he encountered Anglican missionaries, who quickly recognized his talents and sent him to the Anglican school in Islington in 1826. When he returned to Sierra Leone in 1827, Crowthers became the first student at the Church Missionary Society’s college in Fourah Bay. His rise to fame within Anglican missionary circles stems from his leading role in the Niger River expedition in 1841 and his work as a linguist. Thanks to the success of those travels in establishing mutually-beneficial partnerships with communities further inland, Crowthers founded missions along the Niger in Onitsha, Gbobe, and Lokoja in 1857, and he was ordained as the “Bishop of the countries of Western Africa beyond the Queen’s dominions” in 1864. As his official title suggests, Crowther’s leadership was met with resistance from European missionaries. Historian J. F. Ade Ajayi characterizes the boundaries of ecclesiastical jurisdictions as a “Gilbertian situation” that left Crowther with no authority over Lagos, Abeokuta, or Ibadan where European missionaries were stationed.[3] Instead, his dioceses encompassed an impossibly large area, prompting him to choose Lagos as his base of operations from which he could supervise African missionaries and coordinate the distribution of supplies even though it was 200 miles away from his nearest station.[4] This challenging situation created opportunities for European businessmen to renegotiate a more central place within Niger River trade networks.
Despite the resistance he faced from local European missionaries and traders, Crowther did have at least one powerful ally in the CMS in the form of the society’s secretary. Henry Venn was a fervent advocate for training “native” missionaries with the hope that they would become leaders in the Anglican church abroad. Venn supported the Crowthers family throughout their careers, helping to bring Dandeson, Bishop Crowther’s youngest son, to Islington for training in 1863. Prior to this, Dandeson had followed in his father’s academic footsteps by becoming the first student at the newly founded Grammar School in Lagos. His classmates included the sons of the William Dappa Pepple, the deposed king king of Bonny. After attending Islington, Dandeson Crowther returned to Lagos in September 1866 with projection equipment given to him by Venn.[5] With Venn’s gift, the Crowthers gave several shows in Lagos and Bonny (in what’s now Nigeria), including the shows referenced in the Quarterly Token. These exhibitions of the lantern featured more sophisticated equipment than the lanterns used by Williams and Livingstone. These shows are described in two letters to Henry Venn by Dandeson Crowther and in Samuel Crowther’s quarterly report to the CMS. Published versions of these documents aligned the Crowthers’ magic lantern shows with the “Sunday School treats” given to children in England. This editorial tactic infantilized their adult African audiences in order to inscribe them within a narrative of effective missionary work.
Though published sources misrepresented their use of the lantern, I will argue that the Crowther’s lantern shows made several important contributions to the magic lantern show as part of the missionary movement. Their first innovation had to do with the lantern as a fundraising tool. Unlike Williams and Livingstone, the Crowthers explicitly characterized their lantern shows as a leisure activity. This approach gave them room to adopt ticketing practices from theatre and other popular entertainments. They developed an incremental pricing system that charged the highest admission cost on the first evening of a series of lantern shows and free admission on the last. Their pricing practices leveraged the lantern’s novelty to raise funds for new churches without limiting their audience solely to those who could afford admission. While the CMS and other evangelistic organizations did not sell tickets for lantern shows, they did begin to see the lantern show as a fundraising opportunity and incorporated a collection at the end to fund continued missionary work. Second, the Crowthers were among the first to adapt narratives of their missionary work for the big screen. Dandeson created a lantern lecture describing his father’s expeditions along the Niger, which he sent to the CMS home office. This set (and presumably copies of it) became part of a core collection of lectures circulated by the CMS for free among their auxiliary missionary societies in Britain. The demand for lantern lectures depicting evangelistic activity abroad was so strong that the CMS created a new division in 1895 to manage the production and circulation of lantern material. The proliferation of missionary slides in Victorian England contributed to the narrative strategies in geography lectures in secular contexts. Finally, Samuel and Dandeson Crowther created avenues through which other missionaries of non-European descent could request material. Samuel Crowther became a leading figure in the movement to train and support “native” pastors.[6] His correspondence with Henry Venn, Mrs. Malaher, and Mrs. Lanfear[7] led to the formation of the Missionary Leaves Association, an auxiliary branch of the CMS devoted to soliciting donations on behalf of non-European missionaries, in 1868.[8] The resulting periodical created a space where “native” missionaries could request lanterns and slides, expanding the lantern’s global reach in the age of photography.
