Foreword
Seth Quartey is an interdisciplinary scholar located between the humanities, history, and social theory, with a background in sociology and a PhD in German.
His book, based on extensive research in the Basel Mission archives, is a fascinating comparative biography of three Basel missionaries in the West African Gold Coast during the 19th century. This was a Swiss missionary society, with many German missionaries and at least one of dual African and European heritage, operating in a part of Africa controlled by Danish (until 1850) and British colonizers. The book compares three categories, or “types”: a male German missionary (Andreas Riis), a German missionary woman (Rosine Widmann), and a missionary of mixed African and Danish descent (Carl Christian Reindorf).
Missionaries are an increasingly important focus in colonial studies, because they were almost always in the forefront of European contact and settlement during the modern colonial period. But whether missionaries were “handmaidens of colonialism,” as some have suggested, or whether their projects were instead sometimes at odds with the colonizers’ mission, is an important and underanalyzed area.