William Wade Harris was a Grebo man from Liberia, a Methodist teacher and Episcopal catechist who had been imprisoned after involvement in a political dispute. In prison, by his own account, he received a visitation from the angel Gabriel instructing him to preach, and on release he walked east into the Ivory Coast in 1913 wearing a white robe and carrying a bamboo cross, a Bible, a bowl and a calabash rattle.
Over roughly two years he moved along the lagoon coast and into the western Gold Coast, and the numbers baptised are estimated in the low hundreds of thousands. It was the first mass movement of conversion in West Africa led by an African, and it happened in territory where European missions had worked for decades with very little result.
His message was short and unusually practical. Abandon the old power objects and burn them; observe Sunday; take one wife rather than several, though he did not require existing wives to be put away; and wait for the teachers with the book who would come. He did not build an institution, take money or claim an office, and he told converts to go to the churches when they arrived. When Methodist missionaries did arrive some years later they found tens of thousands of people waiting for them, and much of the subsequent Methodist strength in the country derives directly from that.
The French expelled him in 1915, suspecting political intent, and he died in Liberia in 1929.
The Harrist Church was organised formally after his death by followers who preferred to keep his practice rather than join a mission church. It remains an independent Ivorian church, one of the few African founded churches of that generation still functioning under its original discipline.