| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
By definition, their status as Missionsfrauen was first an ideological marriage to the mission within the spectrum of the mission’s prohibition of sexual relationships, and second, to the missionary. In other words, these women were, for the Basel Mission, like commodities to be transported where they were marketable. Yet, Missionsfrauen were allotted a feminized space, which opens the possibility for the construction of gendered discourse and for gender identities also based on the racialized schwarze Mädchen. Often, as in the case of Rosine Widmann, the Missionsfrauen had no idea about their husbands-to-be until they arrived at the mission station on the Gold Coast.57 Indeed, by drawing on such different cultural contexts, questioned whether there were matters of social interest, commonalities, and differences that emerged and anchored in the mission’s notion of cultural superiority.
Riis, as it will be indicated later, traded in military products and used slave labor on his plantations. Widmann attempted often to use scarves and medicines to ease her way into the consciousness of the locals, and Reindorf took on an assimilationist discourse in the hope of making out of the pre-colonial African a “modern” man in the image of the European. This book, ultimately, seeks to provide comprehensive accounts of missionary practices that delineated gender and social relations as they were constructed on the colonial front, to reconfigure our understanding of missionaries’ involvement in colonial activities within the Gold Coast context, and finally, to fill an important gap in the field of German and African studies. Such an investigation on missionaries brings to mind some basic views: one that reflects, by means of their practices, the specific character of missionaries as social types and their participation in governments to manage the colonial environment, and one that shows the position of the assimilated convert within the broader context of cross-cultural changes. These views are supplemented with the following questions: To what extent did missionaries’ practices reflect the discourses inherent in the broader intellectual world that produced them Was this a European determined space and did it cross racial lines In examining Reindorf, an entirely different set of questions must be kept in mind.