Alexander Worthy Clerk (4 March 1820 – 11 February 1906) was a Jamaican Moravian pioneer missionary, teacher and clergyman who arrived in 1843 in the Danish Protectorate of Christiansborg, now Osu in Accra, Ghana, then known as the Gold Coast. He was part of the first group of 24 West Indian missionaries from Jamaica and Antigua who worked under the aegis of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society of Switzerland. Caribbean missionary activity in Africa fit into the broader "Atlantic Missionary Movement" of the diaspora between the 1780s and the 1920s. Shortly after his arrival in Ghana, the mission appointed Clerk as the first Deacon of the Christ Presbyterian Church, Akropong, founded by the first Basel missionary survivor on the Gold Coast, Andreas Riis in 1835, as the organisation's first Protestant church in the country. Alexander Clerk is widely acknowledged and regarded as one of the pioneers of the precursor to the Presbyterian Church of Ghana. As a leader in education in colonial Ghana, he designed curriculum and pedagogy, co-establishing with fellow educators, George Peter Thompson and Catherine Mulgrave, an all-male boarding middle school, the Salem School at Osu in 1843. In 1848, Clerk was an inaugural faculty member at the Basel Mission Seminary, Akropong, now known as the Presbyterian College of Education, where he was an instructor in Biblical studies. The Basel missionaries founded the Akropong seminary and normal school to train teacher-catechists in service of the mission. The college is the second oldest higher educational institution in early modern West Africa after Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone which was established in 1827. Clerk was the father of Nicholas Timothy Clerk (1862 – 1961), a Basel-trained theologian, who was elected the first Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast from 1918 to 1932 and co-founded the all boys' boarding high school, the Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School established in 1938. A. W. Clerk was also the progenitor of the historically important Clerk family from the suburb of Osu in Accra.
Early life and education
Alexander Worthy Clerk was born on 4 March 1820 on Fairfield Plantage near Spur Tree, Manchester Parish under British colonial rule. Little is known of Clerk's parentage and childhood other than his parents were Jamaican Christians. He was the third son among five brothers and four sisters. In 1833, when Alexander Clerk was about thirteen years old, the "apprenticeship act", granting immediate and full freedom to children six years of age and younger, and an intermediate status for those older, was enacted. Between 1838 and 1842, Clerk studied Christian theology, ministry, dogmatics and homiletics; philosophy and ethics; pedagogy and education at the now defunct Fairfield Teachers' Seminary (Lehrerseminar Fairfield), a teachers' training college and theological seminary, founded in 1837 by the Rev. Jacob Zorn (1803 – 1843), a German-speaking Danish subject and a superintendent of the Moravian Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands from 1834 until his death in 1843. Zorn was also a missionary of the London-based Missions of the Church of the United Brethren and its sister organisation, The Brethren's Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel. The Jamaican branch of the Moravian Church, which had its early beginnings in 1754, had by then been in the West Indies for nearly hundred years. The first Moravian missionaries in Jamaica were Zecharias Georg Caries, Thomas Shallcross and Gottlieb Haberecht, who evangelised to slaves on the Bogue Estate and later, to surrounding plantations. As part of his classical education, Clerk also studied languages: German, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The training institute was established by Zorn at the behest of the Moravian mission leadership to prepare young Jamaican men for Christian evangelism, catechism and the propagation of the Gospel in the West Indies after the abolishment of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 followed by the full emancipation of slaves in Jamaica on 1 August 1838, a little over a year after Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne. Zorn also envisioned sending graduates from his small missionary training school to evangelical mission in Africa. Clerk was also mentored by the Rev. J. Blandfield at the Moravian school. Clerk's education was funded by a wealthy Victorian Christian woman from Bath, Somerset, Mrs. P. Skeate (née Ibbett) . A. W. Clerk maintained correspondence with his English benefactor when he later worked on the Gold Coast as a teacher-missionary. Clerk was set to become a teacher-catechist and a missionary affiliated to the Fairfield Moravian Church mission presbytery or classis, (founded on 1 January 1826) after his graduation from the seminary and subsequent consecration as a missionary in 1842.
