Philip Quaque, the Cape Coast boy sent to England in 1754, became the first African ordained in the Church of England

In 1754, three boys from the Gold Coast were sent to England to be educated by a missionary society. One of them, Philip Quaque, returned as a priest.

Quaque was born in Cape Coast around 1741, the son of a local leader. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, an Anglican missionary organisation, had sent a missionary, Thomas Thompson, to the Gold Coast. Thompson arranged for Quaque and two other boys to travel to England for education.

In England

In London, Quaque was taught and baptised, taking the name Philip. Of the three boys, one died of tuberculosis and another suffered a mental breakdown. Quaque completed his studies and was ordained a priest in 1765, the first African to receive ordination in the Church of England.

He married an English woman, Catherine Blunt, and the couple sailed to the Gold Coast in 1766.

Chaplain at the Castle

Quaque was appointed chaplain at Cape Coast Castle, the headquarters of the British slave trade on the Gold Coast, and missionary to the local people. His wife died within a year of arrival.

His position was deeply uncomfortable. He ministered in a fort where enslaved Africans were held in dungeons before being shipped across the Atlantic. His letters to the Society describe his frustrations: the traders and soldiers often ignored his ministry, and he struggled to win converts among the local population. During his years in England he had lost much of his Fante, which made preaching to his own people difficult.

A school

Quaque set up a school in the castle to educate mixed-race and African children. It became one of the early foundations of Western education in the Gold Coast.

His letters

Quaque’s letters to the Society, written over decades, are an important historical source on life in Cape Coast and on the difficulties of an African caught between two worlds. Historians have used them to study the slave trade, colonial society and the early church.

Death

Quaque died in Cape Coast in 1816, after about fifty years as chaplain. He was buried in the castle courtyard.

Legacy

He was the first of a long line of African clergy in the Anglican Church. Today, Ghana’s Anglican dioceses remember him as a pioneer, and his story is told to visitors at Cape Coast Castle.

He preached above the dungeons for half a century. Few lives show so clearly how tangled the early church in West Africa was with the trade it later condemned.