Introduction ^{Footnote 1}

In the early nineteenth century in Sierra Leone a series of events took place which could not have been replicated elsewhere or at any other time. Those events were the British Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, the influx of freed African slaves from vessels that had been seized and adjudicated by the Vice Admiralty Court, and the establishment of a western-style education system which served to knit together a tremendously diverse region. Central to the transformation of society in that region and period, but too little studied by scholars, were a group of German-speaking Lutheran missionaries who worked on behalf of the English evangelical Church Missionary Society. The pedagogical efforts of those individuals – all of them men – served to affect the socio-cultural fabric of the country and its inhabitants radically over time. However, the missionaries themselves have been largely under-reported within the historiography, forgotten in fact over the last half century although with the recent exception of Bruce Mouser’s study of the Reverend Peter Hartwig. No study prior to this one has examined their sociocultural origins, instead categorizing them as “Germans.” ^{Footnote 2} However, their lives and their origins fundamentally shaped the region, and any effort to approach their work and impact would be incomplete without a detailed recognition of how they differed from the largely British agents in the colony with whom they worked, and how they differed from one another due to the peculiarities of central European geopolitics of the period. These men were not only ultimately transformative, but also served as important sources on the ground for ethnographic data concerning the Susu and Bullom peoples, and for the process of acculturation of African recaptives which went on all the time in Freetown. It is therefore crucial to analyze the missionaries biographically as far as the data will allow, so as to recognize the value as well as the limitations of their contributions. While later German-speaking missionaries were significant in the history of Sierra Leone, this earliest group experienced a unique situation. They were breaking new ground and their efforts began in an ad hoc fashion, rendering their correspondence and accounts important as they represent the initial steps in developing the CMS in the region.

This article ends with the year 1816 when the CMS mission was centralized in Freetown and the missionaries were given full authority over the steadily increasing demographic of the Liberated Africans who were being judicially emancipated into the colony. After that point, the detailed and personal nature of each man’s African correspondence shifted, as each missionary found himself responsible for many hundreds of pupils instead of just a few dozen. Simultaneously, the overall approach of the CMS became more structured and codified.

Sierra Leone: Company and Colony

The first decade of the nineteenth century was one of enormous social change in Sierra Leone. The nascent settlement at Freetown, controlled by what was by that time a crumbling British-based Sierra Leone Company, was home to a diverse mixture of settlers. They had first come from the United States to Nova Scotia following the 1763 American War of Independence, and then in 1797 they emigrated from an inhospitable eastern Canada to the coast of upper Guinea. Their second migration was funded and overseen by a group of ardent abolitionists in Britain who directed the Sierra Leone Company in tandem with wealthy investors who hoped that a settlement in West Africa would prove profitable. In 1800 these Nova Scotians now settled in Africa were joined by approximately five hundred Jamaican Maroons, who had been exiled to Nova Scotia in turn after the Second Maroon War; like the Black Loyalists, they found Nova Scotia far too cold and unappealing and begged to be moved. In 1808 the Company which administered the settlement finally collapsed under the financial burden of supporting its colonists, and Freetown was annexed by the British Crown. Freetown then became home to a Vice Admiralty Court which implemented the Act to Abolish Slavery by dealing with the adjudication of captured slave vessels. Within a decade people rescued from slave vessels had outnumbered the settlers.

Freetown was surrounded by an equally complex mixture of peoples with long histories in the region as well as by comparative newcomers. Families of Afro-European coastal traders who could trace their lineage from inter-marriage of local elites and European agents dominated the trade networks connecting the interior to the Atlantic system, while powerful Muslim kingdoms at Moria and Fuuta Jallon represented connections to the Islamic systems inland. Many of the local peoples, including representatives of the Afro-European coastal families, belonged to a male initiatory society, Poro, which served to oversee judicial processes, trade disputes, warfare, and spiritual matters, and which provided authority to local governing bodies. ^{Footnote 3} Both Islam and Poro offered systems of education to children of the region, but access was limited by the wealth and social standing of a given child’s parents. It was into so diverse and complicated a blend of peoples and religion that the missionaries whose lives and work form the core of this article arrived, in 1804. They brought European innovations in pedagogy which afforded children an education no matter their origin or social standing, and their work as teachers paved the way for an entirely new educated elite in West Africa. That said, their regionalism and actions set them apart from the more typical narrative which privileges the European male interloper within African society, so that an examination of each different context becomes central to a deeper interrogation of these seven individuals.

The Church Missionary Society and its Missionaries

The Church Missionary Society was founded in 1799 by the Clapham Sect of the London abolitionists as the “Society for Missions to Africa and the East.” ^{Footnote 4} The purpose of the Society was conversion within the colonies, and their mandate was to address what the founding members believed was a lack of interest in Africa by other missionary societies. Despite their intentions, the CMS was unable to recruit any British missionaries to serve their cause, but with the mediation of Carl Steinkopf, who was the Lutheran pastor at the Lutheran Savoy Chapel in London, the society was able to come to an arrangement with a seminary in Berlin which provided them with missionaries to send overseas. ^{Footnote 5} The CMS therefore sent these men to the West African coastal area with which the Clapham Sect was already involved through its interests in the Sierra Leone Company. The CMS had been founded by evangelical members of the Church of England, but the missionaries from the German and Baltic regions were Protestant Lutherans ^{Footnote 6} with whom at that time the Church of England had amicable relations. The cordial relations of the two Churches had developed in part due to the long tradition of intermarriage between the English and German-speaking royal families and in part due to the general agreement in doctrine between the two Churches. Furthermore, the evangelical movement within the Church of England had a great deal in common with the Pietist Lutheran movement in German-speaking Europe. The German-speaking early missionaries whom the CMS was forced to send out in lieu of English speakers often clashed with colonial authorities, but most tensions were ameliorated considerably in 1816 when the CMS, and by extension the evangelical branch of the Church of England, became the official religious denomination of the Colony. ^{Footnote 7} That reliance by the colony’s leaders on the CMS intensified as the colony explicitly sought to educate and indoctrinate newly arrived Africans freed from slave ships, with the CMS given primary charge not only of Liberated Africans but of most of the children in the colony too.

