Townsend, Henry 1815 to 1886 Anglican (CMS) Nigeria

1.0
1.1

Background
Birth and Early life

An English missionary of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and one of the founders of the Yoruba mission, Henry Townsend was born in 1815 in Exeter, England, into a family still known till date for their pedigree in the printing business. He entered the missionary college of the CMS in Islington in 1836, and that year he was assigned to Sierra Leone. Three years later he returned to England, where he married Sarah Pearse in 1840.

2.0
2.1

Early Missionary Work

Townsend came to Sierra Leone as a missionary teacher and began his service in the village of Kent. He was there until December of 1841 when he was transferred to Hastings. This transfer was auspicious for him and for the future of the society's work in West Africa. Townsend found Hastings to be strategic to his interest in learning to speak Yoruba, called the Aku language at the time. No sooner had he started there than he noted in his journal that he had "recommenced learning the Aku dialect for which there are many facilities in this town and which I have much reason to think would be abundantly useful in our visits to the people." He took immediate advantage of the opportunity and noted in his journal in March 1842, "My labours in the Aku dialect have been steadily pursued since I resumed it in February. The people have considerably aided me by addressing me in Aku whenever I meet them and by explaining what they say when it is not sufficiently clear to me." The usefulness of Townsend's occupation with the Yoruba language began to unfold in October of 1842 when some of the speakers of the language in Hastings requested from the society missionaries to accompany them back to their country. These converts wanted missionaries to accompany them home. Mr. Townsend first heard of this desire of the people to have missionaries sent to their country eight months after he began to serve in Hastings. He wrote then with delight that, "It gave me much pleasure to hear one of our communicants say that they (the Akus) had begun to pray that the Lord would send a missionary to their

country." At a special meeting held on October 4, 1842, the local committee deliberated on the formal request from Hastings that missionaries be sent to the Yoruba country. It resolved that Mr. Townsend "be requested to visit Badagry & its vicinity as soon as a favourable opportunity presents itself, to obtain information relative to a missionary objects; that Andrew Wilhelm the society's Christian visitor at Hastings be requested to accompany him." Townsend and his team left Freetown on November 15, 1842, on their assignment to "Badagry and its vicinity." In Badagry they met the Methodist missionary to the Gold Coast, Thomas Birch Freeman, and his colleagues, Mr. and Mrs. DeGraft, who were returning from Abeokuta where they too had gone to explore the possibility of starting a mission. On January 4, 1843, Townsend reached Abeokuta and was warmly received by Sodeke, the commander of the Egba army, and his people. Prior to his arrival, the effect of the British anti-slavery campaign had been felt in Abeokuta through the home return from Sierra Leone of relatives that were long thought to have been dead. This obvious achievement of the campaign predisposed the people to mission and Mr. Townsend did not have to convince Sodeke and his Egba compatriots to open their country to mission. The team on exploratory visit to the Yoruba country returned to Freetown on April 13, 1843, having been away for five months. Mr. Townsend reported his findings to the parent committee of the CMS and sent a few native manufactures of cloth and cushion to the lay secretary. As for the readiness of the people to receive missionaries, whatever it meant at the moment, there was enough enthusiasm on their part and with their chief, Sodeke. The chief promised to give the mission "more children to teach than [they] are able to manage." He had even written a letter that Townsend delivered to the governor of Sierra Leone, thanking England for delivering his people from slavery and resolving to exert his own power to see the slave trade fully suppressed. For Townsend, in view of the earlier failed attempt to penetrate the interior of Africa through the Niger River, the success of the exploratory visit was significant. It is a great and merciful providence that while the door of access to the interior thro' the Niger is closed against us that God should give us favour in the sight of the Akus by which we might reasonably hope to be as useful to the African race and eventually to penetrate to its remotest nation. I earnestly hope that as providence has opened a large field of usefulness that

in like manner he will provide the means, and suitable agents, to enter upon the work he has prepared. The missionary from Exeter returned to England in October 1843, and in view of starting the Yoruba mission, he was ordained a deacon on Trinity Sunday, 1844, and a priest on October 20 by the bishop of London. He was assigned to begin the work alongside Samuel Crowther, then the foremost Yoruba convert in the service of CMS, and Charles Gollmer, both copioneers being already ordained as priests and serving in Sierra Leone. The three missionaries and their wives arrived in Badagry in January 1845, but they could not proceed to their intended mission base at Abeokuta. News reached them, barely a week after their arrival in Badagry, that Sodeke had died. They were advised to wait for the appointment of a new leader for the town in view of the war situation of the country. 2.2 Abeokuta --"Sunrise within the Tropics"

