ABSTRACT
HARDLY had James Johnson been two years at Breadfruit than, to the grief of his parishioners, he was removed to a higher appointment. He was made Superintendent of all the stations which the C.M.S. had opened in the interior of Yorubaland since 1846. That he had been a success in Lagos can be judged from the fact that. as had been the case with his transfer from Kent to Pademba Road in 1863 and from Freetown to Lagos in 1874. his parishioners petitioned that his position would be difficult to filJ.1 On the morning of 24 February 1877 he left Lagos, with prayers and good wishes and accompanied by several members of the Church and others for part of the sixty-mile route to Abeokuta, the citadel of Christianity in the interior of pre-colonial West Africa that was to be his headquarters. In the judgment of his parishioners. " ... although your stay in this place has been comparatively short yet the impression of your devotedness to the interests of ourselves and our country, has been so great, that we are now parting with a very dear one with whom we have lived for many years".2 His importance was acknowledged by Christians of all denominations. On 9 February 1877 a deputation of them had congratulated him on his appointment and presented him with a gift of £25.3
The decision to put James Johnson in a position that was to make him bishop de facto. though not de jure, was not an act of deliberate policy by the Church Missionary Society. There was no
113 Henry Venn to push the Society to make James Johnson a Bishop, as had been the case with Samuel Ajayi Crowther in 1864. It was the circumstances in Yorubaland in 1875 that persuaded the C.M.S. to transfer control of the churches in the territory to African control. For when they returned to Abeokuta and Ibadan respectively, veteran C.M.S. missionaries Henry Townsend and David Hinderer discovered that the attitude of Y oruba rulers to Europeans was no longer as favourable as it used to be. Gone were the days when the white man was regarded as a prestige symbol and when he could be trusted as a disinterested counsellor and honorary secretary. He was now being suspected as a knight-errant of British imperialism. As Henry Townsend painfully experienced the chiefs had transferred their trust to the Saros;4 in Ibadan the rulers had transferred respect and confidence to a one-time cook of David Hinderer's, Daniel Olubi.5 Therefore both decided to withdraw to the coast.
