Abstract
This chapter examines the ideological and social context in which the Basel Mission emerged and scrutinises the changing meaning of Pietist purity over the nineteenth century. The Basel Mission drew upon the support of wealthy and powerful patrician families from Basel and far-flung Pietist networks across Europe and beyond. However, it swiftly transformed into a grassroots movement, funded by small donations from a large number of people in urban and rural areas of Switzerland and Germany. The Basel Mission’s evangelising efforts abroad were linked to charitable activities at home, which tackled the ostensible problem of de-Christianisation within Europe and fundamentally depended on voluntary work, especially by women and children. Although healing had been part of Pietism ever since the movement gained momentum, most adherents had reservations about the morality and efficacy of scientific medicine, discernible in their preference for healing and deliverance theology. The Basel missionaries’ prolonged experience of death and illness in West Africa, however, allowed for the reformulation of Pietist concepts of purity and healing through the integration of scientific theories of disease and hygiene.
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Keywords
- Pietism
- Evangelical awakening
- Social question
- Healing and deliverance theology
- Grassroots movement
- Home mission
- Supporters
1 Pietists, Patricians and the Social Question in Basel
The religious space of knowledge, in which the Basel Mission doctors were socialised, was rooted in the tradition of Pietism, which, alongside Anglo-American puritanism, formed the most significant Protestant revival since the Reformation. Pietists believed in the necessity of a spiritual rebirth and intense Bible-study as well as bodily asceticism and discipline. They strongly supported education and literacy, and focused on the individual’s emotional connection with God. At the same time, Pietism brought people together in circles that not only became places of mutual edification but also initiated social change. Founded in the wake of the so-called Erweckung—the early nineteenth-century evangelical awakening on the European continent—the Basel Mission drew upon the support of wealthy and powerful bourgeois families from Basel and far-flung Pietist networks reaching across Europe and beyond.Footnote 1
1.1 Wurttemberg Pietism
Pietism was a significant religious movement within Protestantism that emerged at the end of the seventeenth century and reached full blossom in the eighteenth century. Pietists called for an end to denominational strife and promoted a practical form of Christianity marked by personal piety, programmes for social betterment and efforts to spread Christ’s Kingdom on earth. Originating in present-day Germany, Pietism had a lasting impact on Protestantism worldwide, particularly in Europe and North America. Far from being a homogenous movement however, Pietism changed considerably over time and adopted different forms according to regional, structural and political conditions.Footnote 2 The version of Pietism that was most influential in Basel and the Alemannic-speaking areas of Germany and Switzerland around 1800 is called “Wurttemberg Pietism,” after the region where it originated.Footnote 3
Wurttemberg was a Duchy in southwest Germany until it was enlarged and raised to the status of a Kingdom in a loose German Confederation during the Napoleonic period. Pietists often found themselves at the heart of controversies with governments whose authority they challenged. Therefore, they constantly had to look for places where they could practise their faith without persecution. In 1743, the Government of Wurttemberg passed the “Pietist Rescript,” a law which guaranteed Pietists freedom from persecution if they stayed within certain limits. The Pietist population subsequently grew in Wurttemberg and became very influential in the life of the Protestant community there. In 1871, Wurttemberg joined the new and more strongly unified German Empire, headed by the Kaiser and King of Prussia Otto von Bismarck.Footnote 4
The city of Basel became a focal point of Wurttemberg Pietism and the subsequent transnational missionary movement that arose from the religious revival in both European and American churches in the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 5 The main focus of this renewal lay in the creation of a more practical and active approach to Christianity, including evangelising and welfare work both abroad and at home.Footnote 6 Pietists felt that the epochal political conflicts following the French Revolution and the subsequent economic and social transformations had led to the disintegration of traditional communities. They interpreted these changes as signs of de-Christianisation and thus the approaching end of the world, the second coming of Christ and the imminent establishment of the Kingdom of God. This perception energised the missionary movement, which promised to expand God’s Kingdom by human effort.Footnote 7