The waiting at Badagry lasted longer than the there missionaries could have imagined. The new authorities in Abeokuta, Sagbua and Sokenu, wanted them to wait, ostensibly for the wars to abate. Townsend got to know the fact behind their delay when he finally began the work in Abeokuta. Sodeke's death was seen by a few powerful chiefs as an opportunity to reverse his pro-missionary stance that threatened their interests. But even with this delay, things took a turn for the worse, and the road between Badagry and Abeokuta became unsettled again. When the situation eventually improved, the politics of war and slave trade among the peoples east and south of Abeokuta complicated things. After seventeen months in Badagry they were invited to begin the work at Abeokuta. Messrs. Townsend and Crowther and their families arrived there at the end of July 1846. Mrs. Gollmer having died barely two months after arriving in Badagry, Mr. Gollmer was left in the town to run the young fledgling mission among the recalcitrant Popo people. With his assertive nature, Townsend quickly became the driving force of the mission, although he was sensitive and unassuming when he related with Egba authorities. In no time, the mission made inroads into the Abeokuta community. More missionaries arrived in the field and made impact they never imagined as the people responded favorably to their message. Barely a year after the commencement of the mission, Henry Townsend could write that: The success that has already attended our efforts so lately commenced exceeds what would have been a reasonable expectation at the commencement. God gives his word & his

servants favour in the sight of the heathen so that we are welcomed & treated with the greatest respect by all classes & the word of God is listened to with the greatest avidity. In spite of this sanguine state of affairs, the missionary was aware that the people had not yet fully come to terms with the mystery of new life unfolding before their eyes in stack contrast to the culture of death and destruction that had prevailed hitherto: Our intentions in coming amongst them are not quite understood & sometimes a suspicion to our disadvantage arises, such suspicions as are common to a superstitious & credulous people as fear of the existence of a supernatural power with us by which we might bring some dire affliction upon them. But such suspicions as have arisen have been rejected again by themselves, unaided by us, the return of the Sierra Leone people seems at all times to be a sufficient evidence of the good faith of Englishmen, to them a standing miracle of mercy that rebuffs the fear of the most timid. As Townsend and other pioneer missionaries in mid-nineteenth century Yoruba country would acknowledge time and again, the return of the Yoruba re-captives from Sierra Leone was the ice-breaker that opened the country to mission. The reunion of families with their long forgotten relations commended missionary motive to the people as altruistic. And the converts among the returnees were also in the vanguard of mission, telling their stories to the high and low of the goodwill that sustained them away from home. These were stories that contrasted with the realities around the people and, farfetched as they sounded, they could only point to the dawn of a new day. As churches were being established in the different quarters of Abeokuta, Mr. Townsend enjoyed the confidence of Sagbua whose seat of administration was at Ake. Sodeke, Sagbua's deceased relative and predecessor, gave Ake this political primacy among all the quarters of the town when he made it his seat of government even though he was from Itoku. This district having so emerged as the seat of Egba government at Abeokuta, the chiefs also resolved to give the mission three acres there on which to build their mission. This close, physical proximity between church and state in Abeokuta, far from being the intention of the missionaries, was a result of the formal relationship between them and Egba authorities from the beginning. With Townsend serving as their letter writer, the Egba authorities kept up their communication with the Queen of England whenever the opportunity availed itself for them to communicate with the English crown. It all flowed from their gratitude to the English people for freely redeeming their people from slavery and rehabilitating them in Sierra Leone. The resultant trust and goodwill between the mission and the state worked for their good relationship; but with the passage of years, it became a burden for Townsend and