The Missionaries and their Relationship with Church History

The first missionaries largely originated in the Berlin Missionary Seminary, founded in the Pietist Lutheran tradition in Berlin in 1800 and led there by the Reverend Johann Jänicke. ^{Footnote 8} The Seminary had missionaries but no funds with which to send them abroad, while the CMS had funds but no interested missionaries. ^{Footnote 9} CMS historian Samuel Walker’s Reference Walker1845 narrative adheres closely to the original documents from which it derives its information, documents now kept in the University of Birmingham Cadbury Research Library’s Special Collections. ^{Footnote 10} Walker described in detail the recruitment of the German-speaking missionaries from Berlin, and the difficulties they faced in Africa. The 1873 CMS Atlas gives no names of missionaries who worked on the upper Guinea coast prior to 1816, and from then on indicates only success in conversion, although it attributes that success to the Reverend William A.B. Johnson. ^{Footnote 11} In 1899, Eugene Stock, likewise a CMS historian, described also the arrangement between the CMS and Berlin Seminary and further explained that upon their arrival in London the new missionaries were unable to speak English. Stock’s account paints a picture of challenges from the outset, describing German-speakers who were literally unable to communicate without the assistance of Steinkopf. In fact it was Steinkopf who eventually arranged accommodation for them in Clapham so that they could learn some English before being sent to Britain’s first Anglophone African colony. He also facilitated their brief return to Berlin to be ordained as Lutherans, in order to place them at the same level as other missionaries acting overseas. ^{Footnote 12}

Most intriguingly, in 1953 the Anglican church historian J.R.H. Moorman, later Bishop of Ripon, offered a wholly revisionist account of the CMS’s efforts in Sierra Leone and its hinterland. Moorman’s history differs considerably from those relying explicitly on the original archival sources:

Moorman cites Stock’s 1899 account as his primary source for what is a patently inaccurate description. Moorman’s revision of the work of the early missionaries is troubling in both a prominent figure within the Church of England and an ecclesiastical historian. His erroneous emphasis upon the English influence through Bickersteth if anything emphasizes the need not only for the correction of the historical record but for a better understanding of the true origins and sociocultural backgrounds of the men whom the CMS actually sent. ^{Footnote 14}

The Impact of the Missionaries in Sierra Leone

Although other earlier missionaries had been in Sierra Leone, the CMS mission proved to be the longest-lasting and most successful. Sierra Leone was ecumenical to a startling degree, with representatives of the Methodists and the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion as well as Baptists and the CMS. The Baptists were primarily comprised of the Nova Scotians, most of whom followed the “New Light” doctrine and with few of them formally trained as missionaries. Whole congregations of Black Loyalist Baptists went to Sierra Leone after John Clarkson, younger brother of Thomas Clarkson, recruited settlers in Nova Scotia. ^{Footnote 15} Once they arrived in Sierra Leone, David George, a charismatic Nova Scotian revivalist, continued to act as the leader of the Baptists. However, according to Cassandra Pybus’s study, after George had left Freetown to study with the Baptists in England in 1795 he was viewed with suspicion by the Nova Scotian Baptist settlers when he returned to the colony. ^{Footnote 16} Methodists too, under Moses Wilkinson, joined the settlers along with the Baptists who had accompanied Clarkson after his trip to Nova Scotia. Mingo Jordan’s Methodist congregation from Preston and Boston King’s from Dartmouth were both persuaded by Clarkson’s recruitment efforts, and Wilkinson’s and Jordan’s parishioners elected to emigrate. ^{Footnote 17} The first attempt at a formal mission by European Methodists did not last long, for those who left for Freetown in 1796 had returned within six months because of the hardships of life in the new settlement. Nevertheless, even without guidance from their sect’s authorities in England the Nova Scotians persevered under Wilkinson, ^{Footnote 18} although his congregation was problematic because it was considered undisciplined. Appeals to Thomas Coke then led to both the abortive 1796 missionary attempt from England, and a later one in 1811, which was successful. ^{Footnote 19}

As a result, the German-speaking missionaries from the CMS who arrived in 1804 were remarkable not only in their early presence in the colony but in their perseverance too. The colonial authorities pressed the incoming missionaries to serve as colonial chaplains – denomination was not a factor for the prospective Chaplain and after the departure of John Clarke the colony was without a spiritual leader. Official Government Chaplains for the colony included men of varied denominations. There were the Reverend Melvill Horne, a Methodist-leaning member of the Church of England in 1792, a Presbyterian named John Clarke, who traveled to Freetown in 1796, Malchior Renner, who was a Lutheran acting for the evangelical CMS from 1804–1806, and his fellow Lutheran Nylander from 1806–1812. Then there was Rickards, ^{Footnote 20} 1812–1813, and finally another Lutheran Butscher, from 1813–1817. ^{Footnote 21} To begin with therefore what was important was not denomination but availability, until the formal affiliation in 1816 of the CMS with the colony’s leadership, whereupon CMS missionaries tended to be placed as chaplains and as superintendents of recaptive villages and enjoyed much greater influence within the colony.

The CMS Mission Schools

The missionaries established settlements and schools, and their educational contribution to the colony and region was arguably their most significant in this early period. The CMS missionaries’ schools were unique regionally and remarkable historically. ^{Footnote 22} The first agreement made between Renner, Butscher, and local traders along the Rio Pongo which established Bashia settlement included the stipulation that the children of slave traders should be taught English by the CMS representatives. They subsequently added to their classrooms enslaved children whom they purchased and then freed, and those children then studied alongside the children of the local elites and of the Maroons and Nova Scotian settlers. The classrooms therefore served as a first and crucially important regional melting pot, allowing the pupils in each school to cross social and ethnic lines. Those children later became the nucleus of a new educated Sierra Leonean elite many of whom in turn themselves opened schools, such as that of Stephen Caulker on Sherbro Island. The first CMS schools were built along the Rio Pongo among slave traders and Susu people, while later mission schools were established nearer Freetown on the Bullom Shore or at the slave factories of the Îsles de Los. During his period in Freetown prior to 1812, Nylander “opened a school for native children in Freetown, for which purpose a house was provided by the governor, it being found that there was no instruction afforded to the Maroon children; their parents not choosing to send them to the schools of the settlers, there being enmity between the Maroons and the Nova-Scotians.” ^{Footnote 23}

The first of the CMS schools to be completed was Bashia, established in 1808 on the site of a former slave factory. Overseen by Renner, Butscher, Wenzel, and Wilhelm at various points until its eventual destruction by fire in 1817, Bashia was the most successful of the early mission schools of the CMS. The land ceded for its use was offered by a local slave trader, Benjamin Curtis, in return for education to be provided by the CMS missionaries, so that Bashia was a school right from its beginning. By 1809 Renner’s letters to Pratt indicate that Butscher was instructing eight local boys at the two settlements of Canoffee and Bashia on the Rio Pongo. By the summer, Butscher’s own account describes him as being often at nearby Fantimania, to negotiate with M. Fantimani about which children ought to be sent to which school. Butscher’s letter raises the same problem of language as each of the other German-speaking missionaries faced. Butscher offered to resign his post teaching English to the local Susu boys because of his concerns about his grasp of the tongue; he hoped that one of the newer missionaries might be better suited than he was to teach the local children to speak English. ^{Footnote 24} The missionaries had been explicitly requested to teach the pupils in English, which must have been a considerable challenge for the first few waves of CMS teachers for all of them spoke English as a second language. In Butscher’s case he had had only nine months of training!

