Laws of God and Missionary Handling of Slavery

The CMS did not formulate a principle regarding domestic slavery that their agents on the Niger in the 19^th century must follow. This seems to be a default position that simply followed their SPG (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) older missionary cousin’s practice since the late 18^th century in the US and in the Caribbean (where they owned a slave plantation that was bequeathed to them)Footnote ¹⁰ . In a bid to mitigate slaveholder’s antagonism to the conversion of the enslaved to Christianity and their consequent admittance into the church on an equal footing with the slaveholder – a situation the slaveholders considered subversive of their authority over the enslaved – the SPG affirmed a policy for their enslaved converts of ‘absolute obedience’ to the slave master.Footnote ¹¹ Responding to the famous activist American abolitionist Anthony Benezet’s letter imploring the SPG to condemn slavery and outlaw it among its members, Daniel Burton, the SPG Secretary (1761–1773) affirmed on behalf of the society that

The SPG position clearly affirmed ameliorationism and gradualism.Footnote ¹³ The CMS policy on the Niger and in their other West African mission stations differed little from this position. In contrast, the Swiss-founded Basel Mission that operated on the Gold Coast around the same time had in their document of engagement an article that prohibited attachment to all forms of slavery for members of the mission community.Footnote ¹⁴ The CMS rather developed on the fly what the range of acceptable responses to slavery should look like according to local conditions in the mission field. Hence, what guided the agents’ conception of justice to domestic slaves, if they conceived their mission as one based on justice, and how they were to operationalize this justice for their converts, themselves and the society that hosted them was not a part of the setup instructions the CMS gave to Crowther.

While the 19^th-century British abolition of slavery was in implementation in the colony of Sierra Leone, from where the CMS agents came, the Niger River basin societies that hosted the missions remained major slave societies. Considerable internal slave trading continued to anchor the political economies of these societies. The law of the land thus sanctioned slavery and the slave trade. Indeed, the brief of the British government-sponsored 1841/42 anti-slave trade commissioners to the Niger was to persuade African ruling elites along the Niger to employ their slaves in industrial cash crop production at home rather than deport them overseas. Thus, preparatory to having Obi of Aboh at the head of the delta of the Niger sign an anti-slave trade treaty in 1841, Captain Trotter

Anti-slavery as a Christian precept and a moral concern placed the CMS missionaries in between two cultural systems that were supported by different political and legal frameworks. In interpreting or intermediating anti-slavery and Christian principles, the missionaries had to respect the laws of the land at the same time as they espoused and promoted the laws of God, as well as obey the laws of England.

The royal statute that licensed the Niger Mission as a missionary episcopacy of Bishop Crowther in West Africa declared this episcopacy to be operative in ‘the countries beyond the limits of our [British] dominions’.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, like their 100-year-older cousin, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in the 18^th-century Gold Coast, the CMS ‘operated within the confines of the existing African social and political structure’ in places where British sovereign authority was lacking.Footnote ¹⁷ Hence, though licensed by a British royal edict and operating under a British Anglican mission, Crowther’s mission stations were neither British colonies nor protectorates. Rather, missionaries like Crowther and other secular British interests, like traders and explorers, were, by their activities and advocacy, the ones who at the time were directly and indirectly making or seeking to make these places into a British sphere of influence.

In 1841 at Raba, above the confluence of the Niger and Benue, Crowther appealed to both the law of God and the law of England as he remonstrated with slave traders on ‘the sinfulness of the practice, it being against the laws of God and the laws of the most enlightened kingdoms of the world’.Footnote ¹⁸ The retort he received from a slave merchant was that ‘it was not against the laws of this country and their king’.Footnote ¹⁹ The law of the land thus prevailed for most of the time. Because of the British government’s inability at this time to extend their direct political rule in order, among other things, to avoid incurring expenses, the British Foreign Office canvassed protection and support of independent local political elites for British trading and mission outposts that had gone way ahead of the empire’s direct political reach.

The Bible and the Plough

As a long-term development policy that would put an end to slavery and other cultural infelicities, Crowther espoused and implemented the Buxtonian ‘Bible and the Plough’ precept, i.e., Christianity going hand in hand with improved agriculture and export production.Footnote ²⁰ This was the evangelical missions’ proposition that received the British government support and partnership for the introduction of legitimate commerce to the interior of Africa – its more popular version was Christianity, Commerce and Civilization.Footnote ²¹ Crowther held firmly to this idea that in the long run, it was going to be the solution, the death knell, to internal slavery and the slave trade. Redirect the attention of slave traders/holders to agricultural export production in exchange for European manufacture; put the children in schools and train them in some trade as they learn the rudiments of the Christian religion and become converts, and a new day would dawn for Africa. He argued, ‘We must make ourselves more generally useful in order to promote the Christian civilization of the people on the Niger by the introduction of industrial habits in connexion with our stations: the country abounds with produce, labour is cheap; if the youths are only taught to prepare them for European markets, our work is done’.Footnote ²²

