CMS organises first missionary expedition to the Yoruba country

Johnson states that "the earliest attempt to reduce this language into writing was in the early forties of the last century," when the Church Missionary Society, with the Rev. Henry Venn as Secretary, organised a mission to the Yoruba country. It was led by the Rev. Henry Townsend, an English clergyman from Sierra Leone, and the Rev. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, "the first African Clergyman of the C.M.S." After failed experiments with invented characters and the Arabic script, the Roman character was adopted as the basis for writing Yoruba.