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

Jenkins then underlines the fact that for many years he consciously directed people away from topics because “I thought that the episode of the beginnings of Basel Mission work in Ghana had been milked dry. But I was wrong.”²¹ Jenkins is dissatisfied with the “concealed” evidences about local leadership and missionaries’ lives. All that is to say that Jenkins was discontented with the disproportionate attention given to questions of earliest religious contacts. Yet, Jenkins’ study, to put it mildly, is pretentious in a way. His focus is on the role of local leadership in the founding of the church and not on the outlook of the German missionary or the German religious drama, per se. However, his willingness to encourage investigations of the subject from broader perspectives, and the self-acknowledgement of being “wrong,” opens questions of specific issues that have been understated or left unexamined by researchers.

The many archival documents reveal a wealth of paradoxes in the relationships between missionary types, local inhabitants and colonial administrations, ethnographic conceptions of people, identity and landscape in the missionaries’ demand for social change and consciousness.²² Especially in times of grief, loneliness, frustration, and local resistance, the missionaries sought to draw on discourses of power to assert his or her self in the colonial environment. More than one hundred and seventy years ago, on the Gold Coast, missionaries’ contact with the colonial environment produced similar moods whose culmination led to Eurocentric perceptions and notions about cultures and peoples. It is precisely this correlation between the colonial environment and missionaries that suggests that we have to look closely to discover those issues of race, gender, and power usually buried under the euphemism of “educator.”