After discussion among themselves, in 1809 Wenzel and Barneth took over the Kakara settlement near what would become Canoffee, leaving Butscher and Renner in charge of nearby Bashia. Wenzel’s letter to London dated December 1809 indicated that they had made considerable progress with a dictionary. ^{Footnote 25} But by March of the following year Barneth had died and Wenzel had become dispirited, lamenting that at Kakara there were only two children willing to be educated while Bashia supported forty. By the end of 1811 Wenzel’s school was flourishing, with a hundred and twenty pupils, so that Wenzel chose to accept the offer of “Perry’s factory” to serve as a larger house within which to teach, which would have put Canoffee on an equal footing with Bashia – both schools being housed in former factories. ^{Footnote 26} However, by the close of the year the offer had fallen through with Perry unable to displace his workers, but fortunately a neighboring site was offered by local leader Munkgé Backe, and Wenzel began building a larger schoolhouse there. ^{Footnote 27}

Nylander was initially stationed as chaplain in Freetown where he was teaching a hundred and seventy-seven pupils. ^{Footnote 28} After losing his first wife to illness he was able to journey to the Bullom Shore as for some time he had wished to do, and there he established a settlement and school near Yongroo. ^{Footnote 29} Nylander was well received by the Bullom who appeared pleased at his settling among them and promised to commit their children to his care for instruction. He commenced his school at Yongroo Pomoh with two boys and two girls reportedly liberated from the “Congo nation” and by permission of the governor he brought with him from the colony. ^{Footnote 30}

After arriving in Sierra Leone in 1811, Klein first journeyed to Canoffee, where his wife worked alongside Wenzel, teaching the girls at the school there. The Kleins were then moved to Bramia where they established the Gambier settlement, believing that they would quickly see a number of interested students. But their optimism was not fulfilled, as Samuel Walker explains:

Despite Walker’s generous appraisal of the pupil numbers at the short-lived Îsles de Los school the Kleins amassed a student body of only twenty boys and fourteen girls – considerably short of the number ascribed by Walker.

The Trajectories of the Missionaries

Those early missionaries, whose pedagogical efforts became the backbone of the colonial educational system after 1816 and whose first pupils went on to establish their own schools in the region, must be understood in the light of their respective socio-cultural backgrounds. They were from what would become Germany, Estonia, and Poland and must be contextualized further as individuals who, rather than being able to trace their origins from a stable and cohesive singular state, had emerged from central continental regions which were fragmented and in turmoil. Each man had been born in a different region of the former medieval kingdoms of north eastern Europe and accordingly each man as missionary brought pre-existing cultural tensions with him to the upper Guinea coast. After their respective arrivals in West Africa, these men dispersed outward to found missions, and yet those from Swabia congregated at one location, while the Silesian missionary found himself largely alone at another, and the missionary from Revel (modern-day Estonia) similarly was isolated in a settlement by himself. They were persons whose origins dictated their decisions implicitly, and their lives on the Upper Guinea coast cannot be divorced from their cultural backgrounds in central and northern Europe.

All of them had grown up in a turbulent socio-political landscape within which various new philosophical ideals were spreading rapidly. As Johann Reusch has noted, German-speaking intellectuals in the late eighteenth century were experiencing an obsession with the trope of the nobler wilder though their valorization of the idea differed from other similar movements due to the connection drawn between contemporary “tribal” peoples and the tribes of early Germany who had been so feared by the Romans. ^{Footnote 32} Various student associations in late eighteenth century German-speaking cities embraced the same fantasy, idealizing life in distant regions as being true to their own shared cultural heritage as they envisioned it. ^{Footnote 33}

The CMS missionaries ranged from what had once been Swabia situated near today’s Switzerland and Bavaria, to as far north and east as Revel (now Tallinn, the capital of modern Estonia). Each man was giving up his regional vernacular to a large degree, and preaching the gospel under the auspices of a variant branch of Protestantism. In her examination of Peter Hartwig, Nancy Mouser details the possible trauma Hartwig would have experienced in being so deeply separated from his native Prussian language and culture. ^{Footnote 34} But Hartwig was hardly the only one under such pressure, for each of the missionaries spoke German initially, and language and dialectical differences must have informed regionally-based divisions between them. ^{Footnote 35} The parts of Europe from which these first representatives of the CMS originated had undergone radical social and political changes during the eighteenth century. The rapid expansion of Prussia and the death throes of the Holy Roman Empire transformed national boundaries, affected the practice of Christianity, and imposed languages through conquest. Whether a missionary spoke Swabian German or Silesian German, regional dialects would have shaped both his cultural identity and how he interacted not only with his fellow CMS missionaries but with the children under his care, too. English remained a challenge for each of the German missionaries to Sierra Leone and complaints were often made about their accents when they gave sermons, while each of them in letters home acknowledged his respective concerns about his grasp of the English spoken in Freetown.

The Swabian Missionaries

- Melchior Renner

Melchior Renner was thirty-one when he journeyed to the upper Guinea coast to arrive in 1804. He had trained at the Berlin Seminary then spent fifteen months at Clapham in England, studying Susu under William Greaves there. In 1803 he was ordained as a Lutheran on the continent, and sailed soon after. On arrival he acted as the Government Chaplain for two years and then oversaw the Rio Pongo settlements between 1808–1818. He finally died in Kent, Sierra Leone on 9 September 1821 at the age of forty-nine, survived by his wife. Renner’s nearly eighteen years of working with the CMS helped to shape and form policy in the region. His official birthplace, as noted in the CMS documents, was Würtemberg, but his letters to London shed light on his home village of Grodenheim, which he mentioned in a letter to Secretary Josiah Pratt in 1806. ^{Footnote 36} No official CMS histories confirm that birthplace for Renner however, and its location is no longer given on modern maps, although Renner referred to it as being near Ulm. The German commonly spoken in rural areas of Würtemberg was Schwäbisch, or Swabian German, and was a regional dialect unique to what had been known in the Middle Ages as Swabia.

Once in West Africa Renner’s main interest was seeking out the hinterland and its people expressly for the purposes of evangelism. That, rather than teaching or translation, informed his trajectory in Sierra Leone. Renner’s early letters note the same hardships described also in 1805 by his fellow missionary Hartwig – Freetown then was a place where food was scarce and sickness frequent. ^{Footnote 37} Like Hartwig’s, Renner’s letters reflect an intriguing and challenging picture of life on the ground at that point in Sierra Leone’s history. At first the situation seems to have been trying, to say the least, with Hartwig venturing into the country to the north and east and Renner remaining in Freetown, ministering to the people there. Renner’s diligence is notable despite pressure from London which seemingly ignored the situation on the ground in Sierra Leone and repeatedly instructed both men to go out and look for Africans to convert. Renner’s letters from 1806 indicate that with the rainy season and steady illness he was unable to do as asked, much as he wished to go out of the colony. He further expressed his fears for his family in Grodenheim given the onset of the First Napoleonic War – a fear which seems to have been altogether justified when Napoleon’s armies defeated Austrian forces over the three days of the Battle of Ulm in October 1805. ^{Footnote 38} By early summer of 1806 Renner’s letters to London were reflecting his frustration at being confined to the colony while Hartwig journeyed inland, and Renner mentioned increasing disagreements and arguments over which was the superior in the mission. ^{Footnote 39} From that time, tensions between Renner and Hartwig seem to have spiralled rapidly out of control despite various directives from London and the Society. Hartwig’s continued journeys outside the Colony were in obedience to repeated directions by the CMS that he learn Susu and Arabic, and determine the character of the local people. Yet Hartwig’s continued absence seems to have placed a heavy burden on Renner, who was obliged to remain in what he initially described as a colony rampant with sickness and subject to starvation. By the autumn the colonial officials wrote to Pratt to instruct him that Renner and Hartwig were to be accompanied at all times by one of the newly-arrived missionaries because their disagreements were so violent. ^{Footnote 40}

