“Obstinate” Pastor and Pioneer Historian: The Impact of Basel Mission Ideology on the Thought of Carl Christian Reindorf

Abstract

April 2009 Heinz Hauser-Renner, University of Zurich, is engaged in research related to Ga (Gold Coast) history and linguistics. He is currently preparing a new and thoroughly annotated edition of Carl Christian Reindorf’s History of the Gold Coast and Asante (1895), including transcription and translation of Reindorf’s unpublished Ga manuscripts located in the Basel Mission Archives. —ganyobi@bluewin.ch I 1895, after twenty-five years of historical and ethnological research, Carl Christian Reindorf, a Ghanaian pastor of the Basel Mission, produced a massive and systematic work about the people of modern southern Ghana, The History of the Gold Coast and Asante (1895).1 Reindorf, “the first African to publish a full-length Western-style history of a region of Africa,”2 was born in 1834 at Prampram/Gbugbla, Ghana, and he died in 1917 at Osu, Ghana.3 He was in the service of the Basel Mission as a catechist and teacher, and later as a pastor until his retirement in 1893; but he was also known as an herbalist, farmer, and medical officer as well as an intellectual and a pioneer historian. The intellectual history of the Gold Coast, like that of much of Africa, is yet to be thoroughly studied. The lack of attention given to the subject may be partly due to the paucity of sources. With his History, however, Carl Christian Reindorf has bequeathed a unique literary and historical record.4 In researching, writing, revising, and publishing his History, Reindorf drew on his own personal story, the current political situation, and social and religious changes among the people. A major source was the Basel Mission and its associated ideological background, which accounts for some of Reindorf’s ideas on history, African languages, progress, and the nation. In discussing European influence in general and the Basel Mission in particular, Reindorf selectively adopted ideas, for he had his own motives, agendas, and ideological objectives. Reindorf was unquestionably a child of his age, breathing the atmosphere of the nineteenth-century Gold Coast. Though conditioned by the ideas of his time, both European and African, his History clearly displays his intellectual independence. “Obstinate” Pastor and Pioneer Historian: The Impact of Basel Mission Ideology on the Thought of Carl Christian Reindorf