After the bishop was struck with apoplexy, Dandeson took him from Bonny, where it happened, to be with Abigail who lived on the waterfront in Lagos, to recuperate.
The stroke left him paralysed on one side of his body, in the right hand and leg. He could barely move his facial muscles, let alone speak.
It came as a severe jolt to his children.
Abigail, whose youngest son, 27-year-old Herbert, was away in Plymouth studying to be a civil engineer, had never seen her father ill. Dandeson, her younger brother, who was for many years employed as the bishop’s private secretary, travelling with him everywhere he went, had never seen him laid low, not even with a common cold. Not even Junior, their eldest, now in his sixties and a grandfather, had ever seen Bàbá unwell.
Crowther himself couldn’t remember the last time he had been sick. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d suffered an ailment that left him bedbound. At a push, he would say the last time this happened was when as a thirteen-year-old slave boy, Àjàyí, he had suffered a severe bout of fever that almost finished him.
He said he was eighty-two years old, but that was an estimation he had arrived at when, as the first student to be enrolled at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, where he later taught, he was required to put his date of birth on the admission form. More likely than not, he was a few years older.
For more than seventy of those tumultuous years, he had been blessed with unbroken health.
The breeze on the waterfront was good for him. After a few days with Abigail, he began to regain his speech, but with a slur that made his voice, which had always been soft, hard to make out. It took weeks for him to sit up in bed unaided. Even after he could sit up, he still required help to get out of bed. He would lean on Abigail and together they would make their way, one agonisingly slow step after the other, across the parlour and out on to the veranda where he liked to sit, not in the armchair that was there but in a straight-back chair she brought out from Babington’s study.
‘Who built this thing?’ he asked her the first time she brought it out for him. ‘The workmanship is tip-top.’
Abigail answered him with a strained smile. She knew her father was joking, that he was only trying to bring a smile to her face. He knew who built the chair. He built it.
Bàbá was a highly skilled woodworker. Long before he became a teacher in Sierra Leone, more than a decade before he harkened to the call of the priesthood, he had served an apprenticeship with a master carpenter. When he and Susanna as young parents were raising their children in Freetown, and later on in Abẹ́òkuta, he had taken great pride in building every last piece of furniture in the house himself. Nothing was too big or too trivial; he would make time to build it. He had worked as a roofer on many of the churches he had built as a minister, often because he was the best carpenter on the construction site.
The chair from his son-in-law’s study was a wedding present to the newly-wed couple.
The pained look in Abigail’s eyes was because bringing out the chair brought it back to her that nobody had sat in it for thirteen years. That was how long ago it was since Babington had been gone. He had died, on his birthday, during a smallpox epidemic that had swept across the island.
Abigail was convinced her father wouldn’t have suffered a stroke if he had been accorded a modicum of dignity at the Church meeting he was attending in Bonny when he collapsed. Salisbury Square, the Church’s headquarters on London’s Fleet Street, had sent two operatives, both in their mid-twenties, both freshly graduated from Cambridge, both ravenously ambitious and fragrant with righteousness, to talk down to him and humiliate him in order to elicit his resignation from the most important decision-making body in the Niger bishopric: his bishopric. They were assassins and, like all assassins on a mission from on high, they struck without remorse. Their mission was an unqualified success; he resigned from the chair and was instantly replaced in the post with a white man, their intention all along. It was the beginning of a wholesale cull of all traces of the African presence in positions of authority within the CMS in West Africa, a pointed reversal of a policy which had for decades actively promoted the involvement of ‘the Natives’ at the highest levels of their own affairs.
Dandeson had witnessed the public assassination of his father’s name, through devoutly sanctimonious dog whistles and insidious semaphores of incompetence, which had begun years before the two enforcers arrived with the explicit mission of securing the bishop’s signature on a letter of resignation. Their other mission was a zealously pious one, to bring the Light of Christ to the dark souls of the Native, a task they thought beyond the capabilities of any indigenous missionaries they had come across. The white man alone was sanctioned by God to do so.
They walked all over the bishop, and then, once their aim had been achieved, when once he had resigned the chair, there transpired a great deal of hand-wringing at Salisbury Square, and much soul-searching for the shameful way they had treated the African bishop.
The bishop himself was philosophical about it. Not so his son, the Archdeacon of the Niger; Dandeson would never forgive Salisbury Square for what they did to his father. He was appalled by it, but not entirely surprised. Years earlier, the ordination of Abigail’s husband, Babington Macaulay, his headmaster at CMS Grammar School, almost didn’t take place because Henry Townsend, one of the then Reverend Crowther’s closest associates in the Abẹ́òkuta Mission, strongly objected to it.
‘I have a great doubt of young black clergymen,’ Reverend Townsend explained. ‘They want years of experience to give stability to their characters; we would rather have them as schoolmasters and catechists.’
When word reached Townsend that Crowther had been invited to England to meet the queen and Townsend thought it was to talk about the matter of a black bishop which had been demanded by a powerful member of the CMS, he raised a petition against the notion of the appointment of a black bishop.
‘Native teachers of whatever grade,’ he cautioned, ‘have been received and respected by the chiefs and people only as being the agents or servants of white men. As the Negro feels a great respect for a white man, God kindly gives a great talent to the white man in trust to be used for the Negro’s good. Shall we shift the responsibility? Can we do it without sin?’
Within the Church, Townsend’s not so peculiar way of seeing the world was for a long time banished to its eccentric fringes. It took decades for this way of thinking to come to represent the mainstream view at Salisbury Square; when this happened, it quickly became entrenched. Such that, for years after the Crowther prelacy, the very notion of another black bishop seemed so olde worlde, it simply didn’t arise.