| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
That the socio-psychological emotions travelers usually endure evoke unwarranted and unpredictable behavior toward ethnically and racially diverse environments and affect relationships has been conceded in the literature.23 The traveler, Edward Said says, is haunted by a double consciousness, as he exists “in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old.”24 Thus, even under normal circumstances, migrants tend to create spaces of exclusion and inclusion around their symbolic order or boundaries of identification. Such boundaries, according to Stuart Hall, inhabit multiple identities, each sometimes rigid in behavior, ambivalent in perception, and stereotypical about culture, history, and systems of belief.25 This sense of judging and controlling are not solely problems of history, but also contemporary, considering ongoing historic research trends that mythologize missionaries as messengers with “the joyous message.”26
The poetic narrative in the epigraph, which epitomizes the dread of the colonial environment for the African, proposes a new possibility in exploring the complexities, power structures, and imagery of missionaries as they appeared in nineteenth-century Gold Coast.27 The apparent enthusiasm of the poet for the real practices of missionaries is itself a criticism of the experiences in the colonial environment. The generative imageries of Wir Deutschen [we Germans] with the sounds of guns, piff paff, and Feuer und Schwert [fire and sword], cutting through the air; the sale of Branntwein [schnapps] the schneidige Missionar [clever missionary] with the Mausergewehr [flintlock] strapped on his shoulders acquaint us with strong social types. Following the themes captured in the epigraph, I show that scholarly preoccupation with the German-speaking mission within the context of discourse, race, gender, and the intricacy of social relations are rarely seen for what it is and can offer.28 Paul Jenkins hastens to make clear that the history of the Gold Coast was “one of stubborn determination on the one side, and tragedy on the other.”29 What is to be understood by “stubborn determination” Does the history of the BM have far more to offer than the traditional debates about improvement of the spiritual and socioeconomic conditions of the colonized