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John Leighton Wilson, an alumnus of Columbia Theological Seminary, and his wife Jane Bayard Wilson were the first missionaries to West Africa by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. [1] [2]
Leighton Wilson was born in Sumter, S.C on March 25, 1809. [3] He graduated from Union College, NY in 1829 [4] and Columbia Theological Seminary in 1833. In the fall of 1833 he sailed to West Africa to identify for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (located in Boston) the best location for the Board’s first mission in West Africa. Cape Palmas, Liberia, was chosen for work among the Grebo people. Returning to the U.S. in 1834, he married Mary Elizabeth Bayard of Savannah, a daughter of a wealthy and aristocratic family. They sailed for Cape Palmas the fall of that year. During the next seven years they established schools for the Grebo, developed a Grebo alphabet, wrote the first Grebo dictionary and grammar, and translated into Grebo not only portions of the Bible but also school books and hymns. These were printed by their African American missionary colleague B. V. R. James. The Wilsons freed their inherited slaves, provided for their transportation to Cape Palmas and helped them to become established in the African American settler community at the Cape.
While at Cape Palmas, Leighton Wilson wrote copious reports about Grebo culture and challenged white stereotypes of Africans. He vigorously opposed the international slave trade and was often quoted in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist paper The Liberator. Conflict between the African American settlers and the Grebo led the Wilsons to conclude reluctantly that African American colonization in Liberia was, like white colonization in South Africa, an act of imperialism. They came to regret helping their freed slaves come to the Cape, thinking that New England would have been a better place for them to start a new life of freedom. Leighton Wilson began to compare the African American settlers to whites in Georgia who were taking the land of the Cherokees. [1]
In 1842, the Wilsons and their colleagues with the American Board turned over their work to a nearby Episcopal mission and moved to Gabon. They had concluded that the conflict between the settlers and the Grebo was too disruptive for the work of the mission. A number of Grebo who had been converted and who had completed their education at the mission school went with them to be teachers in Gabon. A new mission was established at Baraka, near present day Libreville, Gabon, among the Mpongwe people. Schools were quickly established in various towns and villages around the Gabon estuary. An alphabet for the Mpongwe language was soon developed and once again Leighton Wilson wrote a dictionary and grammar of the indigenous language. He translated portions of the New Testament into Mpongwe. When the French began to occupy the estuary, the Wilsons and the other American missionaries supported the Mpongwe in their attempt to resist the imperialism of the French. On one occasion a French naval vessel bombarded the mission at Baraka trying to intimate the missionaries. When American naval ships arrived in the estuary, the French apologized for the bombardment and a serious international incident was avoided.
On a visit to the U.S. in 1848, Leighton Wilson took with him a skeleton of a large ape never before seen by whites. a Harved professor named this ape "gorilla", and his description of it encouraged a growing scientific racism. [1]
Ill health forced the Wilsons to return to the U.S. in 1852. Shortly after he was elected Secretary for the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions located in New York. They purchased a large home in the city and over the next eight years welcomed to it many missionaries and recent converts from various mission fields. In 1856 Wilson’s book Western Africa was published by Harper and Brothers. A careful and appreciative study of West African cultures and societies, the book still serves as an early resource for anthropologists and historians of West Africa.
As the Civil War approached, the Wilsons felt a growing tension. They heard the siren voice of their Southern homeland calling from deep within their memories. They sought to resist its seductions, but the call became more insistent and, finally, irresistible. In spite of their years of fighting slavery, they gave themselves to a history and a people committed to maintaining slavery and its deep oppression—both an act of deep love for a place and people, and the desertion of a moral vision. Wilson was soon made the Secretary for Foreign Missions for the newly formed Southern Presbyterian Church. After the Civil War he directed a growing mission movement by Southern Presbyterians. He died in 1885 in the plantation home where he had been born. [1]
Libreville is the capital and largest city of Gabon, located on the Gabon Estuary. Libreville occupies 65 square kilometres (25 sq mi) of the northwestern province of Estuaire. Libreville is also a port on the Gabon Estuary, near the Gulf of Guinea. As of the 2013 census, its population was 703,904.
The Kru, Krao, Kroo, or Krou are a West African ethnic group who are indigenous to western Ivory Coast and eastern Liberia. European and American writers often called Kru men who enlisted as sailors or mariners Krumen. They migrated and settled along various points of the West African coast, notably Freetown, Sierra Leone, but also the Ivorian and Nigerian coasts. The Kru-speaking people are a large ethnic group that is made up of several sub-ethnic groups in Liberia and Ivory Coast. In Liberia, there are 48 sub-sections of Kru tribes, including the Jlao Kru. These tribes include Bété, Bassa, Krumen, Guéré, Grebo, Klao/Krao, Dida, Krahn people and Jabo people.
