Philip Quaque: Pioneer Native Missionary on the Gold Coast, 1765-1816

Abstract

Eighteenthr century tropical America supplied the European market with many luxuries and necessities. Tropical Africa, directly across the Atlantic, furnished the labor supply by means of the slave trade. This traffic, in which the British were the chief middlemen between the African slave raiders, Arabs, and others, and the American planters, was regarded as a bulwark of commerce, the nursery of seamen and of the navy. The all-prevailing slave trader, with his numerous forts and factories on the Guinea coast, was the natural enemy of scientific exploration, of normal trade relations, of missionary enterprise, and of other humanitarian effort. He was, about mid-eighteenth century, to be gradually joined by scientific and other forces. By the decade, 1783-1793, a marked change had taken place in the British attitude, which was broadened to include the establishment of a City of Refuge for the Negro, Sierra Leone, the attack on the slave trade as a crime, and the beginning of scientific exploration, of which Mungo Park's attempts to unveil the mysteries of the Niger were an example. In short, Africa, a great American labor reservior, was now to enter slowly upon a new era as a wealth producing continent, furnishing the European world with innumerable tropical commodities, the products of its soil and its laborers. These well known facts describe the African background from which a free native was selected, educated in England, and sent back to the Guinea Coast by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, where for half a century (1765-1816), he worked as a pioneer missionary and teacher. His decades in Africa intriguingly cover the revolution in British opinion, just referred to, from one of aggressive promotion of the slave traffic to that of its legal destruction and outlawry as piracy. This particular African aristocratic freeman, Philip Quaque by name and son of a chief, belongs to the age of small beginnings, of trial and error, and the minute details of his work must be followed as trail blazing beginnings which grew into large scale nineteenth and twentieth century achievements. African missionary work by the Society, however, was not begun by Philip Quaque but by the Rev. Thomas Thompson. Mr. Thompson, a missionary to Monmouth County, New Jersey, asked the Society, in 1750, for permission to leave his mission, which he had held for five years, and to be appointed as a 'missionary to Guinea.1 He requested that his salary be taken out of the Fund for Negro Conversion. The Society agreed to appoint him with a salary of ?70 per year.2