Putting Yoruba into Writing

Crowther's durable achievement is linguistic. Yoruba had no settled written form when he began, and the Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language he published in 1843 established one, working out how to represent tone and the vowel distinctions that Latin letters do not carry. Later editions expanded it into a grammar. He then translated, over decades and with collaborators, the whole Bible into Yoruba, the first translation of the Bible into an African language by a first language speaker of it, and the standard against which later Yoruba prose was measured. He worked on Nupe and Igbo material as well and left vocabularies for both. There is a complication in this for anyone studying Yoruba religion, and it should be stated rather than smoothed.

In fixing a religious vocabulary for Christian use he had to choose Yoruba words for God, spirit, sacrifice and worship, and those choices carried the existing Orisha vocabulary into a new frame. Later writers on Yoruba religion, including E. Bolaji Idowu, worked with terms Crowther had already made decisions about. The record he left is indispensable and it is not neutral, which is true of nearly every early written source on West African religion.