Cape Palmas is a headland on the extreme southeast end of the coast of Liberia, Africa, at the extreme southwest corner of the northern half of the continent. The Cape itself consists of a small, rocky peninsula connected to the mainland by a sandy isthmus. Immediately to the west of the peninsula is the estuary of the Hoffman River. Approximately 21 km (15 mi) further along the coast to the east, the Cavalla River empties into the sea, marking the border between Liberia and the Côte d'Ivoire. It marks the western limit of the Gulf of Guinea, according to the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO).
The Republic of Maryland was a country in West Africa that existed from 1834 to 1857, when it was merged into what is now Liberia. The area was first settled in 1834 by freed African-American slaves and freeborn African Americans primarily from the U.S. state of Maryland, under the auspices of the Maryland State Colonization Society.
Lott Cary was an African-American Baptist minister and lay physician who was a missionary leader in the founding of the colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa in the 1820s. He founded the first Baptist church in 1822, now known as Providence Baptist Church of Monrovia. He served as the colony's acting governor from August 1828 to his death in November that year.
Fetichism in West Africa: Forty Years' Observationof Native Customs and Superstitions is a book by the Reverend Robert Hamill Nassau, a missionary, published in 1904. It is one of the earliest studies of traditional religion on West Africa.
The Grebo or Glebo people are an ethnic group or subgroup within the larger Kru group of Africa, a language and cultural ethnicity, and to certain of its constituent elements. Within Liberia members of this group are found primarily in Maryland County and Grand Kru County in the southeastern portion of the country, but also in River Gee County and Sinoe County. The Grebo population in Côte d'Ivoire are known as the Krumen and are found in the southwestern corner of that country.
Daniel Coker (1780–1846), born Isaac Wright, was an African American of mixed race from Baltimore, Maryland. Born a slave, after he gained his freedom, he became a Methodist minister in 1802. He wrote one of the few pamphlets published in the South that protested against slavery and supported abolition. In 1816, he helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the United States, at its first national convention in Philadelphia.
The Kingdom of Orungu was a small, pre-colonial state of what is now Gabon in Central Africa. Through its control of the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was able to become the most powerful of the trading centers that developed in Gabon during that period.
André Raponda Walker (1871–1968) was a Gabonese author, ethnographer, Catholic priest, and missionary. Walker wrote extensively about Gabonese language and culture.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a cabinet ministry of Liberia responsible for directing Liberia's external relations and the management of its international diplomatic missions. The ministry is located in Monrovia, Liberia's capital.
Thomas Erskine Clarke is a Professor Emeritus of American Religious History at Columbia Theological Seminary, best known for his books Dwelling Place and By the Rivers of Water.
The Maryland State Colonization Society was the Maryland branch of the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in 1816 with the purpose of returning free African Americans to what many Southerners considered greater freedom in Africa. The ACS helped to found the colony of Liberia in 1821–22, as a place for freedmen. The Maryland State Colonization Society was responsible for founding the Republic of Maryland in West Africa, a short lived independent state that in 1857 was annexed by Liberia. The goal of the society was "to be a remedy for slavery", such that "slavery would cease in the state by the full consent of those interested", but this end was never achieved, and it would take the outbreak of the Civil War to bring slavery to an end in Maryland.
Boston Jenkins Drayton (1821–1865) was a Liberian politician and Lutheran minister who served as the 3rd Chief Justice of Liberia from 1861 until 1864. He had previously served as the final Governor of the Republic of Maryland from 1855 until its annexation by Liberia on March 18, 1857.
Donguila is a coastal village in Estuaire Province in northwestern Gabon. It lies along the L106 road, 16 kilometres by road south of Nzamaligué. Donguila is best known for St. Paul Catholic mission founded in 1878, opposite the Pointe Denis. The general population speaks the Mekeh variant of the Fanghish language. Though found in several neighboring countries, the main type locality of the rodent, Peters's Hybomys, is Donguila.
The African nation of Gabon has had human inhabitants for perhaps 400,000 years. Bantu peoples settled here from the 11th century. The coastline first became known to Europeans through Portuguese and Dutch sailors. Colonised by the French in the 19th century, Gabon became independent in 1960.
Elizabeth Mars Johnson Thomson was an African-American missionary in Liberia, "a major figure in Liberian education and religion."
Thomas John Jackson was an African-American former slave from Frederick County, Maryland, United States, who emigrated to Cape Palmas in the 19th century. Thomas Jackson was one of the most prominent early Americo-Liberian and was among the early American settlers of Liberia. Thomas Jackson is mentioned in the African Repository by the American Colonization Society and the Maryland State Colonization Society.
Jean Kenyon Mackenzie was an American writer and Presbyterian missionary in West Africa.
Adolphus Clemens Good was an American Presbyterian missionary who worked in west and central Africa. Aside from his missionary work he took an interest in natural history and culture, collecting specimens, and writing on the local languages and culture.
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