Although the connections between Pietism and the nineteenth-century evangelical awakening within German-speaking Protestantism are discussed controversially in research, most historians agree that they shared a focus on personal belief and subjective religious experience.Footnote 8 The Erweckung transformed Christian mission from being a concern of rulers and church leaders to an initiative to be supported and upheld by every committed Christian. Born-again laypeople, many of them women, became agents of their own spirituality, meeting in non-church settings to pray, read and discuss the Bible, and to encourage each another in their faith. Tract and missionary societies emerged, which had no organic connection with a specific church and set out to enlist backing from congregations elsewhere, regardless of territorial church jurisdictions.Footnote 9
Inspired by English writers of religious tracts, a group of Protestants from Basel’s surrounding area adopted the renewed interest in the Bible and the missionary cause.Footnote 10 The indifference of Pietism towards confessional tenets facilitated coalitions between different denominations and allowed for Swabian Lutherans and Swiss Calvinists to take Christian action together. In 1780, they founded the “German Society for the Promotion of Pure Instruction and True Piety” in Basel, commonly referred to as the Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft—German Society for Christianity. The Bible study and discussion group brought together prominent clergymen, politicians, business owners and theologians from the Alemannic region, who identified themselves with the Pietist movement and wanted to establish visible, outward expression of their religious beliefs.Footnote 11
The society’s primary objectives were to build networks with other evangelical groups across Europe and to disseminate Christian literature. From about 1800, the Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft started publishing German translations of reports, tracts and other publications produced by the burgeoning British missionary societies, such as the Baptist Missionary Society. Due to the increasingly strong missionary element in their thinking, members of the Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft initiated a seminary for the education of overseas evangelists in Basel in 1815.Footnote 12
1.2 The Basel Patricians
The inception of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society in 1815 drew on long-standing religious, commercial and political networks rooted in the city on the Rhine. Located in the heartland of an interregional triangle between Switzerland, Alsace and the Kingdom of Wurttemberg, Basel was home to one of the few ancient bridges across the Rhine, which made it an economic hub long before its industries had fully matured. The ruling elite, the patricians, not only fostered important trade ties across Europe but also paid special attention to religious issues.Footnote 13 They organised their own Reformation in 1529 and displayed particular sympathy for revivalist movements such as Pietism and the evangelical awakening over the next centuries. These Protestant merchants and manufacturers, who dominated politics in the city-state well into twentieth century, provided the necessary financial, organisational and political support for the establishment of a mission society in Basel.Footnote 14
From the late seventeenth century, the patricians occupied most political offices and regularly sent representatives from their ranks to the so-called Tagsatzung—the Federal Diet of Switzerland.Footnote 15 Growing religious and political conflicts between liberal and conservative forces dominated Swiss society from the late eighteenth century, as was the case across Europe. The end of the Old Confederacy began with the invasion of Napoleon’s troops in Basel in 1798. The cantons subsequently experienced a temporary loss of their independence and the Napoleonic wars threatened more than once to engulf the city on the Rhine.Footnote 16
Basel, the largest and wealthiest town in German-speaking Switzerland at this time, had become a byword for political conservatism by the 1830s. Alone among the major Protestant cantons, it withstood the Revolution of 1830 and resisted the liberalisation of the Ratsherrenregiment—the rule of the merchant elite. Increasing tensions between the relatively disenfranchised countryside surrounding Basel and the urban elite led to a short civil war and the separation of the territory into two new half-cantons in 1833, Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft. The patricians subsequently had to concede their territory south of the city, where their silk ribbon factories and summer residences stood. The split of the canton of Basel also meant that the patricians lost considerable influence in the Confederacy and steadily alienated themselves from federal matters.Footnote 17