disillusionment for the Egba state. 2.3 Persecution

The progress Yoruba mission made at Abeokuta in a short time was too rapid and indeed threatening to some interest groups in the town. Some parents opposed their children's conversion and some couples had difficulties with managing the experience of conversion of their spouses, especially the conversion of the women folk. But all these issues did not amount to much as they were mostly domestic in nature. According to Miss Tucker, the public persecution that erupted resulted from the economic threat conversion represented to the guild of Ifa priests, the Babalawo; the wood carvers who fashioned religious icons; and those who traded in the livestock used for sacrifice. Members of the Ogboni conclaves in some districts of the town were also peeved by the loss of gratuities that should have accrued to them as converts were being buried according to the new Christian rites. For these people, conversion was bad for business, and as in Ephesus, they would not fold their hands.

Mr. and Mrs. Townsend returned to Abeokuta in March of 1850, gratified by the rapturous welcome they received. Their arrival with more agents from Sierra Leone, in addition to the ministers who had joined the mission in their absence, maintained an upbeat work atmosphere. Opportunities were opening in many different settlements, but the personnel was lacking to honor the many invitations for a white man to take residence in them. Behind this longing to have missionaries were mutual jealousies among the various towns and the insecurity of the age. People lived under the fear of the many slave-raiding wars they knew could sweep their towns away at any moment. Some of them would have thought that the presence of the white man would be an advantage. 3.0

Civil Developments

Tension between the war chiefs and the civil chiefs was a feature of Egba society in the immediate post-Sodeke era. It became much more so as mission took roots in Abeokuta and the message of disciplined life gradually penetrated society, really in agreement with the aspirations of common people who wanted to settle down to a peaceful life.

In this spirit, Sagbua, like Sodeke was keen on Abeokuta establishing diplomatic relations with England. When Mr. Townsend was returning to England in 1848, he dictated a letter to him to be delivered to the queen. In January 1851, Her Majesty's consul in the Bights of

Benin and Biafra, Mr. Beecroft, visited Abeokuta. The consul was impressed by the size of the town and the public reception given him at Ake town square. Having read the message of the queen, he reminded the people that "the English were the only people who had endeavoured to benefit them, and to remove 'from Africa the awful darkness that overshadows her.'" He also informed them about the malicious design of King Ghezo of Dahomey to attack the town and "then spoke of the desire of the Queen of England for the welfare of Abbeokuta, of the importance of commerce, and the necessity of suppressing the slave trade, if they hope for peace and prosperity." Sarah Tucker noted that the Egba chiefs received the consul's admonitions and expressed "their earnest desire for the removal of the usurping Kosoko from Lagos, being well assured that no peace could be expected as long as he was there." 3.1 Forced Expansion through War

As the values of the wider world continue to make inroads into Abeokuta through the returnees from Sierra Leone and the missionaries, the settlers gradually adapted to their environment. The mission too was making progress, and the work was expanding into adjoining settlements when Ghezo, the Dahomian king, and his women soldiers, the Amazons, made good their plan to attack Abeokuta. They made fruitless assault on Abeokuta on Sunday, March 2, 1851. The attack and its horror in the momentary displacement of people fleeing for safety gave Mr. Townsend a rethink on the situation of the mission. The unrelenting war troubles, which indirectly brought mission to the country, now were forcing its expansion.

Following the aborted invasion, it became clear to the missionary from Exeter that the mission's activities in the country were being endangered by wars from the western flank of the town. There were lessons of history that readily found application here, and Townsend was quick to draw from them. The CMS and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM) had had to abandon their work in Natal in the 1830s because of the Zulu wars and the complications that came with them in the Boers' Great Trek. To avoid the repeat of the Zululand mission failure, Townsend began to look further afield to safeguard CMS work in Abeokuta. In a letter to his colleagues in the Yoruba mission he advanced all the arguments at his disposal on why the work must be extended beyond Abeokuta forthwith: As a move towards "a chain of mission stations" within "the reach of mutual dependence & assistance," Ibadan and Ijaye qualified, in Townsend's reckoning, as fields to be occupied by

the CMS Yoruba mission. The two towns received their resident missionaries in 1853, David Hinderer stationed at Ibadan and Adolphus Mann at Ijaye. The mitigating influence of mission in Yorubaland, which had been at work in Abeokuta for seven years, was now extended to the other two centers of belligerence in the wars destroying the country. Abeokuta under the mission leadership of Mr. Townsend and his colleagues had become the sunrise of a new life in the country. 3.2 Mission Work into North Abeokuta

