Andrew Foster (educator)

Andrew Jackson Foster (June 27, 1925 to December 3, 1987) was an American educator and Christian missionary known as a pioneer of deaf education across Africa. Born in Ensley, Alabama, he became the first deaf African American to earn a bachelor's degree from Gallaudet University in 1954, then earned a master's degree from Eastern Michigan University in 1955. In 1956 he founded the Christian Mission for the Deaf, and through it established 32 churches and mission schools for deaf students across thirteen African nations, including the first school for the deaf in West Africa, the Ghana Mission School for the Deaf, in 1957. His schools introduced formal sign-language instruction and literacy programs to deaf communities across the continent where none had existed before, earning him recognition as the father of deaf education in Africa. Foster died on December 3, 1987, in a plane crash near Gisenyi, Rwanda.