Described by his fellow missionaries as overbearing and harsh, Renner nonetheless impressed the people around Bashia once he left Freetown for the Rio Pongo far to the north and west, with one of his first pupils at the school, Bangu, recorded much later by John Godfrey Wilhelm as having been willing to risk his life in defence of Renner despite Bangu’s own dismissal from Bashia:

Leopold Butscher’s letter to London in 1807 suggests that much of Renner’s previous harshness might have been due to his confinement in the colony and the unlikelihood of his exploring and evangelizing as he wished to. ^{Footnote 42} Judging by his activities once he was stationed at Bashia he was clearly driven by religious zeal rather than philology or simple curiosity about the African world. His records of students are brief at best and unlike many of his fellows he published no translations. Renner seems instead to have focused on working with his parishioners and, to a greater degree than many of the other German speakers of the CMS, seeking new converts. His accounts by 1815 offer important representations of how local headmen felt about Abolition as well as proposed solutions to the problem of legitimate commerce beyond the colony which Renner reported upon as originating among specific local headmen such as M. Backe.

Renner’s letters provide important details and data for historians of the region, and serve to highlight the lack of support for such outlying settlements as Bashia. By 1819 the British colonial government had centralized all missionaries in Freetown, closing their settlements and effectively terminating their relationships with the people among whom they had worked for so long.

- Leopold Butscher

According to CMS documentation Leopold Butscher was aged thirty and from “Swabia.” Like his fellows he had studied at the Berlin Seminary and then spent nine months in England, after which, like Nylander, he was ordained a Lutheran Minister in 1806. The ship taking him to Sierra Leone was wrecked off the coast of Ireland, and on Butscher’s second voyage in 1813 after his leave from Sierra Leone he was once again shipwrecked, this time off Senegal in the company of his Afro-European student Richard Wilkinson, whom he had taken with him to England. In the intervening years Butscher taught at the Bashia settlement alongside Renner, until he was put in charge of the Christian Institution in Freetown in 1814 after his return to Sierra Leone. He died on 17 July 1817 at the age of forty-one, after eleven years working for the CMS.

Butscher’s home region overlapped Renner’s to some degree, encompassing a broad portion of central Europe. Walker gives Butscher’s birthplace as “Ueberlingen, at the Bodensee, in Swabia.” ^{Footnote 44} Prior to 1803, Überlingen was a Free Imperial Town answering only to the Emperor, so ruled itself as well as representing itself at the Imperial Diet. The Reichsdeputationshauptschluß of 1803, the last significant law of the Holy Roman Empire before its dissolution, redistributed territorial sovereignty between German and French rulers in compensation for major land losses during the French Revolution. ^{Footnote 45} It abolished Überlingen’s status and the town was absorbed into the Margraviate of Baden three years before Butscher’s arrival in Sierra Leone. Importantly, Überlingen was also staunchly Catholic and Butscher’s birth and baptismal records indicate that his later adherence to Lutheranism must have been as a result of conversion. ^{Footnote 46} That aspect of Butscher’s origins bears emphasizing, for it demonstrates that for him as for many of his fellows there was no home to return to even if he or any of the other German missionaries had chosen to leave the upper Guinea coast. That stands in stark contrast to his British colonial contemporaries who could and often did return home, whether to recover from various ailments or to pursue alternative professions.

As soon as he landed in Freetown Butscher seems to have left immediately for the Rio Pongo, by December 1806 journeying into the interior onto land claimed by the Mandinka. Butscher went to act as arbitrator in the matter of the expulsion from the colony of an influential local man, Dala Modu, who had been charged with slave dealing. Butscher then accompanied Renner and Johann Gottfried Prasse out of the colony after Nylander had relieved Renner of his duties as chaplain, and although Prasse died soon afterwards the three men founded Bashia together in what they then called “Susu country.” ^{Footnote 47} Butscher’s achievements for the CMS primarily revolve around his impact as a teacher. He was described by Peterson as being ahead of his time in his stated interest in urging Africans to develop alternative commodities, although in many respects that agenda was very much in line with the burgeoning abolitionist interests of the time. ^{Footnote 48} Despite linguistic insecurities expressed in his correspondence to London soon after his arrival, by later accounts from Leicester Mountain in Freetown, Butscher clearly evoked considerable affection from his pupils. Over the years until his death in 1817 his letters and journals primarily focused on the training and successes of his students, first at Bashia and then at Leicester Mountain. His fellow missionaries wrote glowingly of him, with the Kleins indicating that although he and Renner both managed to win the affection of the local people, Butscher especially merited respect along the Rio Pongo. ^{Footnote 49} His relationships with his pupils continued even after the closure of the outlying missions, with Wilhelm commenting on the devotion to Butscher he observed among the pupils in Freetown after Butscher’s death. Wilhelm wrote of one of his students that “I believe that many of the Leicester Mountain Children, proved far more obedient, pleasing, & careful under the School of the late Rev^d Butscher, to whom, as first Master, they were attached like children to their own father.” ^{Footnote 50}

Butscher’s work at Bashia alongside Renner may well have been facilitated by the common regional dialect both men would have known. Überlingen’s position in former Swabia, and Butscher’s categorization as Swabian – as opposed to any connection with Baden – suggests that he thought of himself as being from Swabia, which would have lent itself to the Swabian German which rural Würtemberg also used. ^{Footnote 51}

- Jonathan Solomon Klein

Jonathan Solomon Klein was thirty-three, and instead of at the Berlin Seminary studied in England at Clapham near London for four years, and took Lutheran Holy Orders in 1811. After some time spent with Nylander he journeyed to the Canofee mission on the Rio Pongo to work with Wenzel there, though after some personal difficulties between the two men Klein left Wenzel and went to establish first a settlement along the Rio Dembia, then another at Gambier, one on the Îsles de Los, and finally one at Kaparroo. If we may judge from the correspondence, Klein and his wife, a niece of his English teacher the Reverend T. Scott, were polarizing figures and after ten years with the CMS, his connection with them in Africa was dissolved.

