Alfred Saker

Alfred Saker was born on July 21, 1814, in Borough Green, Kent, England, the son of a farm laborer who later became a poor craftsman. He had very little schooling. At the age of fourteen he began to work as an apprentice, and he later trained as an engineer in the Devonport dockyard in Plymouth, where he learned to work with metal and wood. He was a practical man who loved to build. He also was a young man who struggled with his faith. In his teens he came to Christ through the faithful teaching of a Baptist Sunday school and he joined a local church.

He felt called to be a missionary, and in 1843 he offered himself to the Baptist Missionary Society. He was accepted as a teacher and artisan. He sailed with his wife, Helen, for West Africa, to the island of Fernando Po, which is now part of Equatorial Guinea. There he worked among freed slaves and local people. He learned several languages and taught in the school. Over the years he saw that the Spanish authorities who ruled the island wanted to shut down the Protestant mission. In 1858 the missionaries were forced to leave.

He then crossed to the mainland and settled on the coast of Cameroon. He founded a town for the freed slaves and for those who had been expelled from Fernando Po. He called it Victoria, in honor of the Queen, and the town became a base for the mission. He laid out streets, built houses, a school and a church, and taught the people to farm and to live in ways that would sustain them. He also made friends with the local chiefs and learned the Duala language. He was a builder as much as a preacher.

His greatest labor was the translation of the Bible into Duala. He worked on it for many years, and in 1872 the entire Bible was completed, one of the first complete translations in an African language of that region. He also wrote school books and a hymnal. He went on tours into the interior and tried to open stations in new places. He suffered repeated attacks of fever and nearly died on more than one occasion. His wife Helen died in 1860, and he buried her in the land he loved. He later married again.

Saker was a man of very strong will, and some of those who worked with him found him stubborn. He did not like to be questioned and was sometimes impatient with the home committee of the mission. He pressed his plans hard and was often short of money and workers. He also lived with the heavy burden of a work that rested largely on his own shoulders. When he left Africa, he felt that he had not done enough.

His health failed and in 1876 he returned to England, where he spent his last years. He died on March 12, 1880. Hundreds of Cameroonians had been brought to faith under his care, and the church he left behind has grown into a major body in the country. He is remembered as the father of the Baptist church in Cameroon and as a man who built a town, a church and a Bible from the ground up.