primarily purposed to outline the contributions of religion and education to national development in Ghana. First, missions saw education foremost as a means of conversion (Ayandele 1966: 286; Bassey 1991: 36; Berman 1974:527; Foster 1965:85; Sheffield 1973:11). History books tended to exaggerate in achievements of Europeans, making no reference to Africans own great past. Important among these, all in Lagos, were the Baptist Academy in 1855, the C.M.S. A special memorial Mass was celebrated at the Holy Spirit Cathedral in Accra, Ghana, on Oct. 9. In 1876 the college became associated with Durham University in England, which awarded degrees to students of the college. For instance, in Ghana, it was in 1858 that Rev. Within ten years the C.M.S had opened twelve more schools in what is today Cross Rivers State. However hypocritical, government support for the schools should not be surprising, considering the benefits the colonial governments stood to gain. The Committee for Women's Work was responsible for the education of native girls. 1. In conclusion, the converts tended to look down upon many things in their ancestral culture. This finding was supported by two types of analysis. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Unlike the Portuguese, the French colonial officials encouraged the Christian missionaries in the promotion of formal education and social services, notably health. I found that while educational outcomes are generally better in places that were exposed to Christian missions in the colonial era, traditionally polygamous societies benefited less. The Basel Mission. In addition, the contributions of celebrity missionaries, such as Christian Schwartz, William Carey, Alexander Duff, and James . Foremost in the contribution of the early Christian missionaries to the development of Ghana is their efforts to bring Western education to Ghanaians. quiz This study simply offers systematic, long-term evidence of it. Hildebrandt, Jonathan. Amma Darko But that increase was greater in monogamous societies. Missionary, educator contributed to building independent Ghana. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. Free resources to assist you with your university studies! Being ignorant of the significance of certain institutions and practices of the people of West Africa, and occasionally being misled by their over-zealous followings into wrongly interpreting the peoples heritage, the missionaries compelled pupils in their schools and docile adult converts to shun their own ancestral practices. further studies All rights reserved. The Basel Mission, as a result of this phenomenal expansion trained many local personnel to man the new stations. In conclusion, the educational enterprise of the Christian missionaries in the British and Italian colonies of Africa during the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries was primarily negative for the African pupils. Among several others, the native Bishop Ajayi Crowther produced the first translation of the Bible in Yoruba. In 1989-90, the government banned the activities of several religious organizations, including the Church. The South African War is not covered in this grouping of letters. In regions where a denomination felt threatened by another denomination, the denominations were more likely to establish more schools in an attempt to gain more converts than their rival, while in regions such as northern Nigeria, where colonial policy prevented too much rivalry, schools were scarce (Bassey 1991:45). Furthermore, they were skilled farmers that could grow cash crops to be consumed back in the mother country, such as cocoa from Ghana (Foster 1965: 153). People all around the world are searching for hope, but many dont have someone to tell them about the hope found in Jesus. Get full access to all 9,566 pages that make up the Ghana in Records from Colonial Missionaries, 1886-1951 collection. Longman Group Ltd. London and Basingstoke, 1986, Fage, J.D. The first Europeans arrived at the West-African Coasts at the end of the fifteenth century. The agricultural schools the missions ran would have been even more advantageous to the colonial governments considering the discouragement of local industries that might have competed with the motherland. In addition to studying the impact of these struggles on education, we also need to understand how they influenced gender inequality. Apart from giving to the converts a new religious faith which they consider is superior to the traditional religions, the Christian missionaries did pioneering work in introducing new crafts, industries, Western education and modern health services. When he arrived in Nkwatia-Kwahu to teach English at St. Peters Secondary School, the town had yet to benefit from electricity and running water. Yet, the relationship between European missionaries and African populations had some contradictions. In 1845 the C.M.S. Some earlier scholarship on mission education has taken this as a positive impact of the missionaries. Similar developments were carried out by the missionaries in other Nigerian languages, Efik, Kanuri, Igbo, etc. For more than a year, Ghanaian Saints continued to practice their faith in their homes. They constitute the benefits that the missionaries brought to Africa as a whole. We shall now turn our attention to the activities of the Christian missionaries in Ghana. Lastly, the missionaries were not used to eating our local foods. %PDF-1.7 % History of the church in Africa: a survey. Thus as early as 1823, the Roman Catholic Sisters started a clinic for the sick and for children in Banjul. Required fields are marked *. This decreased the zeal with which people began to accept the Gospel leading to nominal Christianity. As happened in other territories, the Christian missionaries did not confine their work to the spread of the gospel alone. For that matter, they rebelled against their chiefs and elders. "Big things have small beginnings"; so is The Presbyterian Church of Ghana. station in 1858, it was not until 1889 that the missionaries entered Hausaland, which was predominantly Muslim. Purchase a license below to view the full collection. Renewed evangelism started when the Basel (later known as Presbyterian) missionaries started work at Osu (Accra). With the support of the Propagation of the Faith within the Vatican, whose Cardinal Secretary became Pope Gregory XVI, various Roman Catholic missionary societies were founded. 2236624), The beginning of Africanisation : the dawn of the missionary motive in Gold Coast education, Early colonial and missionary records from West Africa, West Indies material in the archives of the USPG, 1710-1950. It was however in the coastal territories filled with mulattos and other European trading communities that Christianity won some of its early success. The practice of inflicting multiple wounds on the bodies of so-called spirit babies now belongs to history. Some observers have argued that the Europeans used the Christian bible to justify the practice of slavery and the slave trade. Kuhne , his fellow captive and co-author joined him at the mission as a trader in cotton, an activity which was part of, and a means of, financing the mission. The mission schools trained Africans to be able to work as translators, messengers and office clerks for the colonial government. Other difficulties they faced were the problems of the many languages and dialects and their ignorance of the true meaning of the various cultures, beliefs, values and ways of life of the people whom they set out to convert to Christianity. The Journal of Negro Education, 2019 The three models of Secondary education in Ghana since colonial times are the Mfantsipim School founded by the Church (mission) in 1876, Achimota School in 1927 established by the British Colonial government The European missionaries believed that European culture was superior to African culture. ), Father Auguste Moreau and Father Eugene Murat, arrived at Elmina and revived the Roman Catholic Church in Ghana. Their records from World War One show their distance from the war and yet that it did affect . Two other training colleges opened by the missionaries, in the early days, were the Wesley College in Kumasi (1922) and the Roman Catholic Training College at Amisano, near Elmina (1931) which in 1936 moved to the campus of the newly founded secondary school, St Augustines College at Cape Coast. These contradictions are surprisingly absent from contemporary research. Other missionaries opened mission stations in the country. In 1859, the first newspaper in Yoruba. Also, Christian missionaries in Ghana were as zealous as their counterparts in Nigeria in pioneering medical services. Another difficulty that the early missionaries faced in the spread of Christianity was insufficient Christian literature at that time. Senior High School Literature Ramseyer had at first not intended a missionary sojourn in Ashanti. Their educational activities helped spread literacy and vocational skills training among Ghanaians. Andreas Riis, assisted by a team of West Indian evangelists, laid the foundations of the Basel Missionary Church in the country. NUUT Co. Ltd. Kumasi, Ghana, 2011, Baarkinado. Despite their significant contributions to education, local language development, agriculture and the economy as a whole, the missionaries have been criticized severally. Instead of needing to import skilled workers such as carpenters, the mission schools provided colonial governments with workers capable of building and maintaining the colonys infrastructure and basic technology, a contribution that kept the colonies running smoothly. As happened in other West African countries, many more mission-sponsored hospitals were founded in the course of the twentieth century. In Ghana, missions strategically weighted costs and benefits when choosing where to establish their churches and schools. In 1858 ten years after the founding of the first college, the Presbyterians opened a sister college at Aburi for the training of women teachers. Here you can choose which regional hub you wish to view, providing you with the most relevant information we have for your specific region. Both the academic and vocational forms of education the missions provided served to strengthen the rule of the colonial powers, so that the native inhabitants were second-class citizens in their own land. Series CLR. He worked zealously as an evangelist and schoolmaster in the Castle School until his death in 1816. However