| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
Riis, who was born in North Schleswig, belonged to the second generation of missionaries sent to the Gold Coast in 1832. He achieved notoriety as the sole survivor of that generation of missionaries, first by responding to the advice to seek help from a Neger-Doctor,36 secondly, owing to the many controversies surrounding his person as a slaveholder,37 and thirdly, as the missionary who, by daring determination and ruthlessness, brought the Basel Mission to its permanent location, Akropong, in 1835. Unlike Riis, Rosine Widmann, born Binder, had grown up in Korntal, in the southern German region of Württemberg, where religiosity and missionising dominated community life. She caught the eye of Johannes Daur, the director of the Brüdergemeinde Korntal [Brethren Parish of Korntal] who felt she would make the perfect wife or Missionsfrau for his friend, the German missionary, Georg Widmann,38 who had been sent by the BM to the GC in 1843. Arriving in 1846, Rosine Widmann demonstrated a zeal that had her working with schwarze Mädchen [black girls] to Zucht [breed], and familiarize them with Ordnung [orderliness].39 As a Missionsfrau [wife of the mission] a colonial identity imposed by patriarchal ideology as a role and not a job, Widmann nevertheless represented Europeanness, first, and undertook responsibilities for acculturation of female converts, second. Carl Reindorf was born to a Danish father and an Accra woman on the Gold Coast. With his double heritage, he was among the “privileged” Africans trained to teach, preach and uphold the European lifestyle among Africans and to convince them to convert. He was ordained a “full minister” in 1872 and retired in 1893. Reindorf’s connections to the mission, however, lasted until 1906, as the mission committee assigned him further responsibilities. Unlike the above missionaries, Reindorf was the assimilated “other” in the BM network and its cultural assumption that, by the active inclusion of local recruits, this newly created cultural dynamism would lead to the formation of new identities.