/ Studium
The Basel Mission and its Legacies: Excursion Part 2
“What’s God got to do with it?” At the end of our journey in the footsteps of the Basel Mission, the answer to this question – the title of one of our preparatory seminars – was clear: Quite a lot, whatever you may or may not think of Him.
Photo Gallery Ghana Excursion (Part 1 and 2)
In the first week of July 2024, students and instructors from the University of Basel, the Akrofi-Christaller Institute (ACI), and the University of Ghana (UG) participated in an excursion in Basel and southern Germany. This journey, which followed a first that took place in Ghana in early 2024, allowed participants to experience and assess how the historical legacies of the BM are presently perceived, preserved, and presented in Europe.
With over 30 participants, the group experience was enriched by sharing across diverse cultural and generational backgrounds. These exchanges taught us many lessons: for one, sometimes positionalities tied to one’s geographical/cultural origin do not always restrict shared opinions with people from a different place. What one believes in, or whether one holds any religious belief at all, definitely matters in how we assess mission history. Another prominent lesson, particularly for the Basel-based participants was this: A cultural shock at home can hit you just as hard as a cultural shock abroad.
We started our programme on the premises of the Basel Mission house with a tour guided by Claudia Buess and Alexandra Flury-Schölch. From Missionsstrasse, we walked through Basel city along the route of Mission 21’s curated tour called “Mission and Colonialism” which illuminated the entanglements between the mission’s (and Basel’s) history and imperialism. Such entanglements included, among many other things, aspects of trade and slavery, the exhibition of different “peoples” in the Basel zoo (Völkerschauen) as well as the history of Anjama, a woman of noble birth who left her hometown in southern Ghana to join a missionary family on their way back to Basel.
Our excursion programme then took us to the Stuttgart region, where we visited towns known for their strong historical roots in the pietism movement. In Gerlingen, the place of birth of prominent Basel missionary Johannes Zimmermann, archivist Klaus Herrmann had prepared a packed programme for us, which included a visit to Zimmermann’s former home and the local museum, where Mr. Sellner guided us through a small but exciting collection of artefacts that show the tangible relationship between Gerlingen and places where the town’s kinsmen went to spread Christianity. Johannes Zimmermann’s life in Ghana was prominently staged in a thatch-roofed shed with personal objects including a traditional stool he used when he sat in the council of advisors in the king’s court in Kroboland. As we learned in detail from former mayor Alfred Sellner, in the past few decades, there have been several exchanges between Gerlingen and Kroboland, celebrating the historical bonds between these places initiated by the Basel Mission.
In neighboring Korntal, Klaus Andersen, the former head of the Korntal congregation (Brüdergemeinde), introduced the town as an exemplar of a self-sufficient 19th-century pietist settlement, sustained by farming, a wine press, and a food bank. Mr. Anderson also highlighted how Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann, the founder of Korntal, envisioned a settlement guided by the reformist teaching of Martin Luther, which translated into devout Christian everyday living and symbolism. Many participants were reminded of towns like Abokobi and Akropong in Ghana, where missionary founding figures like Hoffmann or Zimmermann also loomed large in local memory culture.
On the fourth day, one part of our group hiked to Mount Chrischona in Riehen, another prominent site of pietistic missionary training in the 19th century. We briefly looked into the history of Cornelius Badu, born in 1847 in Elmina (Ghana), who spent some time in missionary training at Mount Chrischona, but throughout his life according to historian Paul Grant struggled to play the role of the “grateful African convert”.
Our programme also included two half-days in the Basel Mission archive, with our Ghanaian guests working on their own research themes while Basel-based students assisted them with their German language skills. The small archival staff, Andrea Rhyn and Patrick Moser, did their utmost to cater to the needs of our guests, realizing that for many, this visit to the “mother archive” was long-anticipated and of great importance.
Echoing similar activities during the Ghana excursion in January, we also had the chance to speak to descendants of Basel missionaries. In an eye-opening conversation, three members from the children’s/grandchildren’s generation shared their very personal encounters with the heritage of the Basel Mission, having been raised in the tradition of pietist discipline, experienced separation from their parents and/or suffered under their isolation from local children in both Basel and Ghana.
Thanks to the efforts of the Museum der Kulturen staff and curators, participants were offered unique insights into the museum’s depot to look at items collected by former Basel missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our Basel-based participants could not do anything with these foreign objects, which Basel missionaries had classified under the nebulous and condescending term of “fetish”. However, many of our Ghanaian guests had rather clear ideas of what these objects had been used for and what they meant to their previous owners.
The excursion ended with an in-depth evaluation by groups of our students of the freshly published source collection, The Reports of Theophilus Opoku: A 19th Century-Gold Coast Pastor (2024) edited by anthropologist Michelle Gilbert and historian Paul Jenkins. During the discussions, many crucial topics were raised, spanning Opoku’s hotly debated “derivative” language and tone as a Ghanaian collogue. The discussions were followed by the eventful launch of the volume punctuated by a memorable cocoa pod-breaking ceremony by Leonard O. Agyemang and Adelle A’asante. Good-byes were stretched out over a concluding reception dinner, a church service, and a farewell lunch in subsequent days.
The output of the excursion is currently being curated into short blog posts for display on a website (baselfo.ch, under construction), which will host individual and collaborative works produced by students.
Our excursions have been timely in many ways. First, they reinvigorated interest—critical and clerical—in the Basel Mission’s history ahead of the 2028 bicentenary anniversary of the mission’s first arrival in Ghana. Secondly, we have built new networks amongst individuals and institutions in Ghana, Switzerland, and Germany from which fruitful collaborations are underway (e.g., exchanges of archival materials between the mission archives in Basel and their counterparts at ACI). Thirdly, the forthcoming website will not only deepen the scholarship on the Basel Mission but also provide a medium for continued engagement among the partner institutions.
Finally, this exchange has shown how rewarding it can be to draw practical lessons from postcolonial criticism – especially at a time when “postcolonial” has become a discursive trigger in some circles. However, we also came to understand that an unquestioned right to question and critique whatever one pleases, including an individual’s religious beliefs and heritage (even if by implication), can be just as narrow-minded as the religious zeal of the first Basel missionaries.
Special thanks to Veit Arlt (Center for African Studies Basel) and Andrina Sommer (History Department, Basel); Samuel Bachman, Ursula Regehr, and Isabella Bozsa (Museum der Kulturen, Basel); Claudia Buess, and Alexandra Flury-Schölch (Mission 21); Patrick Moser and Andrea Rhyn (Basel Mission archives); Klaus Herrmann and Klaus Andersen and everyone else who contributed to our visits to Gerlingen and Korntal; Hannes Kölle, Beate Saalmüller and Monika Messerli, as well as Frederick Gyamfi Mensah (Uni Basel) for their support to make this excursion successful.
Text: Ernest Sewordor, Julia Tischler