The liberal forces dominating the majority of the other cantons had supported the insurgency against the conservative elite in Basel. The city’s wealth and independence, together with its orientation to the outside world, had long made it an object of envy and resentment among the other cantons. On the other side, most voices in the city of Basel opposed liberal centralisation plans, such as the proposed transformation of Switzerland from a Staatenbund, a confederation of states, into a Bundesstaat, a federal state. Basel remained loyal to the Confederation during the civil war of 1847 but there were many patricians who sympathised with the conservative cause of maximum cantonal independence. The Bundesverfassung—Federal Constitution—of 1848 was passed in Basel in a similar grudging spirit with many Ratsherren simply not voting.Footnote 18
The foundation of the Swiss Federal State in 1848 led to the implementation of political reforms. The new Federal Constitution was based on the democratic participation of all men, yet without fundamentally affecting the sovereignty of the cantons. Basel thus remained a city-state ruled by Patrician councilmen, who held exclusive decision-making authority over municipal and religious matters, despite the development of a more democratic Swiss Federal State. They dominated the economic life of the region, controlled the government of the canton and held leading positions in the local churches.Footnote 19
Religion and politics were closely linked in the city on the Rhine. Most Basel patricians were devout Protestants who believed in liberal trade and business but supported conservative values and policies. This combination of worldly activism, energetic pursuit of trade and profit, devotion to political conservatism and the religious piety that dominated the city gave observers the impression of an oppressively pious, duplicitous society.Footnote 20 For a long time, patrician families could be certain of their influence in both the political and religious domain. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did religious as well as political liberalism gain momentum. A new church constitution was passed in 1874 guaranteeing the Protestant cantonal church more independence from the city-state, and 1875 saw the adoption of a liberal cantonal constitution based on the model of other cantons.Footnote 21
For many patricians, while the cantonal separation of 1833 had been a life changing and humiliating experience, it had also served as a wake-up call to redefine their place in the world. Many of them subsequently turned towards evangelicalism.Footnote 22 The Basel Mission’s leadership consisted of a self-perpetuating circle of men, called the Committee, that usually had about twelve members, mostly academics, politicians, jurists, merchants, bankers and manufacturers originating from patrician families.Footnote 23 While they prevailed numerically, representatives of the Pietist theological elite of Wurttemberg, especially from Tubingen University, also held key policymaking positions. The Inspector, for example, who was in charge of daily administration, was usually a German theologian.Footnote 24
By 1821, the Committee members had decided to establish their own mission stations abroad and subsequently tried to take root in Russia, China, India and Africa, most notably on the Gold Coast in 1828 and in Cameroon in 1885. Officially, this move assured that the distinctive Pietist worldview was brought to regions that were still labouring in “unchristian darkness,” as the Committee expounded.Footnote 25 Most Committee members, however, also had strong economic incentives in expanding their sphere of influence overseas. Some of Basel’s most prominent merchants sat on the Basel Mission’s board of directors and on the mission’s trade commission. The Basel Mission’s trade commission gave rise to the Basel Mission Trading Company, founded in 1859. The corporation, which remained under direct Basel Mission management until 1917, supplied mission stations in West Africa and South India with European goods and traded cacao, palm oil, rubber and cotton on a global scale.Footnote 26
The Basel Mission was materialised, and their leadership provided, by the representatives of a visible and stable religious, political and economic elite. The Basel Mission Trading Company was created to provide a Christian commercial alternative to colonial traders, who, the Committee members argued, often exploited and corrupted the people in their sphere of influence. Basel Mission traders were the first to ship cacao from the Gold Coast overseas in 1893, turning the British colony into the world’s largest cocoa exporter over the next few years. The success of the trading company was much welcomed by its shareholders, mostly Basel patricians, who received six per cent of revenue as a dividend. By 1914, the number of traders trained at the mission seminary in Basel exceeded that of common missionaries in West Africa.Footnote 27 This illustrates the converging interests between worldwide evangelicalism and trade.
