Hello ,

Season’s greetings from all of us at the Bishop Crowther Documentary Film Project. 

For us, December is Crowther Memorial Month, being that Bishop Crowther died on 31 December 1891. The Crowther Project is very much on course, thanks to the support – financial and otherwise – we keep getting from the public. 

We've done one or two more interviews and are planning a couple more in the coming weeks. In recent weeks, we’ve had access to new libraries and found useful publications on their shelves. One such book is: “The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria (1842 - 1914) by E.A Ayandele, one of the most authoritative historians on the subject. 

Meanwhile, this December gives me an opportunity to revisit the newsletter I sent exactly a year ago, on 2 December 2021. In it, I wrote (partly) as follows:  

As we have researched him over the past couple of months, we’ve turned up a great amount of information – from his own personal accounts and those of others – that have revealed more about him, his ideology, struggles and accomplishments. 

We learned new things about him with every passing week, more or less. It was like peeling the layers of an onion and beholding a shiny new skin. 

The more we pored through diverse documents, the more I realized that there was a lot that Bishop Crowther can teach us in the 21st century. And that includes his leadership style, his thoughtful approach to problem solving, his communications skills, his understanding of the human nature, his desire for enterprise, his belief in the importance of science and Agriculture, his passion for education, his willingness to leave people better than he met them, and his single-minded devotion to his life-long mission of evangelism.

And that’s not all. From the onset, we have dedicated some time to studying Crowther's yearly engagements and travels across what’s now Nigeria. And from that we’ve put together a very long list that we’ve tagged “Crowther’s Calendar”. 

Here’s a sneak peek into what some of his Decembers looked like: 

• 11 DECEMBER, 1825: Ajayi was baptized by Rev. J.B Raban and given the name Samuel Crowther after a venerable clergyman, the Rev. Samuel Crowther, Vicar Of Christ Church, Newgate Street, London, and one of the first committees of the Church Missionary Society.

• 2 DECEMBER, 1843: Rev. Samuel Crowther arrived in Freetown Sierra Leone after his ordination in England.

• 3 DECEMBER, 1843: Rev. Samuel Crowther preached his first sermon in English to congregants in Freetown Sierra Leone.

• 5 DECEMBER, 1851: Crowther and his wife addressed Christians to plead the case of his people in a schoolroom at the parochial school in Islington.

• 11 DECEMBER, 1857: Rev Samuel Ajayi Crowther met the Baptist missionary, Mr. Clark while stranded on Jebba Island

I’ll say more about these in subsequent newsletters.

Thank you.

Pelu Awofeso

For: The Bishop Crowther Project