The Journey of the First Black Bishop: Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther 1806-1891

Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther was a true son of Africa in character, dilligence, strategic approach to issues, methodologically independent and a deep thinking person. He was taken into slavery not out of his own making or voluntary acceptability but out of providence and the making of human nature. He was destined to go through the ordeal of slavery inorder for him to learn the methodology of how he would release his other brethrens still wallowing in the bondage of slavery and abject poverty. Without Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther's ordeal, efforts and strategic planning, the fire of development we now see burning across the continent of Africa today would have been long extinguished. He single handedly planted the tree of unity not only in his home country - Nigeria alone, but across the length and breadth of his beloved continent, which other people from other nations of the world had written off and labelled the dark continent. He brought oil and lamp for us to see the dangerous path that we were formerly trodding and elevated the status of a black person in the committee of world nations. His grandson Albert Macaulay was undisputably the father of politics in Nigeria while others who struggled with his grandfather in the vanguard of education, economic freedom and total destruction of slaverery in Africa also had their own place of recognition in the land of the continent.