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ABSTRACT
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 Then the essay draws from unpublished letters from the middle part of Crowther's career to show how he framed his literary project as something unprecedented and novel-as if he were inaugurating a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.
The prolific nineteenth-century Yoruba scholar and bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther is often invoked as a founding figure of Yoruba and Nigerian nationalism (Griffiths, African Literatures 37; Hastings, Construction 158; Izevbaye 479; Müller 489; Peel, Religious Encounter 278) as well as of modern African education and scholarship (Ajayi, How Yoruba Was Reduced to Writing 50, Patriot 8; Apter 194; George 23; Sanneh 184). As a literary figure, though rarely considered as the producer of "self-consciously literary writing" (Adéåkö, "Writing Africa" 2), Crowther has been credited with "starting a literary tradition" through his religious and linguistic writing (Ajayi, "Crowther and Language"; cf. Adeuyan; Griffiths, African Literatures 54; Taiwo 68). This essay establishes his careful intentionality in playing that epochal role, but also qualifies it by demonstrating his conscious engagement with existing indigenous literatures outside his African-Anglican subculture.
I begin with an account of Crowther as literary progenitor in a historical play published in 2005 by Femi Osofisan. Ajayi Crowther: The Triumphs and Travails of a Legend was commissioned by the Redeemed Christian Church of God, the largest Nigerian Born-Again denomination (Marshall 74), and was first performed at the RCCG's flagship church in 2002. Given that the RCCG tends to propagate a narrative of the individual's conversion away from the past of African cultures and toward a new, modern, and globalized future, the emphasis of Osofisan's play on the strategic recuperation of African cultures and on anticolonial and national self-assertion is surprising.1 But given...