SUNDAY-SCHOOLS IN CENTRAL AFRICA.
A Paper read at the State Sunday-school Convention, at New Britain, Ct., May 26, 1880, by Albert Burton Jowett a native of the Mendi Country, West Africa.
I represent the Sunday-schools in the Mendi country of Western Africa. These are located in the interior, about a hundred and fifty miles north of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. The first Sunday-school among the Mendi was established at Kaw Mendi. This place was the site selected for a mission by Messrs. Raymond and Steele, who accompanied the Amistad captives to Africa, when they left Farmington in 1841.
At this school, my mother was a pupil, and had for her instructor, Mar-groo, one of the Amistad captives who had been hopefully converted.
There was a good day-school at this place, and also one at Freetown, a hundred and fifty miles north, which had been kept up for twenty-five years by the Church Missionary Society of England.
My mother has often told me that the missionaries were very much pleased because the Mendi boys passed a better examination than the boys at Freetown, who had had all the advantages of that sea-port city.
Mr. Burton, a missionary who went to Africa from Connecticut, while traveling up the Bar-groo river noticed a fall of water in a wooded country, and determined to establish an industrial mission at that point.
There was no saw-mill on the coast, so Mr. Burton put up buildings for a mill; some one gave him the necessary machinery, and he opened a station and named it “Avery.” A church and some dwelling houses were built, and a community of people gathered who bought logs, converted them into lumber, and conveyed it to the coast for sale. A school was opened in the basement of the church, and a Sunday-school was convened on Sundays. My father is a teacher and interpreter at this station. This Sunday-school and the one at Kaw Mendi are the only ones in the Mendi country proper, where there are about 2,000,000 people. There are Sunday-schools on the Sherbro Island, but the people there belong mostly to the Sherbro tribe.
Our Sunday-schools constitute one of the means by which our young African friends acquire the simple truths taught by our blessed Saviour. I do not know how it is, if I am in the wrong, pardon me, but I do believe it is much more difficult to teach in Africa than in America, because we have no books in the Mendi language and the children know but little English. Our Sunday-schools in comparison with those in America are very small. The bell for school rings at 2 o’clock, and the teachers go round to the houses where they fear the children do not care to come, and bring them to the school. Before bringing them in to the Sunday-school, a shirt is given to each scholar, as many of them wear no garments at home. This is made of English cloth and supplied by the missionaries; when they return from school, it is laid aside to be worn the next time the school assembles. The instruction is mostly oral—the teacher asking the pupils questions and then requiring them to repeat the answer until they are able to say it.