In September 1853, Townsend and his wife travelled the country north of Abeokuta to explore for more mission opportunities. They visited Brkodo and passed through Eruwa to Biolorunpelu, known today as Lanlat. Having been joined there by Adolphus Mann, who was just starting the work at Ijaye, they proceeded to Awaye; Ishin; Ag ja, renamed y; and Ijaiye. Townsend found "the worthy old Chief Bioku" of Biolorunpelu hospitable and benevolent and considered his place as deserving mission presence. In his words, "I sincerely desire that our society will take up this place as an outstation which may well be occupied by a sober & right minded Christian native teacher from S. Leone."

Their experience at Awaye was not as pleasant as it could have been, although they were well received by the chief of the place, Lasimeji, whose town was tributary to Kurunmi of Ijaye. At Isehin he observed that, "The Mohammedans have much power here & are very numerous; they have many mosques in their quarter of the town. They are exceedingly jealous of us, and well they might for their influence over the heathens and their charm making craft are greatly endangered by us." Townsend also noted that their slave dealing, which recently suffered a setback in the removal of the pro-slavery king of Lagos, Kosoko, by the English government was another potential source of obstacle to mission. He was aware that these Muslims could mount opposition because of the threat mission posed to their economic interests. He therefore cautioned his carriers against their unrestrained talk against their religion.

At Ijaye, where Mr. Adolphus Mann was starting the mission, it had become clear to both the resident missionary and Mr. Townsend that the work would not thrive under the maximum rule of r Kurunmi. The r would not allow any of his subjects, except the very few immigrants from Sierra Leone, to embrace Christianity. His firm grip of the town, over and above any power--temporal or spiritual--was uncontested; he was held in servile awe by his

subjects. Meanwhile, Townsend and his host, Mr. Mann, received permission from the r to visit his archrival at y, the Alafin Atiba. Townsend presented the request when he found the r in a pleasant mood, but his reaction to him on returning to Ijaye proved that the maximum ruler did not feel safe with the visit. Unfortunately still, the meeting with the y monarch did not yield any result towards the establishment of a mission in the royal town. On the two occasions they had audience with the king, the Alafin sat under a semi-dark veranda in front of his Kbi, official place for receiving visitors in state, his face still partially veiled with hangings from the edge of his crown. They never received any commitment from him, except the plea that the missionaries help to mediate in the feud between himself and the r. Townsend later conceded that he "might have been deceived by the king's fair words," if he had not been told of the king's duplicity. In spite of his idiosyncrasies, however, Townsend could not deny his preference for the rs bluntness over against the cunning of the Alafin: "As far as I am able to make a choice I prefer the blunt & open conduct of the Chief r to the sweet words of the king, the latter's words were so like honey that we suspected guile." Townsend, as a missionary who dared Kurunmi, was a passer-by and r could not follow-up on his affront. In the weeks that followed, Adolphus Mann had to face the consequence. Kurunmi snubbed him and deliberately showed more favors to Mr. Bowen, the Baptist missionary at Ijaye. He even ridiculed his message and his motley band of followers on the margins of Ijaye society.

Townsend subsequently undertook several other journeys of exploration, going as far as Shaki in 1854 and Ilorin in 1859. It is particularly noteworthy that he began to encourage members of his congregation at Ake to support mission after returning from Ilorin. He encouraged them to fund the placement of agents in some of the towns whose chiefs had accepted the mission to establish its work among their people. 4.0 4.1

The Missionary and its Challenges

From the 1860s the service of Mr. Townsend in the Yoruba mission at Abeokuta assumed a new flavor. His position as the longest servicing missionary at Abeokuta, after Rev. Crowther's exit to begin the Niger mission in 1857, seems to have gotten the better part of him. He was not able to fairly manage his disagreements with his colleagues, sometimes

deliberately frustrating them to have his way. Even his annual letter of January 1860, written to his superiors in England, was equally defiant. In it, he accused them that, The white missionaries are much abused...even shown up to the world as retarding the proper development of the native minds, as late as the 4th of last Nov. on the society's instruction publicly delivered we are charged with having separated from the native helpers and converts.

