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

The encounters between European missionaries and peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Americas remain among the seminal episodes of colonialism. The encounters themselves have been discussed along different interpretative lines, but an understanding of the missionaries’ activities as a whole has remained elusive. Particularly in the nineteenth century,² a century marked by rapid sociopolitical and economic transformations, colonial enthusiasts took advantage of the print culture to disseminate rhetoric of missionary colonization to mandate sending Christian virtues of “the civilized West” to the “non-civilized peoples” outside the Christian world in order to improve their existential conditions.³ David Livingstone viewed missionaries as “pioneers of civilization—Christianity and commerce,”⁴ while Gustav Warneck regarded missionaries as compassionate people venturing into unorganized space to save the “multitude.”⁵ An examination of most critical works of the twentieth century proves that there are rarely significant deviations from such general idealism. Many critics viewed missionaries as cultivators,⁶ as evangelists upon the course of “promoting social betterment,”⁷ or as agents of “renewal” or “transformation.”⁸ Most significantly, missionaries were presented as a general metaphor of evangelization, Erdensegen [earthly blessing].⁹ Under these constellations, either of the dichotomies in the colonial environment, when they received any attention at all, was interpreted according to the authors’ ideological convictions, or their existence were justified in terms of a kind of apostolic succession.¹⁰ Indeed, some obvious landmarks of missionaries have been marginalized in attempts by many scholars to find “acceptance” for their work, as well as to earn integration into the “intellectual factories in metropolitan centers” of the Western world.¹¹ In the view of Tracey Jones, these distortions owe much to the “understanding of the missionary as a white man with a special calling, in a distant uncivilized land, saving souls.” This, he continues, “comes down to our day. It is lodged deep in our minds by determining the meaning of the missionary task today.”¹² Under such circumstances, as Christensen and Hutchison write, the nineteenth-century missionary becomes “an ‘invisible man’… or, even more, an invisible woman … in the histories of most Western and non-Western societies” compressed in minute subsections of a chapter to escape objective scrutiny of human relationships.¹³