Crowther was of the view that the continuing strength of local slave trading on the Niger was due to the absence of a carrying trade in British imports with African states and societies further inland. This was the reason, he explained, why in 1866 he and his son, Dandeson, were forcibly detained by a chief Abbokoh of Idah. The chief would release them, among other demands, on the condition that a ship would come to trade with him. Crowther reported:

Rev. J. C. Taylor, in charge of the Onitsha mission between 1857 and 1870, shared similar sentiments regarding Onitsha. He argued that more oil trading at Onitsha ‘will serve as an impetus in time to come for the good of the country in general and will, I hope, give a healthy blow to slavery and its abominable rites’.Footnote ²⁴ Consequently, Crowther and his agents promoted local production of export crops like palm oil and cotton and, at Onitsha and Lokoja, insisted on establishing an industrial establishment that would train young converts and give them skills beyond mere literacy. He argued that the booty-seeking adult locals, ‘who have hired themselves to the services of Masaba [emir of Nupe] in destroying towns and villages from which they derive very little advantage’, would have their attention directed at the example of economic activities to be engaged in these industrial establishments to show them that ‘the cultivation of cotton [was] most remunerative’.Footnote ²⁵

Adjusting Slavery’s Legal Framework

What, in the meantime, were the agents in these stations to do with domestic slavery? The mission stations brought the anti-slavery idea that had been broadcast since the 1841/42 expedition closer home to the enslaved and to their masters and mistresses. Crowther’s agents at Lokoja, Gbebe and Idah all reported requests to them, especially by enslaved women converts, to be redeemed or to subsidize their redemption fund or protect them from being sold away into foreign slavey.Footnote ²⁶

Consequently, a significant proportion of the founding members of the CMS churches that Crowther and his agents established were redeemed, ransomed or enslaved individuals. Their schools were populated as well by redeemed children as by the enslaved. While interesting cases of children of members of the ruling class occurred as pioneer church members, freed and enslaved people, especially women, several of whom Crowther or his agents ransomed, constituted the pillars of the churches.Footnote ²⁷ Admittedly, ransoming enslaved children was a major humanitarian affair supported by Christian donors in England and other parts of Europe who during Crowther’s episcopacy sent funds severally to him for this purpose. In 1868, he reported that ‘a little girl was ransomed for the Jewish girls at Bucharest. [and] one of the little boys for the school children at Cheltenham’.Footnote ²⁸ Jewish schoolgirls in Bucharest had fundraised and sent him £5/- for this purpose. And in 1870, ‘kind Christian friends and Sunday school pupils in England have subscribed now and then for the ransom of a few unfortunate children from slavery and have undertaken to support them at school’.Footnote ²⁹

Early 19^th-century and mid-19^th-century Nupe Muslim societies like the Raba and Bida emirates practised forms of manumission. Pious masters could free their slaves on religious grounds; the enslaved were allowed in theory to purchase their freedom, and there were legal procedures for concubines to transition to legal but usually lower-ranked wives. Also, during the wars of the Sokoto and Nupe jihads, liberty was often proclaimed as the reward for slaves who fled their heathen masters to join the jihad parties.Footnote ³⁰ However, in non-Islamic societies, status change for the enslaved was largely generational and applied to domestic rather than trade slaves, and even then such individuals, like children of loyal slaves or old eunuchs, tended to remain in a dependent relationship with their erstwhile master’s family. Their bundle of rights usually remained inferior to those of the free members of the society.Footnote ³¹

Nonetheless, the ransoming and recruiting of the enslaved by Crowther’s missionaries on the Niger into their churches heralded for the slaveholders a social and economic basis for the ransomed to be more independent of their former masters and mistresses. The Church and Mission Yard, the missionary agents and their wives and especially Bishop Crowther, who wielded clerical and diplomatic clout equal to the political clout of the kings and chiefs with whom he dealt, afforded the ransomed convert and ransomed relations of church members access to a measure of economic, social and religious resources that a less well-connected ransomed slave would require generations to realize.

