Mojola Agbebi emerged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century as one of the most distinctive voices in the movement for African control of African Christianity. Born David Brown Vincent in Ilesa on 10 April 1860, he was educated within the expanding missionary system of south-western Nigeria. Yet he eventually became a vigorous critic of the assumption that accepting Christianity required Africans to surrender their names, cultural identity and authority to European missionaries.
His life unfolded during an important period in the history of Lagos and Yorubaland. Missionary schools had created a growing class of literate African Christians, teachers, clergy and professionals. At the same time, many educated Africans were becoming increasingly critical of racial discrimination and missionary paternalism.
Agbebi belonged to this generation. He did not abandon Christianity. Instead, he argued that Africans could embrace the Christian faith without treating European civilisation as its compulsory cultural form.
That principle shaped his career for decades.
From David Brown Vincent to a Missionary Teacher
Agbebi was born into a Christian family and received his education through institutions connected with the Church Missionary Society, commonly known as the CMS. His early life therefore placed him firmly within the missionary world that was expanding through Lagos and other parts of Yorubaland during the nineteenth century.
In 1878, David Brown Vincent became a teacher under the CMS.
His association with the organisation ended abruptly two years later.
In September 1880, he married Adeline Adeotan Sikuade Peters, another CMS-educated teacher. Adeline had received her education in missionary institutions and taught at Christ Church School in Lagos.
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Baptist biographical accounts state that Adeline was already pregnant by Vincent before their marriage and that both subsequently lost their CMS employment.
The episode preceded a major change in the religious direction of the couple’s lives. They later worked for a period in educational settings connected with other Christian denominations before entering the growing Baptist community in Lagos.
Adeline would eventually establish a significant public career of her own in education and the organisation of Baptist women.
The Baptist Revival and a New Religious Direction
A Baptist revival held in Lagos between August and October 1883 proved particularly important for David Vincent.
American Baptist missionary W. J. David organised the revival, during which the Liberian evangelist John T. Richardson preached. Vincent became associated with the Baptist movement, and both he and Adeline were baptised on 18 April 1884.
The change was more than a denominational transfer.
Within a few years, Vincent would become involved in a struggle over the authority exercised by foreign missionaries in African congregations.
The conflict reached its decisive point in 1888.
Mojola Agbebi and the Native Baptist Church of 1888
In March 1888, a serious dispute divided the Baptist congregation in Lagos. At the centre of the controversy was the African Baptist minister Moses Ladejo Stone and his relationship with missionary W. J. David.
The immediate disagreement involved Stone’s remuneration and the authority exercised by the missionary over the African minister. Baptist accounts describe growing dissatisfaction among African members over Stone’s treatment and the broader question of who possessed final authority in the congregation.
The result was a secession.
A substantial number of African Baptists, including David Brown Vincent, broke away and established the Native Baptist Church, a congregation associated with what became Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The movement was not the achievement of one man. Stone was central to the crisis, while Vincent and other African Baptists contributed to the organisation of the independent congregation.
Its significance went beyond an argument about salary.
The dispute exposed a fundamental problem confronting nineteenth-century African Christianity: could African converts eventually govern their own churches, or would European and American missionaries continue to exercise permanent institutional control?
For Vincent, the answer became increasingly clear.
African Christianity needed African leadership.
Christianity “Watered by Native Hands”
By 1889, Vincent was publicly expressing an increasingly developed vision of an indigenous African church.
In his thinking, Christianity itself did not need to be rejected. What had to be challenged was the assumption that Christianity and European culture were inseparable.
He used one of the most memorable images associated with nineteenth-century African Christianity, arguing that Christianity in Africa should be “watered by native hands, pruned with the native hatchet” and cultivated in African soil.
The imagery captured the heart of his programme.
African Christians should preach and administer their churches themselves. They should use African languages and forms of expression. Becoming Christian should not automatically require abandoning African names, clothing or legitimate social institutions.
Agbebi remained Christian and Baptist, but his understanding of the church increasingly emphasised self-government, self-support and cultural independence.
