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"And he never saw his family again."

For the millions of Africans taken as slaves between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, this sad statement is their story. But not so with Ajayi. In 1821, the 13-year-old member of the Yoruba tribe, from what is now western Nigeria, was eating breakfast when word came that Muslim slave raiders from another tribe were attacking his town.

"The most sorrowful scene imaginable was to be witnessed," Ajayi would later recall. "Women, some with three, four, and six children clinging to their arms, with the infants on their backs, running as fast as they could through prickly shrubs. … While trying to disentangle themselves from the ropy shrubs, they were overtaken and caught by the enemies, by a rope noose thrown over the neck of every individual, to be led in the manner of goats tied together."

Many families were separated this way, Ajayi wrote. But he, his mother, two sisters, and other family members ended up roped together. (He never again saw his father, who survived the raid but later died in a similar battle.)

But as Ajayi was bought and sold six separate times, he did become separated from his family. Despondent and suicidal, he was placed (with about 190 other captives) on a Portuguese slave ship near Lagos, bound for the transatlantic market.

The slavers, however, did not control the seas. Great Britain, which had abolished the slave trade the year Ajayi was born, was now feverishly atoning for its national sin through international abolitionist activities, including steaming its navy along the African coast. The Portuguese slave ship, the Esperanza Felix, hadn't even traveled a day when the Myrmidon and Iphigenia began their attack.

More than half of the slaves died in the attack, but Ajayi survived, even encountering his Portuguese owner bound in fetters aboard the British ship. "[I] had the boldness to strike him on the head while he was standing by his son," Ajayi later wrote. "An act, however, very wicked and unkind in its nature."

British policy sent Ajayi not back to Nigeria, but to Sierra Leone (the capital, Freetown, is pictured at left), where abolitionists and missionaries had set up an evangelistic community—a light for the "dark continent."

Eventually, Ajayi would not only return to Nigeria, but he would find his mother and other family members there. "We could not say much, but sat still, casting many an affectionate look towards each other, an affection which 25 years had not extinguished," he said.

In the intervening time, Ajayi had been ordained as an Anglican priest and missionary to his native land. His mother was one of the first converts he baptized. She took the Christian name Hannah, because of its biblical significance. It is the name of the mother of the prophet Samuel—and by then Ajayi was already becoming widely known in English missionary circles under his new name: Samuel Ajayi Crowther. As Anglicanism's first African bishop, Crowther would become the most famous African Christian of the century. But his struggles in that position—and the reasons behind them—are still debated today.

"About the third year of my liberation from the slavery of man, I was convinced of another worse state of slavery, namely, that of sin and Satan," Crowther wrote. "I was admitted into the visible Church of Christ here on earth as a soldier to fight manfully under his banner against spiritual enemies."

The church embraced him quickly, and he soon became a model for what the missionaries had hoped for African converts. After a few years of schooling in the colony, he went to London, then returned to Sierra Leone to become one of the first four graduating students of Fourah Bay College, sub-Saharan Africa's first university. He soon developed a reputation for linguistic skills and was recruited by the Church Missionary Society to work on the Niger Expedition of 1841.

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