The missions were a significant political and economic institution in their own right, and Crowther’s status as a leader with political, religious and economic power was acknowledged all along the Niger. Crowther participated officially in all British government-sponsored anti-slavery missions to rulers and kings on the Niger between 1841 and 1857 and was responsible for securing all the political agreements with rulers that allowed for the establishment of mission stations along the length of the river. His mission stations were a locus of economic activities that rulers were proud to associate with, as construction projects and importation of used goods and foodstuff and, sometimes, trade goods to sustain missionaries created significant economic avenues within the localities where the missions were stationed. Also, after the official withdrawal of the British consulate from the Niger in 1869, Crowther served as the official envoy of the British government to the Nupe emirate for 6 consecutive years, transmitting messages and conveying gifts to the emir and other notables.Footnote ³²

Endowed with such material and symbolic power, these missions thus introduced a shift to the actual status of the enslaved and to the local understanding of how slavery operated. Conversion inevitably impacted the legal framework within which domestic slavery operated in the Niger mission societies. The social space, the cultural capital and sometimes the economic opportunity, in the form of wage employment provided to the ransomed convert, served to undermine the traditional hierarchical cliental social and legal relationships between the ransomed and their erstwhile overlords. Through their association with the mission, some enslaved women at Lokoja, for instance, were able to accumulate savings that were used towards their own redemption or that of their children.Footnote ³³ Hence, the local slave masters and mistresses put up significant resistance, most of which was reported as persecution of the converts in Bonny, Onitsha, Lokoja and Gbebe.Footnote ³⁴

For Crowther’s missionary agents on the Niger, apart from preaching lenient treatment of the enslaved, ransoming constituted one of the important means of bringing the ‘laws of God’ to bear on the practice and institution of slavery in the immediate period and in the short run. But the missions also accommodated slavery to Christian conversion. The enslaved convert and master-and-mistress converts were admitted into what was considered as the pathway to progress by virtue of the Christian teachings taught them.

One might ask, how did Henry Venn, the long-serving CMS secretary and patron of Crowther, conceive of his missionaries’ relationship to domestic slavery in West Africa? His memorandum of 1857 to them deviated little from the pragmatic orthodox position that was adopted during the long struggle in England against slavery: first prohibit and abolish slave trading and thereafter slavery itself. Hence, his memorandum incongruously condemned slave trading and the slave trader but allowed slavery to be.Footnote ³⁵ His missionary agents were to ‘refuse baptism to a kidnapper of slaves unless he has repented and left his evil way, because the practice is directly contrary to Scripture’, but nonetheless, Venn averred that the ‘Committee [of the CMS] would not interfere with the discretion of a missionary in admitting a slaveholder to baptism [because] the Word of God has not forbidden the holding of slaves, though it has forbidden the oppression and injustice of various other evils which too often, though not necessarily, cleave to the character of the slaveholder’.Footnote ³⁶ His reasoning and justification for this position was that in due course, ‘Christianity will ameliorate the relationship between master and slave.’Footnote ³⁷ Reports by Crowther and his agents about these societies testify that such amelioration, difficult changes from the perspective of the slave owners, was happening. They were taking place in the contexts of great contestation and a fraught relationship between the slave-holding political elite on the one hand and the missions, mission converts and the missionary agents on the other.

There are examples in missionary documents showing where the Laws of God were applied in a manner that clearly impacted the legal basis and structuring of the slaveholder’s claim to the person and labour of the enslaved. The first was the adoption of a mass conversion strategy by a local chief, Salamaleku Oduka, at Lokoja, to claim a social and political identity meant to free his community from claims by the officials of the expanding jihadist Nupe emirate over their person. The second was the missionaries’ effort to promote the observance of the Sabbath as a general norm for their host societies, convert or no, i.e., as a day to be observed by all people, including the enslaved, as a sacrosanct work-free day.

The Law of God, the Law of the Land, and the Eki Community’s Struggle Against Slavery

Salamaleku’s Eki community used religious affiliation with the CMS to challenge and resist the jihadist Nupe emirate claim of rights to tax and enslave them as pagans. Salamaleku established a close relationship with the mission, building an Anglican chapel within his community and thus placing his community within the sphere of the Christian Laws of God and the putative British protection, the Laws of England that were assumed for Christians, missionaries and local converts. This was to protect them from the Nupe state’s Sharia law, which in this instance constituted both ‘the laws of the Land’ and the ‘law of God’ for Muslims. The first espoused an anti-slavery ethos, and the second had slavery and the slave trade as important bases of its socio-economic and political structure.

The context for this confrontation was both fortuitous and deliberate. In 1857 Crowther established a CMS mission station in Gbebe on the right bank of the confluence of the Niger and the Benue. This was a famed regional market town newly established only thirty years previously. Its strategic location and fame, as well as the military political disturbances affecting the region at this period, had sent immigrants into it who settled in ethnically differentiated quarters.Footnote ³⁸ The Eki group was one such. They responded favourably to the coming of the Christian mission, and they supplied some of the earliest women members of the Anglican church to be baptized. However, the men made the strategic request that a Christian worship place be built within their own section of the town or close to it to forestall the risk, they argued, of their children being stolen by kidnappers if they had to traverse a long distance to the regular church in the mission quarters. Soon after this request, the town was destroyed in a succession war, the mission yard was plundered and the town’s population was dispersed abroad. Consequently, the Gbebe mission, along with its boarding students and other refugees, relocated to Lokoja on the opposite bank of the Niger confluence. Chief Salamaleku and many of his people relocated to Lokoja with the CMS and set up a new quarter complete with a chapel under the auspices of the CMS, thus giving Lokoja its second Anglican church.Footnote ³⁹ The entire Eki community in Lokoja had become converts now associated with other Christian immigrants from Yorubaland and with Sierra Leonean claimants of British protection.