Missionary activities on the Gold Coast
Historical context
Early accounts indicate that the Moravian Church in Herrnhut in Saxony, Germany, recruited an inhabitant of the Gold Coast in 1735 and trained him in the arts and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. However, on his return to the Gold Coast, the man found out that he could barely speak his mother tongue. A series of European missions were embarked upon by these Protestant missionary bodies, including the Dutch Missionary Society, North German Missionary Society, Baptist Missionary Society and the Church Missionary Society. Some missionaries died within a few years, others within a few months. The Directors of the Danish Guinea Company invited Missions of the Church of the United Brethren, a missionary society of the Moravian Church to the Gold Coast, to teach at the castle and fort schools with five missionaries arriving at Christiansborg in 1768. The first two batches of eleven missionaries all died within a short period from tropical diseases such as malaria, blackwater fever, yellow fever and dysentery, having not fully acclimatised to the local environment. European missionaries who operated in the Caribbean, Latin America and Southeast Asia were also infected with dengue fever. A group of Christian Protestants from the Lutheran Moravians and other sister Reformed Churches in Germany and Switzerland founded the German Missionary Society in 1815 as "the result of a pledge taken by a few dedicated Christians at Basel in the face of a military threat." "If God would spare their city, they pledged to begin a seminary for the training of missionaries," the Christian believers asserted. The mission later changed its name to the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society, and finally the Basel Mission. This German Missionary Society had roots in the Deutsche Christentumgesellschaft, established in Basel in 1780 as a Bible reading fellowship that sought to disseminate Christian literature. They envisioned working with established missionary societies already operating in "unevangelized areas" in the world.
In 1825, the Governor of the Danish Protectorate, Christiansborg (Osu), Major Johan Christopher von Richelieu, upon the observation of the degradation of moral values of European residents living within and without the Danish fort, Christiansborg Castle, requested the Danish Crown, through the Rev. Bone Falck Rønne (1764–1833), founder and board chair of the Danish Missionary Society (established on 17 June 1821), who represented Basel Mission interests in Denmark, to arrange for missionaries from the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society in Switzerland to evangelize in the then Gold Coast colony. For a decade and half, the chaplain's station at the Christiansborg Castle had remained vacant. Richelieu acted as a chaplain and reinstated public Christian worship, set up a school where 150 pupils were baptised and educated. More hands were therefore needed for evangelism. In March 1827, four young men from rural Switzerland and southern Germany between the ages of 23 and 27 years were selected by the Basel Mission. They were: Karl F. Salbach (27 years), Gottlieb Holzwath (26 years), Johannes Henke (23 years) and the Swiss-born Johannes Gottlieb Schmidt (24 years). They were skilled tradesmen with practical training experience in pottery, carpentry, shoe-making, masonry, joinery, hat-making and black-smithing.
In Christiansborg, Accra, they also started the Basel Mission Trading Factory to export palm oil and other local products to fund the mission work and also set up an artisan workshop to train local entrepreneurs in advanced methods of tradesmanship in order to serve their communities on the Gold Coast and in West Africa, which in the view of the Basel committee, was a way of atoning for the horror and devastating effects of the slave trade brought on by European colonialism. According to church history, their priorities were "to become acclimatised, to take time over the selection of a permanent site for the mission, to master the local language at all costs, to begin actual mission activity by founding a school, and lastly to present the Gospel with love and patience...to show to the people an inexhaustible forbearance and an excess of beneficent love, even though only a few of the thousand bleeding wounds may be healed which greed of gain and the cruel craftiness of the European have caused."
They arrived in Christiansborg on 18 December 1828 and had their first church service at a coastal hamlet called Amanfon, near Osu on 28 December 1828. All but Johannes Henke died within eight months of their arrival (August 1829) from malaria and other tropical diseases. Henke eventually died on 22 November 1831. On 21 March 1832, a second batch of three missionaries made up of the Rev. Andreas Riis, the Rev. Peter Peterson Jager and Dr. Christian Frederich Heinze, a physician arrived to continue the work. Five weeks after their arrival, the medical doctor who was supposed to take care of the health needs of the other two missionaries died of malaria on 26 April 1832. The Rev. P. P. Jager also died on 18 July 1832.
The Rev. Andreas Riis, a Danish minister was the only surviving missionary. After becoming ill from malaria fever, a native herbalist, introduced to Riis by his Euro-African trader friend and a friend of the mission, George Lutterodt, treated him with lemon, soap, a cold bath and naturally occurring quinine in tree bark. After his recovery, Lutterodt advised Riis to move to the hilly countryside in Akropong – Akuapem where the climate is much cooler and had a more conducive environment.
In January 1835, Riis and his friend were warmly received by the then Omanhene of Akuapem, Nana Addo Dankwa I. They finally moved and settled at Akropong on 26 March 1835. Osiadan, meaning "builder in the Akan language, is what Riis was affectionately called, because he had built his house made of stones and timber. He ate local foods and spoke Akuapem Twi just like the people of Akropong. Riis lived like the locals at the time, residing in the forested hinterlands, using palm branches as sleeping mats and eating regional delicacies like peppersoup, snails and wormfish by some accounts.
After settling for a year and with the approval of the Home Committee of the Basel Mission, Riis arranged to get a wife called Anna Margaretha Wolters, a twenty year old Danish lady. Among those who came with her were Andreas Stranger and Johannes Murdter. Stranger died on Christmas Eve in 1837 and Riis' own infant died at the close of 1838. Riis had become the symbol of hope for the evangelical revival in the missionary work.