Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the First Yoruba Printing Press
An Albion press landed at Abeokuta in 1846. Samuel Ajayi Crowther set the first Yoruba type — work that powered both Africa's first vernacular newspaper and his translation of the Bible.
In 1846 the Church Missionary Society shipped an Albion hand press to Abeokuta in the care of Henry Townsend. The press was set up alongside a small mission school, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther — born in Osogun, sold into slavery as a boy, freed by a British anti-slavery patrol, and educated in Sierra Leone and London — was the man who set the first lines of Yoruba type ever printed in Yorubaland.
The same press would later produce Iwe Irohin Fun Awon Ara Egba ati Yoruba (1859), widely considered the first African-language newspaper. But its longest-running output was scripture: Crowther's Yoruba translations of the Gospels, the Book of Common Prayer, and eventually the full Bible (completed posthumously in 1884), which standardised written Yoruba and shaped the orthography still used today.
Crowther was consecrated in 1864 as the first African Anglican bishop, and the Abeokuta press became the template for similar mission presses across what is now southern Nigeria.