At the outset of the Gbebe rulership succession struggle, one of the contenders, Abaje, invited the assistance of Emir Masaba, the jihadist ruler of Bida, against his rival.Footnote ⁴⁰ As well, economic dislocations to surrounding communities caused by the crisis gave the Nupe emir a perfect excuse – seeking to restore order on the vital Niger trade route – to intrude and expand into territory previously subject to the Igala king at Idah. The crisis lasted for a decade and overlapped with mid-19^th-century Nupe emirate expansion. Just at this time, the British government decided to withdraw its Lokoja consulate, and the government and the CMS headquarters were forced to seek the protection of the jihadist emir of Bida for the resident European commercial agents, the CMS mission operatives and all British subjects at Lokoja. The emir consequently billeted a detachment of his soldiers and officials on Lokoja, effectively converting the area into a fief within his emirate.Footnote ⁴¹ The consequence for Salamaleku was that the emir’s officials commenced, periodically, to seize members of his community and claim them as their slaves or levy exorbitant taxes on them based on the officials designating them as pagans who were therefore legally enslaveable under the law of jihad.

The jihadist official of the Bida emirate now in charge of Lokoja asserted adherence to Islam as the basis for citizenship and citizen privileges in their jurisdiction. They represented the Eki as infidel non-Muslim locals rather than as ‘English’ or Christian, the political and religious identity claimed by all immigrants and Christians and which the missionary agents claimed for their Nigerian converts; the same that the Eki community strove hard to acquire as an immunity from Nupe jihadist oppression.Footnote ⁴² The refusal to officially acknowledge the Christian adherence of the Eki community enabled the jihadist emirate officials to overlook the Quranic tenet and tradition that enjoined Muslim respect and kindness to ‘people of the book’, meaning, Christians.Footnote ⁴³ A consideration for ‘people of the book’, of course, would have excluded the Eki community from the demographic that was enslavable and thus would have deprived the emirate officials of a source of loot. On the other hand, by their collective conversion to Christianity and affiliation with the Anglican mission, with varying degrees of success during the mid-19^th century, the Eki people staked their claim to liberty from jihadist taxation and enslavement. They kept pleading their subjection to the legal and political protection of the mission. When they found or thought the missionary agents rather slack to come to their defense, they protested, threatened to withhold or refused to give church offering (claiming it would amount to double taxation since they had been left to be taxed by the jihadists). At other times they threatened to desert the church and once, actually did desert and had to be wooed back.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thrice, recourse was made to direct political action by a British Consul, visiting government-appointed commissioners or Bishop Crowther himself, going to Bida, the emirate capital, to argue for the illegality of jihadist officials harassing, detaining or enslaving members of this community and to liberate or ransom several of them from captivity.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Eki community thus used conversion as the rite that marked them as affiliates of the mission, as people under the missionary Laws of God that the Nupe leadership did acknowledge. It was a tool used to redefine their political identity and stake legal claims to rights as free citizens who should be exempt from jihadist enslavement. The mission agents, finding the local jihadist administration resistant to Eki claims, often reinforced the religious identity claim of their Eki church members with secular British government official persuasion, as was mediated by visiting British commissioners and the threat of their man-of-war, or with bribes and remonstrances.Footnote ⁴⁶ This characterized the three-way struggle over the legal definition of citizen and citizenship rights and the overlapping and contested jurisdiction of the three legal systems.

To render their settlement quarter legally inviolable to jihadist oppression, the Eki also used ‘spatial politics of conversion’ to redefine not only their identity but also to accord a sacredness to their residential ward. They sought to make their settlement a legal sanctuary consequent to their Christian conversion, using the presence of a Christian chapel in their ward and their general affiliation with the mission.Footnote ⁴⁷ They thus innovatively exploited their social, political and religious contexts to establish a legal umbrella to protect themselves from slavery and oppression. Consequently, while the Eki community, and the mission agents and Bishop Crowther sought to reinforce Eki peoples Christian and “English people” identity, the jihadist officials consistently sought to undermine it.Footnote ⁴⁸

Was Ransoming Legal or Illegal, Anti-Slavery or Slave Trading?