Klein has left us accounts of the Fula attacks on the settlements, and the tensions along the Rio Pongo, along with a vivid and ethnographically important description of the marriage of the son of a local headman to Elizabetha, one of the Bashia girls described as a “captive.” ^{Footnote 52} Klein’s accounts of the activities both of slave traders and of members of the Royal African Squadron offer a sense of the increasing tensions surrounding the two settlements at the Rio Pongo, and his narrative serves to contextualize the eventual closure of the mission. His detailed accounts present the first example of the missionary as reporter of local events, and demonstrate the importance of analysis of these men to modern scholarship. By the end of 1814 the Kleins had left the Rio Pongo region and were traveling from town to town attempting to establish schools and settlements but with little success. Klein’s overall impact is difficult to quantify because of the nature of his letters to London which largely amount to observations of events as opposed to giving any indication of his own achievements or ambitions. He was generally disdained by colonial officials and seems largely to have sought to establish his own settlements rather than join existing missions.

Like Renner and Butscher Klein’s stated birthplace lay in the modern Baden-Würtemberg region of Germany. Unlike Renner, who hailed from a small village, Klein came from the urban capital of the duchy, Stuttgardt (present-day Stuttgart). Importantly, in the wake of the German Mediatization which attempted to rebalance territorial gains and losses between the German states and France, Stuttgardt was made the capital of the Electorate of Würtemberg. When Napoleon broke up the Holy Roman Empire Stuttgardt became the capital of the Kingdom of Würtemberg and its regional importance rose during the eighteenth century and continued to do so into the nineteenth. Unlike the more modest origins of his fellow missionaries therefore, Klein’s home was by all accounts an important urban centre in its region. Whether that sparked tensions between Klein and the others is difficult to know, for Klein’s journals relate nothing substantial about personal relationships.

We can see then that although each of the three men had come from approximately the same region of modern Germany, differences in their birthplaces might have influenced their interpersonal interactions once the men arrived in Africa. In all probability Renner and Butscher shared Swabian cultural identity and by all accounts their time together at Bashia demonstrates a good working relationship. ^{Footnote 53} All told, they founded the settlement together and worked there for six years without any complaints being lodged by one against the other, in stark contrast to the fractious relationship which had marred Renner’s and Hartwig’s time together. ^{Footnote 54} It is probable too that Klein spoke Swabian, though his dialect would have been the Swabian spoken in Stuttgardt as opposed to that spoken in the countryside which, with their regional origins outside the capital, both Butscher and Renner shared. Klein was a less popular missionary, though his problems reportedly stemmed more from difficulties others had with the behavior of his English wife.

The Strasbourg Missionary

- John Godfrey Wilhelm

At thirty-three, John Godfrey Wilhelm had come to Africa from Strasbourg in Alsace, and had not attended the Berlin Seminary. Instead, like Klein he studied for four years in England, taking Lutheran Orders in 1811. He went to the Rio Pongo almost immediately and taught there with Renner at Bashia during Butscher’s journey to England and subsequent assignment to Leicester Mountain. In 1819, the Royal Gazette reports Wilhelm and his wife as teaching at Leicester along with a Mr. Cates. ^{Footnote 55} Wilhelm died in Sierra Leone on 25 April 1834 at the age of fifty-six, the longest-serving missionary of those who ventured out at that time. His accomplishments included a translation of the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles into Susu.

Wilhelm and the Kleins arrived in the colony in 1811, and like the Kleins and the Wenzels initially stayed with Nylander in Freetown. Like them too he complained that Nylander’s behavior to the newcomers was poor. Wilhelm’s role in the CMS, in the settlements and later in Freetown, seems to have been primarily centred around education and teaching. Like Wenzel he left no letters inquiring about European affairs nor the problems caused by the various geopolitical struggles taking place at that time. Wilhelm’s fluency in English seems to have been strong after his years in England, though later accounts suggest that his heavy accent was a problem for Anglophones to decipher. In 1827 Governor Campbell wrote of three missionaries including Wilhelm that “They are all Germans, who speak a kind of English which is scarcely intelligible.” ^{Footnote 56} Wilhelm’s interest was primarily in ensuring that his students succeeded within the educational approach which he brought with him.

Wilhelm’s cultural identity is considerably complicated by the historically problematic nature of his homeland, Alsace. He was born in the capital Strasbourg which had been a Free Imperial Town much like Überlingen, but similarly lost that status after being forcibly annexed by France during the French Revolution. Alsace as a distinct region on France’s eastern border has always been a matter of dispute between France and Germany. Founded by Germanic people, the region’s acquisition by the French under Louis XIV in the late seventeenth century introduced a new territory which was fundamentally at odds with traditional France. As David Bell has explained, Alsace and similar lands claimed by France “were alien to France in their history, social structure, government, patterns of trade – even in their language and religion.” ^{Footnote 57} Bell goes on to note the characteristics of the Alsatians, including – and importantly in light of how well Wilhelm fitted in at Bashia – their language. Bell explains that even “in 1789, nearly all Alsatians of native stock still grew up speaking a Swabian German dialect.” ^{Footnote 58} That Wilhelm was able to join the others who most likely shared that dialect and that they worked so well together seems no accident.

Wilhelm clearly identified as culturally German by both his name and his preferred native language, and his accommodation at Bashia as Butscher’s replacement suggests that he shared the socio-linguistic identity which seems to have become part of that settlement. Like Butscher, Wilhelm was celebrated as a teacher and his detailed student records emphasize that aspect of his nature. However, he is often described as working on translations and dictionaries, suggesting that even more than his fellows at Bashia his priorities were to his teaching, his linguistic efforts, and then evangelism. His accounts offer rich data concerning medical treatments available to African children at that time from local specialists, interpersonal tensions at play on the Rio Pongo, and intriguing snapshots of the individuals whom he was overseeing and teaching.

The Northern Missionaries

- Peter Hartwig

Peter Hartwig joined the CMS at twenty-five and studied alongside Renner at the Berlin Seminary Missionary School under Dr. Jänicke. He spent fifteen months at Clapham in England acquiring English and studied Susu at the School for Africans under William Greaves, a missionary from Edinburgh who had worked in Sierra Leone before returning home. Hartwig was ordained a Lutheran in 1804 and sailed to Sierra Leone that year. However, in 1807 he was dismissed for a presumed affiliation with slave traders, although, as Mouser has compellingly argued, circumstances forced Hartwig’s departure from the colony and his affiliation with slave traders might have been exaggerated. In 1814 Hartwig begged leave to return to his former duties and was engaged expressly as a linguist. He died shortly thereafter of yellow fever and was followed six weeks later by his English-born wife Sarah, a former governess in the Reverend John Venn’s family. In total Hartwig served the CMS for four years and survived in Sierra Leone outside the CMS for seven years.