The Basel patricians benefitted from the rise of industrial modes of production, the establishment of large-scale factories and the expansion of the world economy. The new mechanical engineering, metal and chemical industries created an increasing demand for labour while the old silk industry survived the industrial transition by sourcing raw materials overseas and establishing a significant export market in the United States. At the same time, these fundamental economic transformations also triggered serious social consequences. In the “old city of faith,” as contemporaries referred to Basel, the radical economic changes and social upheavals were feared to diminish the influence of Pietism Basel’s ruling elite responded to these challenges by building an extensive welfare network. Voluntary service and honorary work were the driving forces of this system, which was built on the tenets of Christian charity.Footnote 28
1.3 The Social Question
In a global trading town like Basel, industrial paternalism and private charity were believed to be the best options for alleviating the social question. Significantly, it was a private society, the Freiwillige Armenpflege—Voluntary Poor Relief—that coordinated welfare work in Basel without any state supervision until 1897. This approach found its earliest and strongest expression in the Gesellschaft zur Aufmunterung und Beförderung des Guten und Gemeinnützigen (GGG)—Society for the Encouragement and Promotion of Works of Public Benefit and Utility—founded in 1777. Initiated by the philosopher, historian and educator Isaak Iselin, and supported by a large number of conservative merchant families, this society brought together humanitarian and Pietist circles to address socio-political issues, such as poor relief and education policy.Footnote 29
Trade and industry flourished rapidly in Basel over the nineteenth century, as a result of the improvement of Rhine navigation in the 1820s, the arrival of the railways in 1845 and the expansion of global markets.Footnote 30 The population of 22,000 inhabitants in the 1830s had almost doubled by 1860 and by 1900 Basel was the second Swiss city after Zurich to count over 100,000 inhabitants. Child labour, long working hours and an overall underpaid and undernourished working class were part of the cityscape. The majority of Basel’s inhabitants were neither wealthy nor clean and healthy at this time. Overcrowded and unsanitary housing facilities, together with an insufficient sewer system and poor water supply, resulted in frequent typhus and cholera epidemics.Footnote 31 For the Basel patricians, the greatest threat to the social order, to a compliant, well-regulated labour force, and to their own ascendancy, was a population living in poverty.
The GGG formed a commission to investigate the conditions of factory workers in the early 1840s and subsequently introduced a broad range of measures to address these hygienic and social shortcomings.Footnote 32 These included the foundation of retail cooperatives, the promotion of health insurance and assistance funds as well as the construction of social housing estates and public bath and laundry facilities from the 1860s. Educational programmes directed at the working class such as reading circles, choir societies and gymnastic clubs complemented these practical measures.Footnote 33 The ever-increasing misery, however, radically contradicted the idea that private philanthropy and Christian charity would put an end to the social question. The social precariousness of the growing population triggered upheavals, waves of strikes and demands for political reforms throughout Europe in the 1860s and 1870s.
The Basel patricians used their welfare system based on private donations as a political instrument to argue against the need for the state to intervene in welfare work, opposing the legal right to state care. In light of ever-stronger working-class and democratic movements, however, they conceded limited state regulations to improve the conditions of factory workers, thereby hoping to increase social stability and protect their dominant position. In the wake of industrial regulations implemented by the governments in the cantons of Glarus and Zurich, they too introduced factory laws in November of 1869 and supported the implementation of the Swiss Factory Act eight years later.Footnote 34
Nevertheless, public welfare in Basel still crucially depended on the benevolence of the conservative elite. According to a survey prompted by the first social democrat in the cantonal Parliament, Eugen Wullschleger, Basel housed over one hundred societies and institutions dedicated to poverty relief and health care in 1903.Footnote 35 Forty-eight were run privately, eighteen belonged to the GGG, sixteen to the reformed church, fourteen were state-owned facilities and six belonged to the so-called Bürgergemeinde—civil community. The Basel patricians, who dominated the Bürgergemeinde, the reformed church, the GGG and the majority of the private societies, controlled more than four-fifths of these organisations. Their financial contributions also amounted to four-fifths of the total funds employed for poverty alleviation, a total of 4.2 million Swiss francs in 1903.Footnote 36
The patricians’ charitable commitment highlights that the civilising offensive both abroad and at home was not only about the poor and their needs but the rich and their motives. By calling on the fundamental Christian pillar of charity and emphasising the moral importance of honorary work, Basel’s ruling class succeeded for many years to hold their position against democratic, radical and liberal forces. Evidently, their conservative social policy fundamentally depended on unpaid work carried out by people from less fortunate backgrounds. A myriad of community workers, deaconesses, pastors, city missionaries, fundraisers and members of voluntary societies, charitable organisations and women’s associations performed non-remunerated community service on a daily basis and thus implemented the patricians’ welfare system.