W. B. Baikie was the first de facto British consul on the Niger. The 1854 and 1857 British government-sponsored expeditions to the Niger that he led were lauded as the most successful up to then. They aimed to open the country to British commerce and help extirpate slave trade and slavery. Crowther represented the CMS on these expeditions and inaugurated CMS mission stations at Onitsha, Idah, Lokoja and Gbebe during the latter voyage. During the expeditions, as the British government representative to enforce anti-slave trade treaties with African rulers on the Niger, Baikie forcefully liberated any slaves he and his commission members discovered in local trading canoes. Once he settled in Lokoja, he formed people he liberated into a community to stay with him in the town, providing them with wage employment. He seized on every opportunity to ransom enslaved children or relations of some of the redeemed people who now lived and worked for him. The children that he ransomed he put in the mission school as boarders. Hence, he created a significant precedent, especially for ransoming enslaved children who, in missionary writings of the Niger Mission, were referred to as ‘liberated African children’.Footnote ⁴⁹ While on his famous months-long trek to Kano from Lokoja in 1862, Baikie wrote a letter to Bishop Crowther in which, in a single breath, he mentioned six people who he was about to ransom or had already ransomed. Notably, he stressed that he would ‘never allow the matter of a few cowries to stand between me and the liberty of a fellow creature. I have my own opinion about slaves – if during my travels a slave were offered to me, I would at once accept – as I know that with me they are no longer slaves & that possibly the slaves may be taught the truths of our holy religion. While left as a slave, this is most unlikely & nothing but absolute want of means would prevent my endeavouring to rescue them’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Crowther followed suit with this practice of ransoming children. On Sept. 5th, 1868, at the court of Emir Masaba of Nupe, he took a ‘favourable opportunity to ask the King a request, which was the liberation of a little boy and girl from slavery, among those kept in his state for sales, as a memorial of the Gospel having been presented to him and to his Sultan and that these children should be put to school at Lokoja’.Footnote ⁵¹ On this occasion, he ended up ransoming three instead of two little children, a girl and two boys, from the king at the cost of £20 sterling.Footnote ⁵²

But ransoming is a two-edged sword that cuts more than one way. On the Niger, as in the pre-abolition Caribbean, ransoming of slaves played both ways: an amelioration for those ransomed but legitimization and prolongation of slavery in the larger society under the guise of conditions of amelioration. Crowther and his agents redeeming the enslaved at Lokoja opened them up to the charge of reinforcing the moral and political status quo of the slave dealer society, as well as promoting the profit motive that advanced enslavement as a desirable commercial activity. The hefty prices paid for all who were ransomed are evidence of the profitability of the ransom business. Besides, there was also the possibility that the ransomed would merely exchange one servitude for another with a different name.Footnote ⁵³

This recalls the division and debates among abolitionists on the strategy to employ in the British abolition struggle. Some evangelical abolitionists argued that immediate abolition was necessary for Christian conversion and benefit to happen, while others felt that the introduction of Christianity and conversion within slavery would produce an amelioration and transformation of slavery.Footnote ⁵⁴ Some Enlightenment philosophers who similarly condemned slavery as evil and unnatural were known to have introduced pragmatic principles into their arguments as a tactic for gradually moving slaveholders along the path to eventual abolition. Condorcet, who vehemently opposed slavery, was quoted to have advocated pragmatic engagement with politicians and people who had pecuniary interest in slavery to move them towards eventually eliminating an evil that was ‘just as opposed to the interests of trade as it is to those of justice’.Footnote ⁵⁵ To end slavery, it was necessary to enlist the support of the political classes even when these represent people to whom ‘the voice of justice is foreign and [who] look at injustice with cold blood’ and permit it to endure.Footnote ⁵⁶

The consuls who succeeded Baikie at Lokoja all seemed to have approved of individual agents ransoming enslaved boys and girls and ladies for keeps until Leon McLeod was posted to Lokoja sometime in 1866 or 1967. McLeod challenged the definition of ‘ransom’ and ‘freedom’ that he found operative on the Niger and came to regard the ransoming activities of the Sierra Leoneans, including those affiliated with the Lokoja CMS mission, to be synonymous with slave dealing. Reporting to Bishop Crowther in early 1868, Revd. T. C. John, the superintendent of the Lokoja CMS mission station, explained the new policy of Consul McLeod, as well as shed light on the dubious relationship that Sierra Leonean British subjects who ransomed people sustained with those they had ransomed:

As could be expected, this led to hasty action by all the agents, secular and missionary, who were implicated in ransoming women or girls in ways that were irregular to quickly regularize their relationship with those they had ransomed. This was to eliminate suspicion that the consul might entertain that the agents merely used ransoming practices as cover for slave dealing. Rev. T. C. John reported,

