| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
This book explores the practices of the missionaries of the BM vis-à-vis the local inhabitants in nineteenth-century Gold Coast to give us a portrait of the role they played, the moral codes they cast, their religious ambitions, ethnological thoughts, and the shifting elements of cultural representations.30 The term practices includes types of discourse and actions that touch on the articulation of values, thought, ethnography, and cultural symbolisms that express power relationships between the missionaries and the local inhabitants on the one side, and missionaries and the colonial governments on the other. This definition does not include the question of religious “education” and “civilization,” which may be found in other studies. Focusing on practices as a way of understanding the missionaries does not necessarily mean highlighting the differences between the missionaries and the colonial governments. Rather, it is an attempt to show how their diverse practices can be grounded in the causality of race, gender, space, and temporality arising from the confrontation between imperial and local cultural identities. I am interested in finding out the ways the missionaries discussed selfhood, otherness, and power to show the complexity of their practices in the colonial environment, and hence, challenge the commonly held view that missionaries were only cultivators of cultures.31 The focus is on a German-speaking male missionary, Andreas Riis (1804–1854),32 a female German missionary (Missionsbraut or Missionsfrau), Rosine Widmann (1828–1908),33 and an African Gold Coast missionary, Carl Christian Reindorf (1834–1917).34 As culturally diverse, they have much to offer in terms of the particularity of the mission’s views on race, national divisions and gender, and how the mission’s principles became a discursive space in which to challenge local values. Yet, the interests they raise are limited or remain obscure. For example, though Riis and Reindorf have received attention in some studies, they have not been investigated in the context of the narratives they produced within the ambiguous colonial environment.35 Rosine Widmann has remained unknown and hence, has not been acknowledged with any relevance in terms of women’s travel writings and her role in the construction of otherness, landscapes and bodies on the Gold Coast.