Four missionaries arrived in 1828. Three were dead within a year. How the Presbyterian Church of Ghana began

On 18 December 1828, four missionaries from the Basel Mission Society arrived at Christiansborg on the Gold Coast. By August 1829, three of them were dead. The fourth died in 1831.

Johannes Philipp Henke, Gottlieb Holzwarth, Carl Friedrich Salbach and Johannes Gottlieb Schmid had come from Switzerland and Germany to start mission work in the Danish-controlled area around Osu. Tropical diseases, especially malaria, killed them before the mission could take root. The Presbyterian Church of Ghana counts 1828 as its founding year.

Andreas Riis

A second group arrived on 21 March 1832, including Andreas Riis, a Danish missionary, Peter Petersen Jäger and Christian Heinze, the mission’s first doctor. Again, most of them died. Riis survived.

In 1835, Riis moved inland to Akropong, in the Akuapem hills, where the cooler climate gave Europeans a better chance of survival. He built relationships with the Akuapem chiefs and people, and Akropong became the centre of the mission. The town is still closely associated with the Presbyterian Church, and it became home to one of the most important teacher training colleges in the country.

The West Indian Moravians

The mission’s most important decision came in 1843. Riis recruited 24 West Indian Christians, Moravians from Jamaica and Antigua, to join the work. They arrived at Christiansborg in April 1843.

The reasoning was partly practical: people of African descent from the Caribbean were thought more likely to survive the climate. It was also a statement to the local people that Christianity was not a religion for Europeans alone. The West Indians set up schools, farmed, and helped plant churches. Families such as the Clerk family, descended from Alexander Worthy Clerk, one of the Jamaican arrivals, went on to play major roles in the church and in Ghanaian public life.

Schools, languages and cocoa

The Basel Mission’s influence went far beyond church services. Its missionaries and Ghanaian converts studied local languages, producing grammars and Bible translations in Twi and Ga. Its schools trained teachers, clerks and craftsmen. The mission also ran trading and agricultural work, and its stations were among those involved in early cocoa growing in the region.

The Presbyterian Church of Ghana

After the First World War, when the British expelled German missionaries, the Scottish Mission stepped in to support the churches the Basel Mission had built. In 1926 the church became self-governing, and it is now the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, one of the country’s largest Protestant churches, with congregations, schools and hospitals across the nation.

The first missionaries did not survive a year. The church they started has now lasted nearly two centuries.