| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
In dispatching any report to the mission it was important to pay attention to content and language according to the mission’s decree, namely, that one narrates events according to the mission’s expectation. Yet, they offer a narrative of an era, experiences, drives and desires—the fundamental elements of missionary life—and the views of the “I” missionary in the imaginative reconstruction of Gold Coast society, which can help in making intelligible pictures of the missionaries’ practices.
Ultimately, what is new about this study is that it introduces the Gold Coast to the field of African and German studies as a privileged space in which mission activities and collective identities were formed and shaped. As Jean and John Comaroff stated in Of Revelation and Revolution (1991), “there are few anthropological analyses of the evangelical encounter itself—analyses, that is, that go beyond detailed, if often sensitive chronicles of actions and events.”63 In their view, investigating the activities of missionaries is more than simply an “analysis of religious change.”64 As such, the unpublished materials introduced here offer the reader a completely new sense of a colonial situation of which anthropology and ethnology were living parts. Another important advantage of this study is that, there exists in the popular imagination the idea that, because the Basel Mission was and is located in Switzerland, it may not be or cannot be considered German by nature. Dr. Mirdt, representative of the Mission der Brüdergemeinde to the World Missionary Conference in 1910, confirmed that, in essence, “the greater part of all German Mission work lies in the hands of the eight oldest societies,” which included the Basel Mission.65 In this matter, the Home Committee was not shy in stating that the Basel Mission was not a Swiss society, but rather a German society, which accidentally happens to be domiciled in Swiss territory.