Historedia
AfricaEvent

Andreas Riis's West Indian missionaries arrive on the Gold Coast

When
1842–1843
Where
West Indies; Christiansborg, Osu, Accra
Episodes
2

Andreas Riis, a Danish minister and Basel missionary, recruited 24 West Indian Moravians from Jamaica and Antigua to aid mission work on the Gold Coast. The group arrived at Christiansborg in April 1843 to establish schools and churches, marking a significant expansion of the Basel Mission's educational and religious efforts in colonial Ghana.

Episodes

  1. 1842-1843 · West IndiesWest Indian Recruitment

    Riis and colleagues traveled to Antigua and Jamaica to recruit black Christians for the Gold Coast mission, addressing labor shortages.

  2. 16 April 1843 · Christiansborg, Osu, AccraArrival at Christiansborg

    The group of 24 West Indian Moravians arrived at Christiansborg on 16 April 1843 after a difficult sea voyage.

Background and detail

Background. Andreas Riis, a Danish minister and pioneer missionary, is regarded as the founder of the Gold Coast branch of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society. He had been a resident of the Gold Coast since 1832. His work focused on formal education, agriculture, and the propagation of the Gospel, which necessitated additional manpower to overcome high mortality rates among European missionaries.

Recruitment. In 1842, the Basel Mission's Home Committee selected Riis, along with colleagues Johan Georg Widmann, Hermann Halleur, and George Peter Thompson, to travel to the West Indies. They departed Basel for Antigua via Liverpool to select black Christian recruits, specifically targeting the Moravian communities in Jamaica and Antigua.

Arrival. The recruited group, consisting of 24 Jamaicans and one Antiguan, sailed from Kingston on 8 February 1843. After a sixty-eight-day voyage marked by storms and heat, they arrived at Christiansborg, Gold Coast, on Easter Sunday, 16 April 1843, to support the mission's educational and religious infrastructure.

People involved

Sources

  1. Andreas Riis Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-05

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.