Bishop Ajayi Crowther Held Hostage on the Niger, 1867

In September 1867, Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the Yoruba-born former slave who had become the first African bishop of the Anglican Church, was seized and held hostage for days at Oko-Okien, a village near Idah on the Niger River, during one of his regular mission journeys upriver.

The trouble began when Crowther and his party, including his son Dandeson, then 24, stopped at Oko-Okien on the way to visit the Atta, the traditional ruler of Idah. The village’s chief, Abokko, believed himself entitled to the same gifts and diplomatic recognition British traders extended to the Atta, and resented being treated as a lesser figure on the river. When Crowther did not satisfy that grievance, Abokko had his men strip the bishop’s boat of its cargo and seize his and his companions’ personal belongings, leaving the party without shelter overnight. Over the following days, Crowther, Dandeson and their boatmen remained in captivity; on September 23, four boatmen suspected of plotting an escape were put in chains. A messenger sent by the Atta of Idah pleaded for their release, and word reached the British consular officer stationed at Lokoja.

Abokko’s price for freeing his hostages was steep: he first demanded 200 slaves, then, when that was refused, one thousand bags of cowrie shells, valued at roughly one thousand pounds. British officials would not pay it. Handing over slaves, even to free a bishop, was treated as an unacceptable step toward reviving the trade that colonial and mission authorities on the Niger were actively working to suppress, and Crowther, who had been sold into slavery himself as a boy before being freed by a British naval patrol, was reportedly resolute that no ransom should be paid on his behalf. When negotiation failed, an armed party was sent to force the hostages’ release. During that operation, Mr. Fell, the British vice-consul at Lokoja, was struck by a poisoned arrow and died before the party could get him back to Lokoja, one casualty among the mission’s many close calls on the Niger.

By 1867, Crowther had already published grammars and vocabularies for Yoruba, Igbo and Nupe, work that built on the Yoruba New Testament and prayer book translations he had produced in the years after his 1864 consecration at Canterbury Cathedral as bishop of the territories beyond British-controlled West Africa. He continued his mission work on the Niger for years after the Oko-Okien crisis, eventually completing a full Yoruba translation of the Bible. The episode, which drew British consular intervention and cost a vice-consul his life, illustrated both the physical dangers Crowther’s Niger Mission faced from local power struggles over river trade and the moral line the mission drew around the slave trade it had been founded, in part, to help end.