As noted by Revd. John, it is indeed not clear whether the ‘young woman’ whom Mr Reader redeemed was a ‘wife or concubine’. If she was treated as a full-fledged legitimate wife, Consul McLeod would have had no occasion to accuse Mr Reader of slave dealing and threaten to send him over to Lagos to be tried for slave dealing. It is equally unlikely that the language would have been used that required a need to ‘set her free’. It is also instructive that the two other persons with the CMS Lokoja mission connection implicated in the possible slave-dealing charge were compelled to formalize marriage relationships with the women they had ransomed. The pregnancy of Mr Reader’s ‘woman’ might be construed as an ongoing sexual exploitation of a vulnerable woman who merely ended up exchanging one slavery for another. The most egregious exploitation of such redeemed girls and boys was recorded for William John at Onitsha, an assistant schoolmaster for the CMS, who with his wife was accused of beating to death a girl they had redeemed from slavery after accusing her of theft. William John was convicted of manslaughter after he returned to Sierra Leone in 1882.Footnote ⁵⁹

Consul Leon McLeod of Lokoja took CMS missionary ransoming of slaves to be equivalent to slave trading. This reflects the continuing debate around the Atlantic on anti-slavery advocacy and process, whether it included amelioration, gradualism, apprenticeship and elements that seemed to prolong the condition of slavery before it finally could be wound up. The reality was that British humanitarian and abolitionist views and definitions of domestic slavery at this time in the mid-19^th century were not unanimous, as opposed to the export trade over the Atlantic, which they all condemned. Neither were there clearly laid down rules on how British diplomatic officials should consistently handle domestic slavery. It was thus unclear whether and when to accommodate indigenous slavery and ransoming as a social practice among the people or to oppose it as a continuation of the Atlantic slave trade practices that were supposed to be abolished.Footnote ⁶⁰

Indeed, as argued by Huzzey and others, British promulgation of anti-slavery laws and its assumption of global moral and political leadership role of extending freedom laws to Africa and elsewhere after 1834 went hand in hand with the continuation of significant unfreedoms, especially in labor and social relations, back in England.Footnote ⁶¹ Huzzey identifies what he considers to be a situation of ‘unreal freedom’, the oppressive and coercive institution of the workhouse, for example, and the contradiction of the occurrence of ‘wage slavery’ or ‘white slavery’ back in England, even as its missionary, military and commercial agents advocated and enforced abolitionism in Africa, the Caribbean and throughout the Atlantic and Indian oceans in early to mid-19^th century.Footnote ⁶² On the other hand, Huzzey argues as does others like S. DrescherFootnote ⁶³ , that the overseas anti-slavery effort, and especially the anti-slavery rhetoric, redounded as moral leverage to advance social and labour reforms at home. The CMS, as a significant arm of British humanitarian and evangelical abolitionism, and the Niger Mission under the leadership of Crowther, it could be argued, were effectively extending British legal (and imperialist) reach, the laws of England, into the Niger area when many aspects of social and economic relations in England remained constrained, unequal and hierarchical. This might have accounted for the omission in Salsbury Square’s instructions to its agents regarding a definitive abolitionist standard for engaging with domestic slavery in their mission stations.

By the 1870s, though, a government position that was more questioning of domestic slavery practices in Africa and, especially, of ransoming, began to emerge. In 1871, the British Foreign Office responded to an inquiry by Consul McLeod thus; ‘the case of a person being hired in his services for a term of years in a sum of money to be applied in the purchase of that person’s freedom comes within the category of a ‘Pawn’; and this specie of slavery was especially forbidden by the Act 6 & 7’.Footnote ⁶⁴ A W. Hewlett who signed the letter referred to Palmerston and Glenelg’s position of 1848 & 1849, viz.,

Consul McLeod’s opposition to missionary ransoming was thus not without merit. Ransoming had no deterrent effect on the slave users and slave traders nor on the larger slave society. Moreover, ransoming captives during wars was not new to the Niger mission host societies, and it was usual that most captives who ended up in the market during wars were those whose relatives were not available to ransom them or who could not ransom them at the exorbitant cost demanded by the captors/traders, especially the emirate soldiers and officials. Hence, Emir Masaba was happy to have slaves ransomed at Crowther’s request. W. B. Baikie, the consul, himself, noted that several slaves he ransomed were at exorbitant sums.Footnote ⁶⁶ Slave owners and traders were not unhappy to be able to make easy money through ransoming in addition to the pretence of extending goodwill to the missionaries or consular agents who made the demand to ransom the enslaved.

Missionary ransoming nonetheless created contexts that physically and socially relocated the ransomed and placed them within the mission yard or mission compound and among the mission community. The establishment of the missionary quarters provided a measure of security and an alternative social setting for the redeemed persons that would otherwise be unavailable to them had they remained wedded to the enduring traditional hierarchy of the slave-owning society. The church community provided a similar, though less solid, cover for the converted who remained in slavery by helping to challenge and ameliorate the ideological and social disabilities they endured. The missionaries, through their mission compound and the church community that welcomed slaves and accommodated the ransomed, thereby established a different standard of justice. Their actions condemned local laws to be unjust and inhumane, and they indirectly extended and intruded the jurisdiction of the laws of England, if only vicariously, into the minds and the political consciousness of the leaders of the societies where native Christian converts were otherwise subject only to local laws of the land. It could thus be argued that Crowther’s missionary agents were facilitators of British moral and political influence in that regard.

By the late 1880s, the CMS Headquarters seemed to be finally awake to the need to update its position regarding the redeeming or ransoming of slaves by its operatives in the field in Africa. Reporting to Salisbury Square headquarters of the CMS on his 1880 investigation of the Niger mission, Rev. J. B. Wood noted,

Just like amelioration, ransoming enclosed a binary that allowed for opposite and contradictory thoughts, plans and strategies regarding slavery. It could undergird the intention and strategy to end slavery, but it could also be accommodated into slave owners’ and traders’ strategy of trading slaves at exorbitant prices to willing buyers of slaves, whether regular local slave users or missionary anti-slavery redeemers, for ransom. Thus, what was obtained on the Niger and in these mid-19^th century CMS mission communities were competing conceptions of freedom within the same broad swathe of anti-slavery ideology of the British Empire. Missionaries, mindful of the force of the law of the land, approved of and promoted ransoming and redeeming of enslaved persons within the context of ongoing slavery. Freedom for them was a continuous, gradual process, won for individuals rather than a wholesale transformation of the entire social-political system, which they had no power to effect.Footnote ⁶⁸

Missionaries’ Sabbath Law and the Laws of the Land

Beside the number of baptized congregants, Crowther’s agents measured growth and the level of success in their mission by how much observance the people gave to their Christian Sabbath day idea when, according to evangelical Anglicans, including the CMS, all must rest and do no work. In Britain the campaign for Sabbath laws before it began to fizzle in the 1870s included the goals not just of saving the poor worker from a seven-day workweek, but also of curtailing various forms of popular leisure and recreation because they were considered fecund occasions for sinning (including the sin of cruelty to animals in horse races and cockfighting, as well as harm to humans in contact sports). ^{Footnote 69} On the Niger, however, the CMS agents conceived Sabbath day observance in more strictly theological terms, though with the social benefit of bodily rest highlighted. Crowther’s Niger Mission agents preached the doctrine of the Sabbath to all and insisted it was the law of God to be observed by everybody, convert or no. They sought to hegemonize the practice over the entire society, making it into a trans-religious culture.Footnote ⁷⁰ In England the Sabbath laws were to ensure the moral regeneration of the urban poor, and on the Niger the laws were a demonstration of the ‘civilizational’ benefit and social discipline that were to flow from their Christian missionary work.

Crowther’s agents on many occasions happily reported the positive responses of regular members of their community to the Sabbath day law. Crowther himself noted that in Onitsha and Idah traditions, special days when certain activities were prohibited and days when people were confined to their homes were not uncommon.Footnote ⁷¹ Hence, the adoption or adaptation of the Sabbath day to local use even by non-converts was not a difficult idea to contemplate and apply. However, the slave societies from the Delta of the Niger to the Confluence upriver were largely dependent on riverine trade, including earlier on in slaves, but in the 19th century increasingly on palm and other produce. The trading houses secured a competitive advantage over others for sources of trade by their use of slave labour. Armed slaves operated the war canoes that secured the trading territories of the corporate units against rivals or that absorbed rival territories into one’s own. These slaves were thus a fighting force for their masters and mistresses, and they were the water transport workers, besides other domestic and economic roles that they fulfilled. Thus, the basis of the authority and economic wellbeing of the slave-owning political and commercial elites and of the governments depended on firm control over slave labour to deploy for production, transportation and for war.Footnote ⁷² The Sabbath law was thus subversive and unwelcome, as it constrained the slaveholder’s ability to deploy their labour resources at will, challenging their authority over their slaves and undermining the competitive basis of their trading corporations. The operation of this missionary law of God threatened to render concerned trading houses vulnerable to supersession by rivals. The impact of Sabbath observance was wide, and its implication drastic, as it reordered a series of relationships that included employer/employee and slave/master economic relations and domestic and political schedules of family members and citizens who must accept a new calendar of social, political and ritual activities and occasions beyond what they were used to. Here was the creation, or an attempt to create an understanding of God and His demands on human volition and on local privileges to supplant the prior and the local norm.Footnote ⁷³

For many enslaved, on the other hand, the Sabbath law ameliorated slavery for them, providing some respite from arduous labour or time for amusement or opportunity to steal away to earn extra income. It curtailed their owners’ control over their person and labour, at least for that day. It undermined the invincibility of the slave elite. Elite slaveholders’ responses and reactions were understandably forceful and violent. They either forbade their slaves to go to church or school, in some cases incarcerating them, and in general persecuting the Church and attempting to prevent members of the community at large from patronizing the Church and church members. At Gbebe, Lokoja, Onitsha, and Bonny, the slaveholding elites instigated patriotic and traditional religious zeal to reinforce their authority and position.Footnote ⁷⁴ A violent persecution, including the execution of Christian converts, broke out in Bonny in 1874–1875. The traditional slave-owning elite complained that Christian converts (especially the slaves) and other dependent people were unravelling the social, political and economic foundation of their society due to the outworking of the Sabbath law and other Christian precepts in disregard of the laws of the land. Crowther recorded the grievances of the chiefs at a meeting to resolve the crisis: viz.,

As can be seen from Crowther’s report, enslaved Mission converts of Bonny refused to trade for their masters and mistresses on the Sabbath day; rather, they established Christian chapels in the oil markets where they conducted Sunday worship services. And worse, converts embarked on iconoclastic attacks on local shrines in the interior trading markets that began to undermine the traditional legal base on which Bonny’s contractual relationship with its trading partners rested. This threat to the legal framework upon which Bonny’s social and economic relations with its trading partners were based was the cause of the virulence of the persecution and martyrdoms of some local converts reported by Crowther and his agents.Footnote ⁷⁶

An Inkling of a Human Rights Reform

In August of 1857, Crowther landed J. C. Taylor and other missionary agents at Onitsha to start a CMS mission station. During this brief one-week period, they received word that a female victim was to be sacrificed to the manes of a dead chief. They were further informed that ‘The king does not step out of his house into the town unless a human sacrifice is made to propitiate the gods’.Footnote ⁷⁷ W. B. Baikie and Captain John Glover, the British government representative on the expedition, and Crowther, the missionary representative, remonstrated against the custom at length. King Akazua and his counsellors thereupon promised to abolish this custom. To demonstrate goodwill, they also promised ‘to exclude strangers from the white man’s country from the law which allows no mat or any kind of seat except the bare ground to strangers visiting the court’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Consequently, the woman who was to be sacrificed was released, and the headman who had charge of the victim proposed that the visitors buy the woman so they could use the price to buy a bullock to replace her.Footnote ⁷⁹ This subject of human sacrifice as a requirement for the annual outing of the Obi of Onitsha was to occupy Crowther and his agent for the entire period of his CMS Niger service. Thirteen years later, in 1870, Crowther was still reporting his continuing remonstrance with the King of Onitsha on the need to abolish the. ‘…evil of human sacrifice … an abomination in God’s sight, which I told him he was bound in duty and obedience to God to abolish in his country’.Footnote ⁸⁰ On 21 October 1870 in Onitsha, Archdeacon Dandeson Crowther on his way to his dwelling ran into another yearly human sacrifice, the gory details of which he provided in his report. The following day Bishop Crowther confronted and remonstrated with some important chiefs against the evil of the horrific law and the practice, reiterating the need to abolish it. He reported,

He then put in a strategic point about the necessity of influencing public opinion on the matter so that through public pressure a change could happen and the law be changed:

Traditional Igbo elite resistance to abolishing the law that stipulated the killing of twins was of the same sort. Crowther reported:

Crowther and his missionary agents, in line and in step with evangelical and social reformation struggles in England, were also pursuing the goal of transforming these Niger bank societies by highlighting the universality of human dignity and the inhumanity and harm done by some of the local laws of the land. He and his agents were thus modernizers and social reformers no less than their humanitarian evangelical base and support back in Britain, who sought the introduction of progressive and modern laws conducive to human flourishing.Footnote ⁸⁴ They thus consistently sought the renunciation, transformation or reformation of unjust and injurious laws and cultural and social practices contrary to human dignity in African societies hosting their missions. Some of the most difficult interactions revolved around their unrelenting effort to abolish these laws and customs. Reviewing the progress of his mission in 1878, Crowther listed some of the deleterious cultural practices which, on first arriving in the country, they encountered and confronted:

1. 1. Annual human sacrifice for the sin of the nation, whether male or female.

2. 2. Sacrifice of sixty human victims at the funeral of a king.

3. 3. Sacrifices of slaves to be buried with the corpses of their masters or mistresses.

4. 4. A human sacrifice … often made as thank offering to the gods for supposed benefits received.

5. 5. To put to death aged women who may be accused of witchcraft is a strict law of the gods; a few such unfortunate persons have been rescued from barbarous death, by timely intervention of Mission agents.

6. 6. To kill both twin born childrenFootnote ⁸⁵ as unnatural birth to human being, is another heart rending law of the gods through the priests. These are either cast out and thrown into the bush alive, or when feelings of compassion prevailed, they are put into an earthen pot alive, taken out of the house and placed under a tree in the bush, there to linger and die from exposure: some have been reported to have been attacked by voracious black ants which put a painful end to their short miserable existence.

7. 7. An infant which shew first its upper tooth instead of the lower, is killed, as it is prophesied to be unlucky.

8. 8. Cannibalism These practises are dying out in the Missions in the Oil Rivers in the presence of commerce and Christianity.Footnote ⁸⁶