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The discussions that took place between the Colonial Office and Christian missions over the implementation of the recommendations of the Phelps Stokes Education Commissions merit more historical investigation. While missions voiced little public opposition to the reforms of mission education outlined in the two reports, over time, in meetings and conferences sponsored by the International Missionary Council (IMC), missionary challenges to the recommendations mounted. This was especially the case with the recommendations concerning the education of African girls. Thomas Jesse Jones, leader of the two Phelps Stokes Education Commissions and author of the two reports, argued that schools for African girls should focus on the training of future Christian matriarchs, who would supply colonial states with the healthy, disciplined labour forces those states desperately desired. Jones identified the school maintained by the missionary Mabel Shaw at Mbereshi in Zambia as the model other missions might emulate. Based upon Jones' recommendations concerning Shaw and her school, the British Colonial Office placed before Christian missions a gendered educational policy that would feature the education of African girls as wives and mothers. J. H. Oldham of the IMC took the point in presenting the Phelps Stokes recommendations and the government proposals based upon the recommendations to missionaries. Oldham discovered that missionaries questioned Shaw's expertise and rejected the idea that girls should be educated only to be wives and mothers.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther was a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary bishop charged with evangelizing the territories that became modern Nigeria. Over the last decades of the 19th century Crowther was the best-known Christian of African descent in the British empire. Pious offerings from British Christians allowed him to build a network of mission stations and schools in the Niger bishopric, as his territories were called. Crowther’s career ended in tragedy with a group of English CMS missionaries that traveled to his bishopric to dismiss as either corrupt or immoral most of the African missionary agents Crowther had recruited over the decades. Crowther resigned his office in protest against what he felt was the usurpation of his authority. Crowther died a short time later. Most of the historical scholarship since Crowther’s death (1891) has been concerned with assessments of two things: Crowther’s missionary strategies and the circumstances behind the events at the end of his career. The events at the end of his life have drawn the greatest amount of attention, but as argued in this article, Crowther is better appreciated for the revolutionary ways in which he rethought the missiological ideas of Henry Venn, his patron and mentor, and applied these ideas to the evangelization of his territories. The schools established under Crowther’s direction offered students a combination of skills aimed at making those students competitive in the society created by the expansion of British overrule in the lands that became Nigeria. The appeal of his schools drew many Africans toward the Anglican Church. By the end of his life, however, Crowther’s schools were coming under increasing criticism from Europeans for making Africans too competitive with Europeans.

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