The Rev. The Reverend is an honorific style most often placed before the names of Christian clergy and ministers. There are sometimes differences in the way the style is used in different countries and church traditions. ''The Reverend'' is correctly ...

Samuel Johnson (24 June 1846 – 29 April 1901) was an

Anglican Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of th ...

priest and historian of the

Yoruba The Yoruba people (, , ) are a West African ethnic group that mainly inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The areas of these countries primarily inhabited by Yoruba are often collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute ...

Biography

Samuel Johnson was born a recaptive Creole in Freetown, Sierra Leone, as the third of seven children of Henry Erugunjinmi Johnson and Sarah Johnson on June 24, 1846. His father, who gave himself the Yoruba name Erugunjinmi, was born in 1810 in the town of Oyo-Ile, capital of the Oyo Empire. Henry was an Omoba (prince) of the Oyo clan, and was a grandson of the 18th-century

alaafin Alaafin, or ''The Owner of the Palace'' in the Yoruba language, is the title of the emperor of the medieval Oyo empire and present-day Oyo town of West Africa. He ruled the old Oyo Empire which extended from the present day Benin republic to Ni ...

(king) Abiodun. He was later captured in the

Atlantic Slave Trade The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and i ...

but fortunately was rerouted to Sierra Leone, like many Yorubas, such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther (his distant cousin) and others. He later met Samuel Johnson, whose name he gave to his son. Johnson had 2 older brothers, Henry and Nathaniel, and a younger brother, Obadiah. Henry and Nathaniel both became missionaries and archdeacons like Samuel, while Obadiah became the first indigenous Yoruba medical doctor. He completed his education at the Church Missionary Society (CMS) Training Institute and subsequently taught during what became known as the Yoruba civil war. Johnson and Charles Phillips, also of the CMS, arranged a ceasefire in 1886 and then a treaty that guaranteed the independence of the Ekiti towns.

Ilorin Ilorin is the List of capitals of states of Nigeria, capital city of Kwara State in Western Nigeria.. Retrieved 18 February 2007 As of the 2006 census, it had a population of 777,667, making it the List of Nigerian cities by population, 7th ...

refused to cease fighting however, and the war dragged on. In 1880, he became a deacon and in 1888 a priest. He was based in Oyo from 1881 onward and completed a work on Yoruba history in 1897. This event is said to have been caused by him fearing that his people were losing their history, and that they were beginning to know European history better. Ironically, this work was ''misplaced'' by his British publishers. After his death, his brother Dr. Obadiah Johnson re-compiled and rewrote the book, using the reverend's copious notes as a guide. In 1921, he released it as ''A History of the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate''. The book has since been likened to '' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'' by Edward Gibbon.

Bibliography

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References

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Hope Africa E-publisher
Sierra Leone Creole people 19th-century Nigerian historians Nigerian Anglican priests Sierra Leonean Anglicans 1846 births 1901 deaths Yoruba Christian clergy Yoruba historians 19th-century Christian clergy Yoruba royalty Historians of Yoruba Abiodun family Saro people People of colonial Nigeria {{Nigeria-reli-bio-stub