Preface
The centrality of missions and missionaries in the colonizing process on the Gold Coast has been acknowledged. However, mainstream studies on missions often understate the extent to which everyday human drama, colonial discourse, and activities were central to relationships between missionaries and local inhabitants for the sake of convenient and abstract labels that project missionaries as “educators” and “developers” of culture that justify the colonial enterprise. Although some literature related to the Basel Missionaries does admit in a sentence or two, that “the missionary enterprise was also fraught with errors, human shortcomings, and characteristic limitation of horizon, they do not attempt to aggressively pursue these themes.” Generally, they are preoccupied with neocolonialist interpretations which define the encounters as “a cross-cultural ‘two-way street’ ” to create a fulfilling whole. Some of these seminal studies include: Peter A Schweizer’s, Survivors on the Gold Coast. The Basel Missionaries in Colonial Ghana. 2nd ed. (Accra: Smartline Publishing, 2001); Peter Haenger’s, Slaves and Slaveholders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa (Basel: P. Schett Publishing, 2000); and John Miller’s, The Social Control of Religious Zeal (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994). Furthermore, more often than not, historians situate the age of German imperialism around 1884 when Otto von Bismarck cabled the German colonialist, Lüderitz, in Cape Town to proclaim that region a German Schutzgebiet. Ultimately, earlier colonial ambitions to gain power and control, and also shape colonized bodies along Eurocentric ideological lines remained insig-nificant for many historians. In reality, as Susan Zantop argued in Colonial Fantasies (1997), the establishment of German colonies and enclaves, however, preceded that official proclamation of German colonialism. Germany, Zantop wrote, had, “a long history of small-scale colonial ventures, large-scale colonialist theories, and a myriad of colonial fantasies, from the sixteenth century onward” (1).