These ideas placed him within a wider current of African Christian independence in which African Christians challenged racial inequality and foreign domination within missionary Christianity.
From David Brown Vincent to Mojola Agbebi
On 24 August 1894, David Brown Vincent adopted the African name by which history principally remembers him: Mojola Agbebi.
The change was deeply symbolic.
Among some educated Africans in late nineteenth-century Lagos, European names and manners had become subjects of growing debate. Intellectuals and clergy increasingly questioned the idea that advancement required imitation of Europe.
For Agbebi, taking an African name became a public expression of cultural self-respect.
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His position was not that everything European should be discarded or that Christianity itself was foreign and therefore unacceptable. His argument was subtler and more important: Christianity could become rooted in Africa without demanding the cultural Europeanisation of its African followers.
Agbebi also became known for African dress, reinforcing the connection between his religious message and his philosophy of cultural dignity.
Evangelism Beyond Lagos
Agbebi’s work soon carried him beyond Lagos.
He became active in evangelistic efforts in Yorubaland and the Niger Delta, where Baptist work was expanding among communities including those around Buguma.
He also became associated with efforts to strengthen African participation in evangelism and Baptist organisation across West Africa.
His career developed an international dimension. His contact with the Welsh Baptist William Hughes contributed to links between West African Christians and the African Training Institute at Colwyn Bay in Wales.
Agbebi travelled abroad and sought financial and institutional support for evangelistic work in West Africa. His activities demonstrated that advocating African leadership did not necessarily mean rejecting international Christian relationships. Rather, he sought relationships in which Africans exercised greater authority over their own religious affairs.
The African Church and Cultural Nationalism
Agbebi’s influence extended beyond Baptist denominational boundaries.
He became associated with the wider African independent church movement and participated in discussions involving African-controlled Christian institutions.
His celebrated Inaugural Sermon of the African Church, delivered in Lagos on 21 December 1902, developed many of the themes that had defined his thought.
He criticised the cultural arrogance that could accompany European missionary expansion and insisted that African Christians possessed the intellectual and spiritual capacity to organise their own religious institutions.
Agbebi’s thinking increasingly connected religion with questions of African personality, dignity and political authority.
For this reason, he became an important figure in the development of early West African cultural nationalism.
African Rights and Colonial Lagos
The boundaries between religious and political questions were increasingly difficult to maintain in colonial Lagos.
Agbebi became involved in organisations concerned with African interests, including the Lagos Auxiliary connected with the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society.
His political outlook reflected a concern that organisations speaking for Africans should not remain confined to a small Christian and Western-educated elite.
He favoured wider African participation and showed an unusual willingness, for a Christian clergyman of his period, to take indigenous institutions and beliefs seriously.
This did not make him a nationalist in precisely the sense that the term would acquire later in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, his arguments concerning African leadership, cultural dignity and freedom from unnecessary foreign control contributed to intellectual currents from which later nationalist movements would draw.
Mojola Agbebi at the 1911 Universal Races Congress
Agbebi’s international standing became particularly visible in July 1911, when he participated in the First Universal Races Congress in London.
Held at the University of London from 26 to 29 July, the congress brought together participants from different countries to discuss relations among peoples, racial prejudice, colonial questions and possibilities for greater international understanding.
Agbebi contributed a paper titled “The West African Problem.”
His participation placed a Nigerian African intellectual and clergyman before an international audience at a time when European colonial rule covered much of Africa.
The paper addressed social conditions and questions affecting West African societies, demonstrating that Agbebi’s concerns had expanded well beyond internal church government.
By appearing at such a gathering, he joined a growing international conversation about race, empire and the future political and social position of colonised peoples.
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First President of the Yoruba Baptist Association
A major moment in Nigerian Baptist history came in 1914, when Baptist churches established the Yoruba Baptist Association, an important predecessor in the institutional development of what became the Nigerian Baptist Convention.
Agbebi was elected its first president.
His election was particularly significant because his earlier career had been closely associated with independent African Baptist organisation. His leadership represented an important moment of cooperation in the development of Baptist institutional life in Nigeria.
