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Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the Yoruba linguist and Anglican missionary bishop, interacted in the 1870s with communities of multilingual Islamic scholars on the north fringe of Yorubaland. This essay uses contemporary scholarship on the book culture of Ilọrin to shed light on Crowther’s letters, in particular his triumphant account of a formal audience with the emir of Ilọrin in 1872, during which his performance centred on the bilingual collection of Christian books he bore. He emphasized the uniqueness and novelty of his Christian books and their associated practices. Yet his accounts invite us to begin viewing Africa’s Christian and Islamic book histories through the same analytical frame, which reveals how they were constituted in part through their interactions. This allows us to see they had more in common than Crowther assumed and than many scholarly accounts of African book history assume, particularly in the areas of the physicality of books, the modes of performance associated with books, and the interpersonal transactions that books facilitate. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the Yoruba linguist and Anglican missionary bishop, interacted in the 1870s with communities of multilingual Islamic scholars on the north fringe of Yorubaland. This essay uses contemporary scholarship on the book culture of Ilọrin to shed light on Crowther’s letters, in particular his triumphant account of a formal audience with the emir of Ilọrin in 1872, during which his performance centred on the bilingual collection of Christian books he bore. He emphasized the uniqueness and novelty of his Christian books and their associated practices. Yet his accounts invite us to begin viewing Africa’s Christian and Islamic book histories through the same analytical frame, which reveals how they were constituted in part through their interactions. This allows us to see they had more in common than Crowther assumed and than many scholarly accounts of African book history assume, particularly in the areas of the physicality of books, the modes of performance associated with books, and the interpersonal transactions that books facilitate.
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