African Christianity Homepage
Christianity in Africa South of the Sahara
Protestant Christianity
Christianity in 19th Century Sierra Leone
Christianity in Africa South of the Sahara Homepage
Roman Catholic Missions 1450-1890
Kongo Christianity
Roman Catholic Missions 1890-1960
Roman Catholicism since Vatican II
Protestant Missions 1700-1890
Sierra Leone
Southern Africa
Xhosa
Interior Missions
Buganda
Mary Slessor
Protestant Missions 1890 - 1960
African Independent Churches
African/Ethiopian Churches
Aladura
Zionists
William Wade Harris & Harrists
Simon Kimbangu & Kimbanguists
Sierra Leone was founded in the 1780s as a place for freed British ex-slaves to resettle in Africa. It became a British Crown Colony in 1806, the year before the slave trade was outlawed.
In January of 1792, 1,200 former American slaves who had ought on the British side in the Revolutionary War, then emigrated to Nova Scotia, where they were unable to obtain land of their own, arrived in Sierra Leone and settled in Freetown. The expenses of their voyage were paid for by the British government. They had become Christians while in North America and carried their "boisterous Christianity" with them back to Africa, defining their new culture in Christian terms, and spreading its message to all in Sierra Leone who would listen.
The Settlers, as the Nova Scotia Sierra Leonians came to be called, now fortified by a large influx of "Recaptives" Ð persons taken from captured slave ships and resettled in Sierra Leone -- grew into a large and vibrant Christian community. In the 1860s the Sierra Leonean community requested the aid of full-time missionary clergy from England. The Church in Sierra Leone was already lively and vibrant under the leadership of the wealthy and powerful Settler Christians. The missionaries sent out to minister to them were not infrequently their inferiors in knowledge of the Bible and Christian doctrine.
Occasionally the European missionaries chafed under the control of the African church, but Henry Venn the Superintendent of the CMS pursued a policy which sought to establish self sustaining, self propagating, self supporting native churches. The irony of his missionary policy in Sierra Leone is that the church there was already self sustaining, self propagating, and self supporting, spreading the gospel throughout the Recaptive population of Sierra Leone. The Christians in Sierra Leone, many of whom were Yoruba, originally from coastal Nigeria, maintained their Yoruba identity in Sierra Leone, while converting to Christianity and becoming Westernized. A significant number of them returned to Yorubaland, converted their neighbours, and created a flourishing church and a westernized Yoruba culture. The CMS encouraged these Yoruba missionaries and ordained a number of African pastors, the most important of whom was Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first black bishop in Africa, who served his diocese with great distinction for 50 years.
This page was based on the following sources, which you can consult for more detailed information:
Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa: 1450-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. pp. 173-88, 338-349
Lamin Sanneh, West African Christianity: The Religious Impact. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983. 53-89
JFA Ajayi, Christian Mission in Nigeria. Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965. pp. 25-53, 206-233.