Malarial Encounters and Shifting Racial Recruitment Strategies by the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast, 1828-1849

Abstract

Abstract In the early- to mid-nineteenth century, European mortality rates in West Africa were the highest in the world. Mortality estimates included nine missionaries sent from the Basel Mission (established in what is now Switzerland) to the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), eight of whom died between 1828 and 1840, mostly from “fevers.” In response to high mortality rates, the Basel Mission recruited several Afro-West Indians to work as Christian missionaries in the Gold Coast, mostly based on the presumption that individuals of African descent would better survive the environment. The decision to recruit Afro-West Indians to evangelize on the Gold Coast seemed to the mission to be a rational decision, one not in need of further justification or an overarching theory of race, environment, and disease. Surprisingly, the Basel Mission did not justify this position Biblically either. Once arrived, the West Indian Christian missionaries mostly lived in the Akwapem hills above Accra at an elevation that would have provided some protection against malaria; subsequently, their mortality rates were significantly lower than the European missionaries. After quinine came to be used as a prophylactic against malaria after 1850, thus lowering European missionary mortality rates, no more Afro-West Indians were recruited by the Basel Mission.