The Crowthers’ legacy would be overshadowed by Niger Mission's financial difficulties in the 1860s and 70s and the machinations of Sir George Goldie. As part of the self-sustaining missionary model advocated by Venn, the mission had developed a symbiotic relationship with traders along the river. The trading vessels would bring supplies and mail to the missionary stations while the missionaries would promote developing trade networks with the coast. The geographic distance between Bishop Crowther and the mission stations that he supported led to local leaders’ mismanagement of funds. The extent of these problems were overstated by Goldie, who took over the West African Trading Company in 1870s. Posing as a friend of Crowthers, Goldie convinced the CMS that the African missionaries were not only incompetent but that these flaws was characteristic of all Africans.[9] To make matters worse, Henry Venn’s death in 1873 left the Crowthers without an advocate on the CMS committee. African leadership within the Anglican church in Nigeria eroded to the point that Bishop Crowther resigned from the Niger Mission in 1890, and Dandeson, now an Archdeacon, created a self-governing pastorate within the Anglican church. The movement towards Nigerian nationalism that began with the Bishop would be continued in his grandson and Dandeson’s nephew, Herbert Mackaulay, planting the seeds of Nigerian independence.
[1] “Lagos,” A Quarterly Token for Weekly, Monthly, and Juvenile Subscribers, no. 45, April 1867, accessible via Google Books, pp. 4-6.
[2] Like John Williams, Samuel Crowther appears in a wide range of scholarship on the areas through which he traveled, but work dedicated solely to his life is relatively limited when compared to missionaries like David Livingstone. P. R. McKenzie’s Inter-religious encounters in West Africa (1976), Jeanne Decorvet’s Samuel Ajayi Crowther, un père de l'Eglise en Afrique noire (1992), J. F. Ade Ajayi’s A Patriot to the Core: Bishop Ajai Crowther (2001), and Duke Akamisoko’s Samuel Ajayi Crowther in the Lokoja Area (2002) are exceptions to this. The Crowthers appear in several important surveys of African Christianity. These include J.F. Ade Ajayi’s Christian Missions in Nigeria (1965) and Elizabeth Isichei’s A History of Christianity in Africa from Antiquity to Present (1995). There were also several biographies of Samuel Crowther published after his death and within Dandeson’s lifetime: see Samuel Crowther: the slave boy who became bishop of the Niger (1888) and The Black Bishop, Samuel Adjai Crowther (1909), both by Jesse Page. As J.F. Ade Ajayi notes, Page’s biographies reflect the controversies surrounding the Niger Mission in the 1860s and 70s that stemmed Sir George Goldie’s efforts to advance the interests of the West African Trading Company by undermining Bishop Crowther’s leadership. Hence, they should be read as remediations of Goldie's defamation campaign.
[3] Christian Missions in Nigeria, p. 206.
[4] See Duke Akamisoko’s Samuel Ajayi Crowther in the Lokoja Area, p. 30.
[5] “Letter to Henry Venn, 6 September 1866,” Church Missionary Society Archive, University of Birmingham Special Collections, CMS/B/OMS/C A3/O13/1, 10 May 2017.
[6] As a term, “native” describes missionaries of non-European descent. Like the Africans whom David Livingstone encountered over the course of their travels, many “native” missionaries would not be considered indigenous to the regions in which they were sent by the missionary societies. Samuel Crowthers was ethnically Yoruba, but in the 1860s and 70s, he was stationed in an area that was predominately Ijo and Igbo.
[7] Mrs. Malaher was married to Herbert G. Malaher, who became the secretary of the Missionary Leaves Association and who helped organize the first CMS exhibition of missionary artefacts in 1882. The 1861 census suggests that Miss Lanfear’s first name was Anne, but Mrs. Lanfear’s first name is unknown. See Census Returns of England and Wales, 1861, Kew, 1861. Available via Ancestry.com.
[8] Some catalogs, including the Archives Hub index of UK Special Collections, record the formation of the Missionary Leaves Association as 1869, but periodical first appeared in 1868.
[9] Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841-1891, pp. 206-233. See also Eric Flint’s Sir George Goldie and the Making of Nigeria, Oxford University Press, 1960.