The first entry concerning Hartwig and his colleague Renner praises both for their hard work studying Susu. ^{Footnote 59} Much of the early correspondence for the first two years of the CMS mission in Sierra Leone focuses on the volatile interpersonal problems between Renner and Hartwig. Hartwig was a more accomplished linguist, translating the Gospel of St. John into Susu, but he and Renner were so mutually opposed that letters from the Governor to London noted that both men were unable to join any expedition together, nor share quarters nor even travel together. ^{Footnote 60} Of the pair Hartwig has been more closely examined, in large part because of his deviance from the norm, and because his connection to the CMS was dissolved explicitly owing to suspicion of slave trading.

A common element mentioned both by Nancy Mouser’s analysis and the CMS documents is the relationship between Melchior Renner and Peter Hartwig. Their problems might have been due not only to influences once the missionaries arrived in Africa and traced by Mouser, but could have had cultural origins too. Of all the missionaries sent to Freetown in the first decade of the 1800’s, Hartwig alone is described as being from Prussia. Only with John Henry and Schulze in 1815 did the Society find another missionary “of Prussia.” During the latter half of the eighteenth century Prussia had rapidly begun to make itself known as a major political force in Europe. The kingdom’s rulers had seized upon various pretexts to launch into wars of territorial expansion, and Prussia was now therefore considered a threat by many of the southern German states. Hartwig’s Prussian cultural identity perhaps proved a considerable stumbling block in his tumultuous relationship with Renner given the different birthplaces of each man. Along with Austria, Prussia was by 1800 one of the two most powerful German-speaking states, and had claimed large swathes of territory along the Baltic coastline into modern Poland, and was sharing a tense border with Russia. In 1792, the beginnings of the Napoleonic War pitted Prussia against the French, and conquest and conflicts in Poland had weakened the state enough to allow French victories, which led to Prussia’s severance from the Coalition against France. In 1795 Prussia signed a separate peace with France allowing French occupation of the Rhineland while Prussia took more of Poland to the east. While Prussia assumed a pose of neutrality, Austria continued to fight France disastrously, losing most notably at Ulm, near Renner’s birthplace. ^{Footnote 61}

Though no mention is made by the CMS nor in Hartwig’s correspondence of his birthplace, Hartwig did write to London inquiring whether Berlin had truly been taken during the course of the war, suggesting either his Prussian national pride or that Berlin was his home. ^{Footnote 62} It seems unlikely that Hartwig was overly nationalistic, however, as Nylander’s letter of 10 July 1807 indicated. Nylander said that the missionaries had learned from a Mr. Vanneck that Hartwig had become a missionary in order to avoid military service, writing that “he did not like to be a soldier in the Prussian army and for fear of being forced to it as it was custom in Prussia, he joined the mission, only to get out of his native country by that means.” ^{Footnote 63}

One of the many criticisms leveled at Hartwig by the Corresponding Committee in Freetown was his accent, which Governor Ludlam noted in passing as contributing to a reported inability to preach effectively. ^{Footnote 64} Hartwig’s own letters indicate his problems in writing sermons in English, and the minutes of the Committee in Freetown indicate that his accent was often incomprehensible to parishioners. ^{Footnote 65} That might have been a case of the mutual hostility between Hartwig and the Freetown society emerging, and coloring accounts. Hartwig’s problems in composing his sermons perhaps reflect the comparatively brief period he had spent learning English, though his translations into Susu and Arabic would seem to indicate a talent for languages. Nylander’s own letters later comment on the ease with which Hartwig evidently displayed his proficiency in English, writing that “he speaks better English, than his mother tongue.” ^{Footnote 66}

Nylander also offered a variant account of the crisis which saw Hartwig eventually dismissed from service in 1807. Nylander wrote to London that the colonial officials had forbidden Hartwig from ministering in the colony, offering his own perspective on the evidently difficult situation on the ground for the first few missionaries. ^{Footnote 67} Shortly thereafter Hartwig left the colony without permission and set out for Rio Pongo while having in his possession some CMS property. He was dismissed, and later denounced as a slave trader himself, though his final letter offers another interpretation of events:

The paper the letter was written on is torn in many places, and the handwriting is unlike Hartwig’s earlier careful script, offering a sense of the violent emotions he must have felt as he wrote it. Hartwig was instructed to wait for passage to England, but he refused and departed in a Mandinka canoe with nothing more than the clothes on his back. ^{Footnote 69} While this personal drama was taking place Renner and his fellows had settled along the Rio Pongo and wrote to Pratt enthusing over what they saw to be a decrease in the slave trade locally. Nylander wrote that Hartwig was not only treated poorly by the colonial officials, but was mistreated by Renner too. ^{Footnote 70} By contrast, Butscher’s letter to Pratt of summer 1807 indicated that Hartwig’s behavior the previous year reflected poorly on the CMS. Butscher further reported that Hartwig now worked as an overseer in a slave factory in the region. ^{Footnote 71} Eventually Hartwig was welcomed back to the CMS in 1814, primarily to act as a translator. After surviving for seven years in the interior, however, Hartwig died of yellow fever soon after returning to the colony and the CMS. His wife, Sarah, who had sailed to rejoin her husband after advocating on his behalf to the Society in London, died six weeks after he did.

- Gustavus Reinhold Nylander

Nylander was from furthest north of all the missionaries sent to Sierra Leone by the CMS, and one of the most important sources among them for modern scholars of ethnography. Nylander’s given birthplace of Revel places him further north than much of Livonia, though the CMS documents specifically describe his home as “of Revel, in Livonia, Poland.” ^{Footnote 72} In the sixteenth century Livonia and Revel were separate; after continuous attacks by Russian forces leaders of the region begged both Poland and Sweden for aid. In return for his assistance the King of Poland demanded the annexation to his own crown of all of Livonia. While Livonia negotiated with him, the semi-autonomous town of Revel and its surrounding Estonian peoples were treating with the King of Sweden and had sworn fealty to him before messengers could stop them. Despite those differences, under the treaties of 1719–1720 Revel, like Livonia, was granted to Russia. Boasting foundries and distilleries it became a Russian fleet station. Today the town of Revel is known as Tallinn and is the capital of Estonia. It is a port town, and by the nineteenth century was well known for its commerce and trade. The town’s complicated history emphasizes why a deeper analysis is necessary, as even the CMS’s presumptions about Nylander’s birthplace are problematic, for in the early nineteenth century Poland was not in control of Revel nor even of Livonia.