Second, Hinderer accused Townsend and his colleagues at Abeokuta of indifference to the plight of the Ibadan mission that was reduced to poverty as a result of the shut-in situation of the town and its people. In fact, he considered malicious Townsend's attitude to the mission during the war as he would not assist in any way to relieve the suffering mission. Rather, he campaigned against the Ibadan people with his newly founded newspaper Iwe Irohin, which Hinderer considered to be misrepresenting the people to England as war mongers while projecting the Egba people as representing light and civilization.

His campaign against the ordination of Rev. Crowther as a bishop was the most indiscreet adventure Townsend plunged himself into and damaged his own reputation as an altruistic missionary. Early in the 1860s, to realize his vision of the three self church, Mr. Henry Venn proposed to consecrate the foremost Christian convert in CMS West Africa mission as a bishop over his people, the Yoruba church being now self-extending through Crowther's work on the Niger. The honorary secretary considered it was time for mission to move to "the regions beyond" while the indigenous church grew in a self-definition that was germane to its cultural environment.

Townsend would not brook such grand design that would supposedly elevate an African agent over Europeans. He lobbied the white missionary party in the mission against the proposal. From then on, he turned on his former fellow pioneer in a campaign that sought to misrepresent him and his family to the home committee as undeserving of the esteem in which he was being held in England. From the late 1850s, as long as Crowther's family resided in Abeokuta, Townsend had no good news for his Africa colleague each time he returned from the Niger. All he had to say to the weary pioneer was how bad his children had been in his absence. Townsend was so confident in his belief in the superiority of his race to claim that even the respect Rev. Crowther had among his people at Abeokuta was because he answered to an English name.

Townsend's ultimate achievement in the matter of Crowther's ordination as a bishop was laying the foundation for the ruin of his Niger episcopacy through his unguarded racial prejudice. Five years after Townsend's death, the bishop and his Niger mission came under the unsparing sledgehammer of a new generation of missionaries who inherited the prejudice, indiscriminately sacked his agents, humiliated the man, and sent him to his grave on December 31, 1891. Townsend was dead, but his prejudice was still speaking. 4.2 A Change of Tide: Politics Unlimited

Townsend's difficulty in his service at Abeokuta began in his congregation in the late 1850s. Evidently, some young men in his congregation at Ake had started to maintain a posture of independence, which he found perplexing. In his annual letter of 1859, he wrote: The difficulties I have met in my own congregation, & they are growing difficulties I fear for our influence has been destroyed, have arisen from some aspiring young men who are filled with worldliness & self conceit too proud to hear reproof & too wise to need instruction. In one or two cases where they have fallen into direct immoral acts I have separated them from the church. The state of the young men gives me much anxious thought for acts of kindliness seem wasted on them. Obligations are speedily forgotten, servants and work people take liberties with their employers that nothing but necessity makes bearable. If this state of affairs was perplexing to Townsend, it was a prelude to what was soon to come. Yet, this did not come without earlier warnings.

Townsend's description of the conduct of these young men as immoral must be placed against the background of missionaries' popular perception of unconverted returnees, and it is difficult to make much of it. What is clear is that the returnees from Sierra Leone in the 1860s were not the reticent type that came in the first wave in the 1840s. Before leaving Sierra Leone, these ones had tasted from the incipient nationalism that was brewing in the colony, which later became the burden of the colonial authorities there in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Townsend pursued all the public relations he could, and tried to represent Egba interests to England through the CMS parent committee just as Hinderer in Ibadan was taking sides with the governor's actions. For Johnson, it was obvious that Townsend could not be an authentic representative of Egba interests in the matter between them and the colonial regime in Lagos.

