The first Methodist missionary to the Gold Coast died within six months. Thomas Birch Freeman stayed for more than fifty years

On New Year’s Day 1835, a young English missionary named Joseph Rhodes Dunwell landed at Cape Coast. By the end of June he was dead of fever.

Dunwell had been sent by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society after a group of young Fante Christians in Cape Coast, who had formed a Bible study group, asked for more copies of the Bible and for a teacher. His death was followed by the deaths of other missionaries and their wives in the next few years. The coast’s reputation as the “white man’s grave” was well earned.

Thomas Birch Freeman

In 1838, a new missionary arrived. Thomas Birch Freeman was the son of an African father and an English mother, and had worked as a gardener in England before joining the mission. He survived the climate and spent most of the rest of his long life in West Africa.

Freeman built the first Methodist chapel in Cape Coast and travelled widely. In 1839 he made the journey to Kumasi, capital of the Asante kingdom, and was received by the Asantehene, Kwaku Dua I. He also travelled to Badagry and Abeokuta in what is now Nigeria, helping to start Methodist work there.

Wesley Chapel

Wesley Methodist Cathedral in Cape Coast, whose foundation Freeman laid, is regarded as the mother church of Ghanaian Methodism. Cape Coast became a centre of education, and Methodist schools such as Mfantsipim, founded in 1876, and Wesley Girls’ High School trained generations of Ghanaian leaders.

Growth

Methodism spread through the Fante coastal towns, then inland. African ministers and catechists carried much of the work. The Methodist Church Ghana became autonomous from the British Conference in 1961 and is today one of the largest Protestant churches in the country.

The cost

The early missionary graves in Cape Coast are a reminder of the cost. Many who came did not survive their first year. Freeman’s survival, and the work of African converts and teachers, made the difference.

Legacy

Freeman died in Accra in 1890 after more than half a century in West Africa. Ghanaian Methodists remember him as a founding father.

The Bible study group that asked for help in 1835 did not know it was starting a church that would count its members in the hundreds of thousands. It only wanted enough books to go round.