On July 31, 2023,
Cohort Sankofa of The Witness Tree Institute of Ghana traveled to the Eastern Region of Ghana to recall history on the campus of the Presbyterian College of Education (PCE) at Akropong-Akuapem.
It was on this campus that the founder and director of the Witness Tree Institute of Ghana was born. It was also here that the seeds of western education and Christianity were sowed.
The principal and some administrators of the Presbyterian College of Education had already heard about the Witness Tree Institute of Ghana, and some students of the College had applied to participate in the institute’s programs over the years, but have never met the director himself, and so this was both a homecoming of sorts for the director and his WTIG team, and an official introduction of the WTIG to the Presbyterian College of Education.
The Presbyterian College of Education is also the college I, and my fellow presenter Joseph, attend. We had applied for participation in the educational program of the WTIG and had been accepted. Part of our learning involved doing a presentation on the history of our college, and we were excited to share this history with our cohort of esteemed North American and Ghanaian educators.
Joseph Koranteng, my colleague and I were to do a presentation at the conference room of the college. Our presentation was about the role of the Basel Mission Society Christian in introducing Western and Christian education in the Gold Coast. This is a summary of what I shared in our presentation.
The Basel Mission Society began its work in the Gold Cost in 1828; however, the serious challenges of living and propagating Christianity in a foreign and sometimes hostile environment almost ended the mission of the missionaries. Thrice the Basel Mission Committee considered ending its attempts to convert Africans in the Gold Coast area. It felt to them that they and Christianity were not yet ripe for mission work on the Gold Coast for various reasons.
The first batch of four missionaries arrived on the Gold Cost on December 18, 1828, under the leadership of Johannes Philip Henke, a German. They were accompanied on the ship by Noi Dowuna. He was the son of the chief of Osu, Accra, and was returning home after a Danish government-sponsored year’s study (1827 - 28) in Denmark.
These missionaries were given the following instructions and mandates:
Firstly, they were to learn to adapt to the climate. Secondly, they were to take time to select a site for a permanent mission station. Thirdly, they were to master the local language at their settlement at all costs, and finally, they were to preach and spread the Gospel with love and patience. In this way, the instructions explained, they would be able to heal ‘the bleeding wounds which greed of gain and the cruel craftiness of the European have caused.’
On the 25th day of December 25, 1828, Johannes Henke passionately delivered the first official sermon in a Chapel which was full of Danish people including the Governor, a few mixed race and African people. The earnest work to save souls had began.
Sadly the hopeful exuberance of the missionaries was to be dampened. Within eight months of their arrival in the Gold Coast, three missionaries died, leaving Hencke alone to struggle with loss of his team, and the tremendous workload. Although news of the death of the Basel missionaries was devastating, a second batch of three determined men were dispatched to the Gold Coast to continue the work that had been started. These men were Christian Frederick Heinze, a medical doctor from Saxony, Andreas Riis and Peter Pedersen Jager, both Danes from Sleswig.
They arrived at Osu on March. 3, 1832 to find to their dismay that Johannes Henke also had died in November 1831. His last letter was written on October 31, to Basel before Riis and others set out on January 21, 1832. The men settled down to work but once again, death pruned their numbers, leaving only Riis to struggle with the arduous work of saving souls and also battling illness and loneliness. Riis wanted to settle on the mountains of the cooler Akuapim area and begin start a school, but his superiors in Basel resisted this plan, fearing a venture inland would be dangerous and a threat to these goals. So for the next three years (1832-35), Riis struggled not only with death but also with the Danish authorities at Osu to release him for missionary work in the Akuapem hills.
Ignoring pleas and sometimes discouraging language, Riis went ahead with a plan to open a school and a mission station at Ningo, Accra.
Meanwhile, he had written to the Home Committee about the sad news of the death of all his colleagues. The Committee in turn wrote to him, urging him to abandon the missionary work and return home. Riis decided to stay, and at the beginning of 1835 he was relieved of his work as Chaplain. Somehow freed of this responsibility, Riis made his first journey to Akropong, in the Akwapim mountains and area on January 24, accompanied by a Ghanaian interpreter called George Lutterodt. Here Riis lived with the people of Akropong, winning their affection and respect but converting very few people.