Despite its considerable distance from Germany as we now know it, Nylander’s homeland was ruled from the medieval period onwards by a largely German-descended nobility. Tensions existed between many of the peasantry and their former German-speaking rulers. Culturally therefore, Nylander’s regional homeland was a mixture of the local peoples, influenced by Swedish conquerors and by centuries of Germanic rule, followed by more recent Russian domination. In 1721 much of the region was ceded to Russia by Sweden as a result of the Great Northern War, and Peter the Great confirmed that German would be the official language of the country. Nylander would therefore have spoken vernacular German, with an accent considerably different from that of the other missionaries who were from what are now the south western parts of modern Germany. ^{Footnote 73} From Nylander’s own journals and journals signed by all the missionaries present in Sierra Leone, his preferred given name was “Reinhold,” and it is as “Reinhold Nylander” that he signs himself in the journal of 30 June 1807. ^{Footnote 74} It is impossible to say whether any inferences may be drawn from that preference as an indication that Nylander wished to emphasize his German cultural identity as opposed to any Swedish ancestry that might have been suggested by the name “Gustavus,” but the question is certainly intriguing to consider. In later documents, he used the initials “G.R.” but still refrained from using his first name. Otherwise however, he brought a remarkable level of objectivity to bear on his descriptions of the traditions and rituals he observed at Yongroo Pomoh, which offers some insight into his mind-set and character. ^{Footnote 75} On pages 52–59 of his Grammar and Vocabulary of the Bullom Language Nylander records three Bullom fables as an exercise in syntax, demonstrating an interest in ethnography which is without any value judgments. ^{Footnote 76}

Arriving in 1806 in Sierra Leone, Nylander was thirty when he made the journey to the upper Guinea coast. Like Renner and Hartwig he was educated at the Berlin Seminary. He spent nine months in England, and took Lutheran Orders in 1806. After his arrival in Sierra Leone he took over the post of Government Chaplain from Renner and acted in that capacity until 1812 when he was able to venture to the Bullom Shore where he founded the Yongroo Pomoh settlement. He remained there until 1818 when he was called back to oversee Kissy Town’s settlement after Wenzel’s death. After nineteen years’ service to the CMS Nylander died at Kissy in 1825 at the age of forty-nine. During his time there Nylander offered many ethnographic studies of the local people and, working through the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, the Epistles of John, Anglican Morning and Evening Prayers, and Watt’s Catechism, ^{Footnote 77} made translations into Bullom and had them printed.

Arriving at last in October of that year, Nylander’s first message from Africa concerned his worries about the previous missionaries’ work, noting that the inroads he saw being made by Christianity were few at best. ^{Footnote 78} That point is supported in another of Nylander’s communications from April 1807, where he wrote of having taken the position of Chaplain, explaining that he had been preaching on Sundays to a largely Methodist audience. Like Renner he expressed his considerable concern about events in Europe surrounding the Napoleonic War, having heard that Napoleon had captured Berlin. ^{Footnote 79} Just as Renner had done, Nylander, evidently as unhappy at being stationed within the colony as his predecessor had been, soon began to write – in fact by June 1807 – asking to be replaced as Chaplain. Nylander clearly had a far greater interest in working outside Freetown among local peoples, and his letter to London of July 1807 emphasized his own work as Chaplain out in the colony while the other men were inland. ^{Footnote 80} Nylander suffered considerable ill health during his time as Chaplain, and wrote to try to ensure that any poor reports of himself by the newly arrived Wenzel would be viewed in a favorable light. Evidently, despite the departure of the contentious Hartwig the various missionaries were still not in harmony, although that too might have stemmed from Wenzel’s Silesian origins and Nylander’s own more northern roots. Nylander wrote of tensions between the Governor and himself, and between himself and the Wenzels. ^{Footnote 81}

Wilhelm and the other newly arrived missionaries offered another perspective on Nylander in their letter to Pratt from November 1809, which is perhaps ironically not much different from Nylander’s view of Renner on Nylander’s own arrival. They describe Nylander as tyrannical, quarrelsome, and demanding, insisting that they pay to lodge with him and viewing Mrs. Wenzel’s chronic illness without any compassion at all. ^{Footnote 82} By the next spring the Wenzels were in the Rio Pongo while Nylander was still in Freetown focused on translating the Bullom language and preparing to marry one Phyllis Nazely. ^{Footnote 83} He wrote to London in April 1810 asking for more school books and described the arrival of seventy-two children between eight to twelve years of age, making totals of sixty boys and seventy-seven girls whom he taught in Freetown. It is incidentally rather a frustration to the modern scholar that no pupil lists exist from that period. Nylander’s wife taught the girls and Nylander the boys, and Governor Thompson completed a school for Nylander’s use in Freetown by the end of that July. ^{Footnote 84} By December of 1811 Nylander was no longer waiting for instructions to vacate Freetown in the aftermath of losing his wife to illness there, and ceased preaching altogether, citing complaints that his style was too much like that of a Methodist. He wrote of his steadily increasing grasp of the Bullom language and by June 1812 he had amassed a vocabulary of over a thousand words. ^{Footnote 85} In that same year permission was finally granted for him to depart and see to the founding of Yongroo Pomoh, and he remained there until 1818 when Wenzel’s death and increasing local hostility forced its closure.

While stationed at Yongroo Pomoh, Nylander became an avid ethnographer and important reporter of funerary customs, local judicial trials among the Bullom, and Poro rites and rituals. His drawing of a Kolloh ritual mask is of considerable interest anthropologically as an example of a ranking member of Poro. ^{Footnote 86} In his detailed examination of the letter in which Nylander describes a masquerade with a “Kolloh devil,” William Hart observed that “The masquerade he describes has long since been discontinued and is known about from no other source. The letter is therefore a unique historical document and one which deserves to be more widely available to scholars in ethnography and the history of religion in Africa.” ^{Footnote 87} Hart considers that in his evaluation of the contributions of each missionary Nylander made remarkable observations. To Hart, Nylander anticipated the language of anthropology in his descriptions of life among the Bullom, and his accounts are therefore of considerable value.

Figure 1. Nylander’s Representation of a “Kolloh Devil.” Source: CMS Archives, CA1/E5/12A, Nylander to Pratt, Yongroo Pomoh, 19 July 1815.

Nylander also offers extensive information on witchcraft and judicial trials involving accusations of witchcraft, which are of importance to anthropologists and historians alike. ^{Footnote 88} His settlement and his work there by himself may well reflect his comparative isolation from the other missionaries due to sociolinguistic or cultural origins and identity, and once again underpins the purpose of this present study, given the wealth of data he provides.