Agbebi died in May 1917.
By then, nearly three decades had passed since the Native Baptist Church crisis of 1888. During that period, the former CMS teacher had developed into an evangelist, preacher, organiser, cultural nationalist and international spokesman on African affairs.
Adeline Agbebi and the Baptist Women’s Movement
The story of Mojola Agbebi is incomplete without Adeline Adeotan Agbebi.
Her work extended well beyond her role as a clergyman’s wife.
In 1888, she established the Hope Institute, reflecting her longstanding commitment to education. She later became an important organiser of Baptist women in Lagos.
In April 1916, Adeline helped organise a women’s body in Lagos known as the Women’s League. A related women’s organisation was established at Ogbomoso later that year.
After Mojola Agbebi’s death, the women’s movement continued to develop. In 1919, a wider central organisation emerged, with Adeline serving as its first president.
Her work became part of the institutional ancestry of the Baptist women’s movement in Nigeria and demonstrated that African Christian self-organisation was not confined to male ministers and church leaders.
Conclusion
Mojola Agbebi’s significance rests on far more than his dramatic departure from the missionary institution that educated him.
Born David Brown Vincent in 1860, he entered adulthood through the structures created by Christian missions. Yet he became one of the Africans who used the education, theology and organisational experience gained within those institutions to challenge racial and cultural inequalities within parts of the missionary enterprise.
The 1888 Native Baptist movement confronted the question of African authority within the church. His adoption of the name Mojola Agbebi in 1894 turned cultural self-definition into a public declaration. His evangelistic work carried his influence beyond Lagos, while his sermons argued that Christianity could take root in African culture without becoming less Christian.
His appearance at the Universal Races Congress in London in 1911 carried that voice into an international discussion of race and empire. His election as the first president of the Yoruba Baptist Association in 1914 further established his place in the institutional history of Nigerian Baptists.
Agbebi’s central argument was remarkably durable. Africans did not need merely to occupy subordinate positions in religious institutions created and controlled by others. They could interpret, organise, finance and lead Christianity themselves.
His lasting contribution was therefore not the rejection of Christianity, but a powerful insistence that African Christians had the authority to make the church genuinely their own.
Author’s Note
Mojola Agbebi’s life illuminates a decisive moment in Nigerian and African Christian history, when educated Africans began demanding not simply greater participation in missionary institutions but genuine authority over their religious and cultural lives. His journey from David Brown Vincent to Mojola Agbebi symbolised a broader movement towards African self-definition. By defending indigenous leadership, African names, cultural expression and institutional independence while remaining committed to Christianity, he helped establish an intellectual foundation for African Christian self-government and contributed to the cultural nationalism that became increasingly influential across West Africa in the twentieth century.
References
Agbebi, Mojola. “The West African Problem.” In G. Spiller, ed., Papers on Inter-Racial Problems Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress. London: P. S. King & Son, 1911.
Akiwowo, Akinsola. “The Place of Mojola Agbebi in the African Nationalist Movements: 1890–1917.” Phylon, Vol. 26, No. 2, 1965.
Ayandele, E. A. A Visionary of the African Church: Mojola Agbebi, 1860–1917. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1971.
King, Hazel. “Cooperation in Contextualization: Two Visionaries of the African Church, Mojola Agbebi and William Hughes of the African Institute, Colwyn Bay.” Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1986.
Okonkwo, Rina L. “Mojola Agbebi: Apostle of the African Personality.” Présence Africaine, No. 114, 1980, pp. 144–159.
Olaomo, Bolaji Yetunde. “Agbebi, Adeline Adeotan Sikuade.” Dictionary of African Christian Biography, 2011.
Ojo, Mathews A. “Agbebi, Mojola.” Dictionary of African Christian Biography.
Nigerian Baptist Convention. Our History. Institutional history of Baptist work in Nigeria.
Spiller, G., ed. Papers on Inter-Racial Problems Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress, Held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911. London: P. S. King & Son, 1911.
Webster, J. B. The African Churches Among the Yoruba, 1888–1922. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