In 1840, Riis returned to Basel. He was in poor health and had left behind in the Gold Coast, neither a group of Christians nor school children, but rather graves of several Basel missionaries. It seemed that Riis had failed, but the people of Akropong begged him to return.
Andreas Riis, heeding the admonition of the Akropong King in his departure, suggested to the Danish authorities that Black missionaries from the West Indies would be more successful at converting Ghanaians into Christianity.
Akropong was again chosen to be the venue for this experiment. Within a few months, a group of liberated Christian Africans from the West Indies were to revive and raise the hopes and the goals of the Basel mission in the Gold Coast. Their presence suggested to the natives of Akropong that Christianity was a religion not only for the white man but also for the Africans. For according to Akuapem oral history, Riis was once told by the Okuapemhene Addo Dankwa that “Christianity and African religion are very different. It would take a lot to abandon any religion but if Riis could show him an African who practices the white man’s religion, then he and his people will accept his mission.
On February 7, 1843, Andreas Riis, Johann Widmann and George Peter Thompson together with a party of twenty-four West Indians left Jamaica for the Gold Coast. They reached Christiansborg on Good Friday, April 16, 1843. After spending two months in Osu, Riis and his party reached Akropong on Sunday, June 18, 1843.
As it went about its evangelical work, the Band Evangelical Society, the new name of this racially diverse group, mission began establishing schools to educate the indigenous people. This led to the establishment of the first preparatory school in Akropong-Akuapem in 1844 by Rev Andreas Riis. The increase in the number of pupils in the preparatory school resulted in a higher demand for professionally trained teachers. This demand culminated in the establishment of a seminary in 1848 to train catechists and teachers to teach at the preparatory school. The main aim of the Seminary was to give teachers a sound basic education as well as attitudes and skills “to live shining and exemplary lives.”
The seminary has gone through several revolutionary stages from a seminary to the present college of education of which I am proudly a part.
The Presbyterian College of Education is affectionately called “The Mother of Our Schools.” It was the first institution of Western style higher education in Ghana, and, in West Africa, it is second to Fourth Bay College in Sierra Leone. Presbyterian college of education has, since 1848, grown in size, attained academic excellence and undergone massive transformation in the area of infrastructure. The school population has increased from five men to over 1,800 men and women.
It is worth noting that the College started as an all-male institution until 1958 when it became co-educational with the admission of 17 women during the tenure of Rev. Noel Smith, the last white Principal of the College.
The college has been at the forefront of special education in Ghana. In 1945, The College began to admit visually impaired students. Currently, The College has a Special Education Unit that trains visually impaired, hearing impaired, and physically-challenged students.
The Basel missionaries were the first to bring cocoa to Ghana. They successfully planted and processed cocoa beans into beverages long before Tetteh Quarshie, the man who commercialized cocoa, went to Fernando Po and brought cocoa seeds. Indeed, Tetteh Quarshie worked for one of the missionaries at the College and therefore knew about cocoa before he left for the island of Fernando Po. It was no surprise that he knew the worth of the plant. Today, the small cocoa farm of the Basel missionaries still exists on the campus of the Presbyterian College of Education. The roots of the crop have are firmly embedded in African soil. The story of the cocoa farm was almost lost in the telling of the first successful cocoa farm in Ghana.
Also buried on the campus of the Presbyterian College of Education and other cemeteries at Akropong are brave men and women from Europe, Jamaica and other parts of the world who believed in their mission and brought western education, including writing and reading, to lay the foundation for learning. These people and countless Ghanaians who aided them in fulfilling their mission are owed a debt of gratitude and respect. I wish I could name them all. But I am determined to keep their work alive as a dedicated teacher and proud student of the Presbyterian College of Education, and to “heal the bleeding wounds which greed of gain and the cruel craftiness of the European have caused.’
Philip Ampofo
Student Teacher
Presbyterian College of Education Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana