Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the Age of Literature

Nineteenth-century Yoruba linguist and Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther wanted the next generation of Nigerian leaders to be committed readers and writers and throughout his career he pursued this goal effectively. The essay begins with a brief account of the social and literary contexts in which Crowther produced and promoted literature. Then the essay draws from unpublished letters from the middle part of Crowther’s career to show how he framed his literary project as something unprecedented and novel—as if he were inaugurating a new “age of literature”—but then turns back to show how he also framed it in terms of preexisting literary traditions, both “pagan” and Islamic. What emerges is a piece of a literary history too complex to be conceptualized as a progression from precolonial orality to colonial literacy and literature.