Missionary Practices on the Gold Coast, 1832–1895: Discourse, Gaz ...

The design concentrates on the configuration of gender to show how both sexes managed and reacted to the colonial environment. Gender is linked to power, “race,” sexuality, and nationality, which structure colonial relations. Thus, we have three missionaries from two different sociopolitical backgrounds, two Europeans, a male and a female, to provide balance in a male-dominated profession. They are contrasted with a male African missionary who demonstrates a different cultural background, and yet, like the former, is situated in the same environment in which imperialist ideology and Darwinian thought are embedded. By including an African co-missionary, we have a testable hypothesis and a framework for arriving at answers as to how the African reconciles a liaison with the socially dominant Euro-missionaries. Such results will help in understanding the continuities or discontinuities within the African practices to discover whether he shared similar or stereotyped views of the local inhabitants with the European missionaries. Notwithstanding Todorov’s method of association and interpretation of the colonial world, the social makeup of society is also wrapped in a gender texture.⁵¹ Hence, we examine gender as a location where the “race” of the Missionsbraut represents the female European sense of self, racial purity, and civilization in the colonial environment. Then there are reasons to assume that males and females might react to certain situations in different or similar ways, producing an intriguing avenue into the question of gender and thought. When necessary, we will look at Lora Wildenthal’s German Women for Empire (2001), which maintains that race was not exclusive of colonialist women, but was also the basis of their colonial thought. In this crucial linkage of German women to empire, Wildenthal writes, “[c]olonialist women evoked race as a national collectivity prior to any voluntary one in order to avoid exclusion from full participation […]” (10).⁵² One other source, which offers a glance into the gender relationships in the colony, is Nancy Hunt’s A Colonial Lexicon (1999). Hunt shows that gender relations in the colony are not fixed in terms of biology, but also possess the capacity to tell more about experiences transpiring in the social and biomedical field. Hunt writes that such issues in themselves “enable an analysis of ‘paths’ to medicalized childbearing: the gestures of old grandmas, midwives … glimpses of obstetrics transactions among colonizer and colonized [… and] the social actions of kin and friends” (198).⁵³ Following this approach, we notice that such experiences in themselves stand as important objects of inquiry and illuminate some aspects of grassroots women’s relationships in these colonial structures of power.