Biography
Andrew Jackson Foster was born in 1925 in Birmingham, Alabama, into a Black family in the segregated South. When he was eleven years old he fell ill and lost his hearing. The illness cut him off from his friends and his school. There were few schools for deaf Black children in Alabama at that time, and the ones that existed were poor. For some years he had no education at all. He taught himself what he could and felt the loneliness of a boy who lived in silence.
As a teenager he moved north to Michigan to live with relatives and attended a school for the deaf, where he learned sign language and began to flourish. He also came to faith in Christ and felt a strong pull toward missions. Later he went to Gallaudet University, the great college for the deaf in Washington, D.C. In 1954 he graduated, becoming one of the first Black graduates of the school. He kept studying after that, driven by a desire to be useful to God and to his people. He was told many times that a deaf man could not do the things he dreamed of doing. He kept going anyway.
His heart was set on Africa. He had read about how little education existed for deaf Africans and saw that most of them lived in isolation, unable to read or write and shut out of the life of their communities. He believed God had called him to go. Few mission boards would send a deaf Black missionary, and he went on his own with the support of a small group of friends and churches. In 1956 he founded the Christian Mission for the Deaf and sailed for Ghana.
He arrived in a land that was about to gain its independence, and he began his work in the city of Accra. He found deaf children and adults who had never been taught, and he opened a school. He taught them to read, write and sign, and he taught them the gospel. It was the first time that many of them had heard of Christ in a language they could understand. Over the next three decades he went from country to country, opening schools for the deaf in Nigeria, Liberia, Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Zaire, Rwanda and many other lands. Altogether he started more than thirty schools in over a dozen nations. He also trained deaf Africans to become teachers and pastors, because he believed the work should be led by the people it served.
His work was difficult and often dangerous. He traveled over rough roads and through unstable lands. He lived on little. He was a Black American in Africa and a deaf man among the hearing, and he met many obstacles. He also met suspicion from some officials, who did not know what to make of him. Through it he kept going, trusting that God opens doors that men shut. Hundreds of deaf students came through his schools and went on to become leaders in their communities. Many of them came to Christ.
He was a man of firm and quiet discipline. Those who worked with him described him as serious and focused, and sometimes strict in his standards for the schools. He pushed himself hard and spent long periods away from his family. Like many missionaries, he paid a price in time and closeness at home. He believed the need was so great that he could not stop.
On December 3, 1987, he was traveling to Rwanda to attend a conference when the plane he was on crashed in Kigali. He was sixty-two years old and was killed with others on board. He died in the work that had held his life for thirty-one years. He was buried in Africa, the land he had loved.
His legacy is large. Deaf education across much of Africa grew from the schools he began. Deaf Christians in many nations trace their first learning and their first hearing of the gospel to him or to those whom he trained. He is remembered as a man who refused to let his deafness define the limits of his service, and who showed that God uses the weak to carry His word to the ends of the earth.