1.4 The Basel City Mission
Basel’s conservative leaders assessed the social question from a moral viewpoint and considered sin, filth and impurity to be at the root of human misery.Footnote 37 Like other protagonists of the Protestant religious revival, they identified two main causes for the social problems of the time: a religious decline, on the one hand, and the erosion of family life in the lower classes, on the other, both of which they sought to counteract by charity.Footnote 38 Therefore, their answer to the social question consisted in a reinvigoration of faith and family values, in contrast to the revolutionaries of 1848–1849. Crucially, the majority of the charitable societies they supported thus not only promised material but also moral improvement. Bible circles, Sunday schools, youth associations, orphanages, nurseries and sewing workshops addressed the social question by seeking to (re-) Christianise the growing population.Footnote 39
The clearest manifestation of the coupling of welfare with evangelising work was the establishment of the Evangelical Society for City Mission in Basel in 1859.Footnote 40 The Basel City Mission was but one manifestation of a pan-European movement that mushroomed in the mid-nineteenth century. Emanating from Glasgow and London, the idea of a home mission had reached Hamburg in 1848, where Johann Hinrich Wichern established the first German city mission.Footnote 41 The Innere Mission, as the movement was known in Germany, sought to reinvigorate Christian faith among European societies by the spread of “brotherly love,” which included charitable work and education. During a stay at a health resort in Baden-Baden in the summer of 1857, an “eager” member of the Hamburg City Mission convinced the Basel merchant Emanuel Herzog to establish a city mission in Basel.Footnote 42
Herzog rallied a group of laypeople and pastors who like him perceived political and religious liberalism as well as rapid urban changes to be a threat to their hometown. The founders of the Basel City Mission classified the social changes brought about by industrialism, urbanisation and liberalism as pathologies—“cancer,” “freedom dizziness,” “pleasure and indulgence addiction”—and believed that proclaiming the gospel was the only way of healing these “diseases” of the time. The president of the Basel City Mission Albert Ostertag expounded in his annual account for 1868: “Only the gospel, the gospel alone, is capable of solving the important social question—everything else, as well-intentioned as it might be, leaves the heart unimproved and thus exposed to all influences.”Footnote 43
Basel had seen an upsurge in immigration since 1848, particularly from other regions in Switzerland, southern Germany, Alsace and Italy.Footnote 44 This led to a rapid growth of workers’ districts and the demolition of the old town walls. By 1860, one-fourth of the city’s population were Catholics.Footnote 45 The City Mission’s declared goal was to religiously assimilate these immigrants into the Protestant population of the city.Footnote 46 The activities they pursued included systematic house visits, the distribution of the Bible and other religious tracts, public preaching, community care and practical support for people in need.Footnote 47 Pietists believed that their charitable involvement would exemplify the benefits of Christianity to people who, in their eyes, led profane lives. However, just as importantly, social deeds were essential for the salvation of Pietists themselves.Footnote 48
The evangelising efforts abroad, which clearly predated the home mission movement, alerted many evangelicals to the perceived problem of de-Christianisation in Europe. They started to feel the need to promulgate a proper sense of morality, decency and hygiene among the people in their vicinity. The stories of successful missions in Africa served as an example and justification for the civilising mission of workers’ districts in European cities. Historians have demonstrated the discursive and organisational connections between home and foreign missions in the British and German contexts, where metropolitan lower classes were perceived as the heathens of Europe.Footnote 49 It is instructive to view the welfare system in Basel and the missionary activities abroad in the same analytical framework, since they were both genuine acts of Pietism. Most people involved with the Basel Mission participated directly or held strong personal and financial ties with Christian charities at home, most prominently the Basel City MissionCity mission.Footnote 50
2 The Web of Mission
Mission societies held key positions in the increasing interdependence of the world, creating durable entanglements between people and places near and far. In Europe, the nineteenth century saw the rise of an evangelical grassroots movement that was made up of countless missionaries, itinerant preachers, donors and members of support groups, among them a surprising number of women and children. Devotion to the evangelising cause brought people together across the divide of social, gender, confessional and regional differences. While Pietism relied on politically influential personalities, most supporters of the Basel Mission came from politically and socially less influential strata. Evangelicalism was a socially broad-based, globally designed project, carried out in manifold ways in different parts of the world. This web of mission facilitated the worldwide exchange of ideas, images and objects.
