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Initially, this study intended to follow this promotional trend entrenched in academics, a trend that deems it as superfl uous, or resist critical discussions of missionaries when it comes to colonial Africa. Somehow, it is not easy for a critical mind to sign up to the faux-academic prints.
To escape this prevailing climate of opinion, the author spent some time between 2000 and 2002 in the Basel Mission Archive in Basel, Switzerland, to find original handwritten nineteenth-century sources in German that tell the informal history of the Basel Mission missionary and represent more truth than the formal falsehood. Here exist documents beset with not only religious writings, but also complex secular themes encompassing anthropology and ethnology that place the encounter within the wider context of German and European travel literature. Reading the missionaries’ reports revealed, beneath an apparent peaceful surface, contradictions triggered by notions of cultural superiority, identity and anthropological undertones that have been nondescript and coincide in the ways of studying missionaries on the Gold Coast. Included in these categories were materials on intermarriages, miscegenation, medicine, purchases of land, joint mission and colonial government expeditions against the Ashanti, mission ordinances, trading companies and shipping lines, and other reports on life histories that refl ect more about the mission’s intent. If one effect is to reinforce such emergence of identity and hierarchical relationships, then it is the correlation between the colonial environment and missionaries, which the sources revealed, that are often misrepresented under the euphemism and fallacy of “educator” immune from the infl uence of current literary interpretation. To some extent, this book allows us, if we are to follow Tvzetan Todorov’s perception of history, “to refl ect upon ourselves, to discover resemblances as well as differences” because self-knowledge develops through the knowledge of others. The book will be an important scholarly resource for scholars and students of German colonialism, African History, and Cultural Studies.
The book is organized as follows. The first part begins with an overview devoted to the history of the Gold Coast, literature and the interpretation of the sources.