The answer for him was to establish Egba administration on a stronger and modern footing with arms of government similar to those of European nations, capable of advancing the interests of Egbaland, and independent of the pretended largesse of English government. To this end, he championed the formation of the Egba United Board of Management (EUBM), combining "the legitimacy of traditional rulers with the skills and the wider outlook of the educated Christian Saro to create 'an enlightened and Christian government.'"

5.0

The Legacy of Townsend

Townsend was a gifted missionary capable of formulating sound mission strategy. His successful push for expansion in the war-torn country was as significant as it was courageous. It proved to be the saving grace of the Yoruba mission in its formative years. However, Townsend seems to have been particularly poor in his pastoral work with young people, being impatient with their idiosyncrasies while having deep respect for the gravity of the elderly. By 1866, he had become reflective enough to appreciate the challenge of church members coming from gross heathenism and to adopt a more biblical and cultural, rather than ecclesiastical, approach to church discipline. He confessed poignantly: My own experience of the nature of church discipline is that we go wrong when we try to inflict a punishment; as a rule I find that people don't need to be formally told they are not fit to partake of the Lord's Supper; they are better governed by the inward monitor; those conscious of having committed evil keep away & this is far better than if I told them to keep away. I find too the benefit of using the elders of the church to investigate cases brought against a church member or to settle disagreements. I save myself the labour & also the unpleasant position one is brought into by being a judge, but at the same time I hear for the most part all that is to be said on either side.

5.1

Indigenous Agency

At a cursory look, it appears Townsend did not record much success in developing indigenous agency from among home grown converts at Abeokuta as his counterparts in Ibadan, Mr. and Mrs. Hinderer, did with children boarded in their home. Coming from the traditional society, such converts were not usually encumbered with the ambition and lack of malleability that sometimes characterized agents from Sierra Leone. Rather, they were at home with the traditional society and had no problem sorting out cultural issues as they affect

their faith. However, Townsend's apparent lack of good success in raising them must be qualified.

Townsend's hands-on learning in the printing business led to the publication of many materials for worship, devotional, and educational purposes in the mission. Some of these are listed in his entry in the CMS missionary register. They include several hymns which he compiled and printed as the first Hymn Book in Yoruba. He also put together a Primer in Yoruba. In retirement, he compiled a new and enlarged edition of the Yoruba Hymn Book and saw through the press two Yoruba School-books, an edition of Yoruba version of the Book of Common Prayer corrected, and the Peep of Day in Yoruba.

6.0
6.1

Conclusion
Lesson Learnt

A fair assessment of Townsend and his legacy must recognize the temperament of the man, the circumstances that gave birth to the Yoruba mission, and the nature of the Egba society in which he served as a missionary. In this vein, his major weakness lay in his domineering attitude and racial pretensions. Although the only naked expression of the latter was in his resistance to Crowther's bishopric, it earned him a place in mission's hall of infamy and robbed him of his significance as a mission strategist. Although his hard-headedness put him on a collision course with his fellow missionaries, yet one must wonder if this was not also his strength in advancing the mission in a war-torn society like the nineteenth century Yoruba country.

As a missionary, knowing the people language is a very major tool in reaching the people and should be followed with vogue. According to Henry Townsend, My labour in the Aku dialect have been steadily pursued since I resumed work in February 1842. He had so much courage to spread the gospel despite his challenges. Townsend was able to win his subject through his charismatic and creative thinking. He was a racist, he never wanted the people to be educated with the following reasons:

The black people will no longer have regard to the whiteman. The black, if educated, might resist the spread of the gospel to protect their deity. The white missionary might not have a place in the black man country.

 He never wanted to experienced what happened in Sierra Leone as a result of

In view of all this, and despite his human failings, especially his lack of charity towards his colleagues, it cannot be taken away from Mr. Henry Townsend that he was the main power behind the planting of Christianity in the Yoruba country as a hard-headed mission strategist. Perhaps, few missionaries would have done better than he did in the complex and volatile circumstances in which he served at Abeokuta.