- Charles Frederic Christian Wenzel

Like Hartwig and Nylander, Charles Frederic Christian Wenzel was a linguist more than anything else. He arrived in 1809 in the colony, around thirty-six years old. He was at the Berlin Seminary as the other missionaries had been and studied English in England for two years. He took Lutheran Orders in 1809 and once Nylander’s health had recovered enough to permit Wenzel and his wife to leave Freetown worked for the early period of his time in Sierra Leone primarily in Kakara, Canofee, and Fantimania along the Rio Pongo. In 1816 Wenzel was sent to Kissy, as the situation along the Rio Pongo was becoming increasingly tense due to efforts to stem the slave trade. Two years later on 1 August 1818 he died there at the age of forty-four. Wenzel’s first wife had died in Africa in 1811, and in 1813 he married an African woman named Beverith. He was the first missionary to marry an African, and she survived him. ^{Footnote 89} During his time in Sierra Leone, Wenzel created a Compiled Susu Dictionary. ^{Footnote 90}

Wenzel is recorded by the CMS as being “Of Breslau, Silesia.” Breslau is known today as Wrocław in Poland but was then the capital of Middle Silesia, which had been conquered by Prussia in the 1740’s. Prussia used the excuse of the dynastic legitimacy of Empress Maria Theresa to launch the War of Austrian Succession, and the town was taken without a struggle in 1741. Three major wars were fought between Austria and Prussia over Silesia during the eighteenth century, and arguably Prussia’s success in taking and holding that important region shaped its later ambitions. In language as well as in faith Breslau’s Germanic roots are clear even in its nineteenth-century name. Silesian German is now a nearly extinct dialect but flourished prior to the imposition of New High German in the 1860’s. Wenzel therefore would have spoken a vernacular shaped by very different roots than those of his Swabian German-speaking fellows. Influenced by Slavic language groups, German was spoken as the language of government, higher culture, and innovation, as Hannan’s study of identity and language for the region notes:

With influences from Prussia, Poland, Germany, Moravia, and Russia among others, the idea of Silesian cultural identity shifted depending upon political alliances and conflicts. Then as now cultural identity was shaped by religion and language for Silesians, with Silesian speakers drawing upon both Western Slavonic as well as German linguistic elements.

Unlike those of Nylander, Wenzel’s letters back to London are in clear English, suggesting that he had less difficulty with and was much more confident in the language in which he was expected to preach. Wenzel initially stayed with Nylander for six weeks after his arrival due to his wife’s illness, and, as Nylander too was unwell, Wenzel took over many of his duties within the colony. Eventually able to depart, the Wenzels took ship from Freetown to the new settlement on the Rio Pongo, a voyage which took five days during which Barneth and the Wenzels were extremely ill. They met Butscher on the way and were all met by Renner in a canoe near the settlement. Wenzel immediately began helping with thirty-three of the children, and labored to translate more Susu in order to assist Wilhelm and Klein upon their anticipated arrival at the mission. ^{Footnote 92}

The perspectives offered by the Kleins suggest that Wenzel was friendly to them on their arrival at Bashia, and they reported to London how studious the children under him were, enthusing that many of them might themselves become schoolmasters in turn. By October 1812 the buildings downriver from Bashia at Canofee/Kakara were finally completed and Wenzel moved there at last with Barneth, but Barneth died before very long. From 1812’s completion of Canofee until his removal to Kissy, Wenzel’s priorities were clearly much as they had always been – translation of Susu, evangelizing and teaching his pupils, in that order. He was the first of the German-speaking missionaries to send no letters home worrying about Europe or his family there, suggesting that unlike Renner, Butscher, and Nylander, Wenzel was able to embed himself successfully in his adopted country, despite the loss of his English-born wife and despite the personal hardships he faced. His proficiency in English assured he was comfortable teaching in that language as instructed, suggesting that his dual legacy, to both students and mission, was his dictionary and the preparation from which his students benefitted. His accounts are primarily of importance concerning the continuing mission to acculturate freed Africans within the colony itself. He also provided chilling narratives of starvation and illness among those placed in Kissy town shortly before his own death from disease in 1818:

Wenzel gives the numbers of recaptives as well as conditions on the ground in a way that is of considerable use to historians of the colony. His work demonstrates the challenges faced by those whose trajectories out of enslavement into the colony were clearly not at all simple.

The CMS Effect

The mission in Sierra Leone was one of the earliest major missions to Africa, the other situated in what is today South Africa. In large part because of the inter-relationship of colonial authorities, missionaries, CMS authorities, and the Vice Admiralty Court in Freetown, those first missionaries had a profound impact, but a complex one. After the retrenchment of the CMS schools and its missionaries into Freetown itself in 1816, the CMS was granted full control over the education of the steadily increasing recaptive population. From among those formerly enslaved individuals arose such religious luminaries as Samuel Ajayi Crowther, whose experience with the CMS has been characterized by historians like Gibril R. Cole as betrayal and exploitation. ^{Footnote 94} Cole recognized the inherent paradox of the evangelical Anglican Society expecting Lutherans and German-speakers to serve as the primary forces of acculturation in early Sierra Leone. ^{Footnote 95} Peel’s analysis of the missionary endeavor in nineteenth century West Africa hinges upon his recognition of the paradox inherent in the missions themselves. Peel argues that by their very nature missionaries and their work grew apart from the colonial and European origins which fostered them. In his examination of the CMS within Yorubaland in the middle of the nineteenth century, Peel pays particular attention to the complexity of the missionary agenda and its intentions, and emphasizes the role of CMS-educated Yoruba like Crowther as agents of conversion. ^{Footnote 96} The spread of Christianity in West Africa was shaped to a considerable degree by the actions and effects of these earliest missionaries and their decisions, especially concerning education in Sierra Leone. The prominence of Sierra Leone as the “Athens of West Africa” developed in part because of the early establishment there of schools along the Rio Pongo which educated the children of former slaves alongside slave traders’ children, children of the elites, and children who had themselves been slaves. ^{Footnote 97} That unique situation produced an educated elite who valued education as a cultural currency and who presented a western centre of education in West Africa to which elites could send their children.

Conclusion: The Legacy of the Missionaries

Accounts written by missionaries can be of considerable importance in shedding light upon the often turbulent regional situations in early colonial Africa. But to interpret their accounts without considering their authors is to approach the evidence without due regard for inherent bias and cultural differences. The turbulent experiences of the missionaries, their students, and the continuing tensions within the colony served to shape its later social dynamic. As a result of their work in Sierra Leone overseeing classrooms comprising a truly unique blend of pupils, these men personally shaped the men and women who became a new West African elite. That they were not British natives but were working on behalf of a British missionary society is important for our understanding of their contributions to the region.

As teachers and mentors the missionaries of early Sierra Leone changed the lives of their students – sometimes for the better, sometimes not – and in turn those same students went on to establish more schools, promulgating the values which they learned from Renner, Butscher, Hartwig, Klein, Nylander, Wilhelm, and Wenzel. The missionaries personally intervened in cases of enslaved children, redeeming pupils who subsequently ended up sitting alongside the children of local elites in the classrooms. None of the missionaries reached what might conventionally be considered old age, in part because the homelands which they had each left were in the process of being forever altered by the turmoil which raged in central Europe and had probably caused their departure. The biographical sketches outlined here are a first effort to restore them to scholarly consideration, and to offer another dimension to current research into the earliest period of colonial Sierra Leone as reported in the journals and letters of these CMS missionaries. It is to be hoped that subsequent research will be well served by analysis of these important and insufficiently studied figures with the emphasis on their respective sociolinguistic and cultural backgrounds. Approaching evidence and documentation from the CMS knowing that the authors were most certainly not British, and that furthermore they were just as much not “German” is a consideration and indeed a corrective which is central to this article’s contribution to the field.