the superficial motivations and ideologies have changed, at the most basic level both contemporary Northern charities and nineteenth century missionaries share the belief that the North must come and save the suffering natives, which in the case of the missionaries, has been proven to have inflicted more harm than provided relief. They preferred to hold onto polygamy, even at the cost of illiteracy. He was followed, three years afterwards, by the Rev. crs questions and anwers All rights reserved. Soon after the start of elementary schools, the missionaries started opening higher institutions also. His funeral Mass was Sept. 27, followed by burial at St. Mary Cemetery at Techny. I well remember when he came to live with me in Trenton. The first missionaries to come to Ghana were the Roman Catholic missionaries in the 15th century and the Anglican missionaries. These included the Baptist missionaries who under the American evangelist, Thomas Bowen, started work from Ogbomosho in 1855. His request to the Danish Crown for missionaries was forwarded to . In fact, Jacobus Capitein, a former Ghanaian slave who became a priest in the Dutch Reformed Church in the 18th century was on record to have defended the practice of slavery. Another contribution of missionaries to the development of Ghana was their pioneering role in writing many local languages. The American Episcopal Evangelical (A.M.E.) Zion Church owes its foundation in Ghana to Bishop J. Bryan Small, who started work first at Keta in 1898. The Methodists, known as the Wesleyan Missionaries (after their founder), arrived in Freetown in 1811. In the 19thh century, too, Afro-Brazilians returned to Benin and Nigeria with Catholicism. Learn how your comment data is processed. At the time of its inception, however, there was no publication that systematically or comprehensively addressed the enormous problems that characterized the education of Blacks in the United States and elsewhere. During the first half of the 19th century they targeted healthier places, with relatively lower malaria-risk, where European missionaries could survive and train local African missionaries and teachers (Jedwab et al. The missionary impact on education would have far-reaching consequences, as their creation of a weak basis of education would slow down the political and educational development of many former colonies in Africa. Its message was that of love and the universal brotherhood of mankind. It is one of the oldest continuously published periodicals by and about Black people. The third, St Nicholas Grammar School (now Adisadel College), was founded by the Anglican Church in 1910. African poetry A member of the CMS, Henry Venn, boasted that the mission schools of Nigeria would produce an educated African elite that could form an intelligent and influential class of society and become the founders of a Kingdom which shall render incalculable benefits to Africa (Venn cited in Bassey 1991:37). Hundreds of believers were baptized, branches organized, and a mission established. The Committee for Women's Work was responsible for the education of native girls. Like the Methodists, the Roman Catholic missionaries spread the faith notably in the interior, which later became Protectorate. Their economic activities went beyond the development of agriculture. In Nigeria, one of the lasting works of the C.M.S. From the second half of the eighteenth century, a fervent wave of evangelical spirit developed in the United Kingdom, Europe and the New World which inspired men and women with the missionary fervour to found religious societies whose members would go out to Africa and the other lands. Instead of adapting the teachings and practices of the new religion to suit indigenous values, as it did when the same Christian religion adopted Greek, Roman, German and Anglo-Saxon native practices, the early Christian missionaries condemned totally as pagan, and to be avoided by their converts, whatever they considered strange. Kalu, Ogbu. Some progressive Europeans, like the first principal of Achimota College, Rev. Again, in West-Africa, the efforts to go beyond the coast to reach those inland with the gospel coincided with the southwards expansion of Islam which posed some threat to the expansion of the work of Christian evangelizing missions. senior high school English Missionaries travelled through dense evergreen forests, crossed rivers and climbed mountains to bring the Gospel to as many Ghanaians as they could. Besides education, they cared for the sick. Mission schools were popular because of the new skills and opportunities they offered. 0 This was the work of the great missionary, Thomas Birch Freeman, who placed two missionaries, Mr and Mrs. de Graft, in charge of the school. The First Missionaries were sent as a result of a request by Major de Richelieu, Governor of Christiansborg. In this chapter, we shall examine how Christianity and Western-style education influenced West Africans values, attitudes and life-styles. Therefore, considering that the impact of mission education continues to have serious repercussions today, one must question whether the First World should continue to interfere in African education.

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