Notes: 1. In his published memoir, his brother put it at 1820 whereas the CMS Register of Missionaries records that he entered the Church Missionary College at Islington at the age of 21 in 1836. p. 41. 2. Early English missionaries in Sierra Leone were artisans who came to serve with the mission as Christian teachers inculcating skills to the children under their tutelage. 3. H. Townsend, journal entry, February 11, 1842, CMS C/A1/M10(1842-1843)/196. 4. H. Townsend, journal entry, March 19, 1842, CMS C/A1/M10(1842-1843)/197, 198. 5. "Aku members of the congregation at Hastings to the local committee," October 1, 1842, CMS C/A1/M10(1842-1843)/331. 33. H. Townsend to Missionaries, July 3, 1851, CMS C/A2/M2(1848-1854)/279-283 34. H. Townsend to Missionaries, July 3, 1851, CMS C/A2/M2(1848-1854)/279-283 35. D. Hinderer to H. Venn, Letter dated May 7, 1849, CMS C/A2/O49/2. 36. H. Townsend to Missionaries, July 3, 1851, CMS C/A2/M2(1848-1854)/279-283. 37. Hinderer arrived at Ibadan as a familiar face, having been there on an exploratory visit in 1851. Mann arrived at his place of service for the first time. D. Hinderer, Journal for the Quarter Ending March 25, 1853, CMS C/A2/O/49/105; A. Mann, Journal of the Mission Station Ijaye from February 17 to March 30, 1853, CMS C/A2/O66. 38. Townsend wrote of Chief Bioku: "His parting salutation gave us much pleasure, 'I commit you to the care of God;' his hospitality & attention to us during our short stay was of the same cast with this his parting benediction & gave us a strong desire to bestow upon him & his people that knowledge of God that man's feeble instrumentality is able to communicate." H. Townsend, journal entry, September 8, 1853, CMS C/A2/O85/254. 39. H. Townsend, journal entry, September 13, 1853, CMS C/A2/O85/254. 40. H. Townsend, journal entries, September 13 and 14, 1853, CMS C/A2/O85/254. 41. Egba people themselves attributed their unparalleled success over Dahomey to the presence of the missionaries among them. H. Townsend to H. Straith, March 4, 1851, CMS C/A2/O85/7. 42. "Yoruba proper" was often used by the agents of CMS in the nineteenth century to

distinguish the Oyo people from the other clans of the nation. This is because the word Yoruba was used to describe the Oyo people first before it was extended to the other clans. 43. H. Townsend, journal entry, September 18, 1853, CMS C/A2/O85/254. 44. H. Townsend, journal entry, September 30, 1853, CMS C/A2/O85/254. 45. H. Townsend, Journal Entry, September 30, 1853, CMS C/A2/O85/254. 46. H. Townsend, Journal Entry, September 30, 1853, CMS C/A2/O85/254. 47. A. Mann, Journal for July, August and September 1853, CMS C/A2/O66/79. 48. H. Townsend, "Journal of a journey from Abbeokuta to Ijaye, Shaki and Iseyin," CMS C/A2/O85/259; H. Townsend, annual letter, January 31, 1860, CMS C/A2/O85/268. 49. H. Townsend, annual letter, January 31, 1860, CMS C/A2/O85/268. 50. H. Townsend, annual letter, January 31, 1860, CMS C/A2/O85/268. 51. The indictment and Townsend's rebuttal seem to have derived from the attitude of the European missionaries towards Mr. Thomas Macaulay whom the missionaries regarded as "all book" but useless for missionary work, hence their not wanting to have anything to do with him. His connection with Mr. Crowther as his son-in-law meant they could not treat the man like a scum and get away with it. The esteem in which Mr. Crowther and all that were his were held in England meant that their treatment of Mr. Macaulay was a bad publicity for the missionaries in the Yoruba mission. At bottom, Townsend was criticizing his boss, Mr. Henry Venn. H. Townsend, annual letter, January 31, 1860, CMS C/A2/O85/268. 52. D. Hinderer to secretaries, June 21, 1860, CMS C/A2/O49/43. 53. D. Hinderer to H. Venn, March 10, 1863, CMS C/A2/O49/61. 54. H. Townsend to H. Venn, May 4, 1860, CMS C/A2/O85/76. 55. H. Townsend to secretaries, July 5, 1860, CMS C/A2/O85/77. 64. Till today, controversy still rages in the intellectual discussion of the crisis of the Niger mission. This often generates around the motive and the method used by the upstarts that were at its center. On the one hand, African historians are of the view that the motive was racial and some of the young missionaries who treated the old bishop with utter disrespect would not have done so to their own European elderly missionaries. Some European mission historians do not see anything racial in what happened; for them the failure of the mission was the evidence that Crowther should not have been elevated as a bishop in the first place. By implication such argument sustained Townsend's prejudice. Stephen Neill is one of these European mission historians who held this position up till the 1950s. As it may be seen above, my position is that in an age of high European imperialism, racism was involved in the matter; and thirty years before the young missionaries from British universities appeared on the scene, Townsend laid its foundation. But racism was not the only issue involved. Uninformed youthful zeal and the other-worldly theology of the missionaries who came on the scene in the second half of the 1880s also contributed to the problem. The young missionaries did not value the old ethos of Christianity, commerce, and civilization which was driving the bishop's agenda on the Niger; the bishop's cultural sensibility was meaningless to them. Neither did they see any nexus that connected their own country, England, with authentic Christianity. Their people at home and abroad, they believed, needed conversion also. Ajayi, Jacob F.A. Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841-1891: The Making of a New Elite. Essex: Longman, 1965; Stephen Neill, Anglicanism (London: Penguin Books, 1958), 341. 65. H. Townsend, annual letter, February 2, 1859, CMS C/A2/O85/267 66. Graf, "Report of visit to the Yoruba mission," CMS C/A1/O105/63/23. 67. G. Bhler to H. Venn, July 2, 1859, CMS C/A2/O24/19. 68. In addition to the visits of Bishops Vidal and Bowen in 1854 and 1859 respectively, Bishop Weeks also visited the Yoruba mission from November 1856 to February 1857, having succeeded Bishop Vidal.

69. H. Townsend, annual letter, February 5, 1861, CMS C/A2/O85/269. Primary Church Missionary Society (CMS) Archives, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, UK. Johnson, Samuel. The History of the Yorubas--From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate. Lagos: CMS, 1921, Tucker, Sarah. Abbeokuta, or Sunrise within the Tropics: An Outline of the Origin and Progress of the Yoruba Mission. New York: Robert Carter, 1854. Secondary Ajayi, J. F. A. Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841-1891: The Making of a New Elite. Essex: Longman, 1965. Ajayi, J. F. A. "Henry Martyn Lecture III: Crowther and the Trade on the Niger," under "Henry Martyn Center," http://131.111.227.198/CAjay3a.htm (accessed February 25, 2011). Ajayi, J. F. A. "A New Christian Politics? The Mission Educated Elite in West African Politics," in Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706-1914, edited by Dana L. Robert, 242-264. Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans. Akinjogbin, I. A. "The Oyo Empire in the Eighteenth Century--A Reassessment," Journal of Historical Society of Nigeria (JHSN), vol. 3. No. 3 (1966). Biobaku, Saburi O. The Egba and Their Neighbours 1842-1872. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965. Carlyle, J. E. South Africa and Its Mission Fields. London: James Nisbet and Co., 1878. Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, edited by Philip D. Curtin, 317-334. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Du Plessis, J. A History of Christian Missions in South Africa (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1911), 221-229. Lloyd, P. C. "Osifekunde of Ijebu," in Africa Remembered--Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, edited by Philip D. Curtin, 217-288. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Neill, Stephen. Anglicanism. London: Penguin Books, 1958. Smith, Robert. Kingdoms of the Yoruba, 3rd edition. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Spitzer, Leo. The Creoles of Sierra Leone--Responses to Colonialism, 1870-1945 (Ile-Ife, Nigeria: University of Ife Press, 1975). Warren, Max. Unfolding Purpose--An Interpretation of the Living Tradition Which Is C.M.S. (N.p.: CMS, 1950).