2.1 Worldwide Webs
The Basel Mission was never an organisation of merely one denomination or church. From the beginning, it drew support from the more Reformed tradition of the Swiss Protestant churches and the Lutheran tradition of many South German Protestant churches, like the one in Wurttemberg. The founders of the mission seminary in Basel invoked the scriptural injunction to go into the world and share the gospel of Jesus Christ. The global ambitions of awakened evangelicals fuelled the emergence of an informal spiritual realm, a network of formal bodies that connected believers across increasingly distinct national boundaries. This cooperation was facilitated by a shared vision about the oncoming Kingdom of God, which devout Christians considered to be their true homeland.Footnote 51
Support associations for the Basel Mission thrived across Switzerland and Germany over the nineteenth century, some of which evolved into independent mission societies. They included the Berlin Mission founded in 1824, the Rheinische Mission created in 1828 and the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft established in 1836. These organisations remained in close contact with Basel and contributed to the good connections of the mission society in Germany.Footnote 52 The men in charge in Basel also maintained close relations with the Mission de Paris and British missionary circles. More than one hundred missionaries from the Anglican Church Missionary Society received their training in the seminary in Basel between 1819 and 1858; among them a future consecrated Bishop of Jerusalem.Footnote 53
Building on their Pietist origins, the Basel Mission was firmly established in evangelical networks. The Inspector—the mission’s director—and the Committee members regularly corresponded with colleagues in other countries, mutually published articles in their respective mission magazines and met at international mission conferences. Evangelical culture and theology were always multifaceted and from the early twentieth century onwards were becoming ever more so as interdenominational connections and cooperation rapidly increased. The first World Mission Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, at which the International Mission Council was created, included an important Basel Mission delegation with a significant number of missionaries on furlough.Footnote 54
The Basel Mission’s global aspirations were also apparent in the way it conceptualised the diverse places in which it operated—in West Africa, Europe and Asia—as one conceptual space. The popular monthly magazine, Der Evangelische Heidenbote, blended stories, pictures and maps from these diverse regions on every page. The most tangible expression of this universalising agenda came in the architectural form of a world community under one roof, on display in the Basel Mission’s collection and touring exhibition. Models, mannequins and artefacts from all corners of the world were brought together and displayed next to each other. These items—held at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel today—served as material evidence for the mission’s global outreach. The back cover of the museum guide for what the Basel Mission advertised as an “Ethnographic Exhibition” in 1908 exemplifies how the visitors were directed to view the world as one, held together by the mission’s worldwide webs and the understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ as a universal message (Fig. 2.1).Footnote 55
Beyond and beneath this spiritual and symbolic dimension, the Basel Mission materialised their global ambitions by participating in the expanding commodity trade. The Basel Mission Trading Company exported European goods to their trading posts overseas, introduced weaving workshops in Cameroon, printing plants on the Gold Coast, tile and brick factories in India and participated in the worldwide cash crop trade with coffee and cacao from West Africa. A distinctive feature of the Basel Mission, one that was not shared by most other mission societies, was their emphasis on practical industries. By building farms, roads, houses, hospitals and churches, the Basel missionaries fundamentally changed the material environments in which they lived and interwove disparate regions of the world in their unifying endeavours. By aspiring to global significance, the Basel Mission naturally competed with other forces. This was true not only for the economic realm but also the religious space.
For all the commitment of missionaries to a common Christianity, the history of missions forcefully illustrates the volatility of global evangelicalism. Theological disagreements and the increasing enmity between Germany and Britain eventually broke the Basel Mission’s special relationship with the Church Missionary Society. Frictions also emerged with the creation of purely Lutheran missions in Northern Germany, such as the Leipzig Mission in 1836. Differing views on the appropriate interaction with colonial authorities, conflicting notions of ecclesiastical order and theological disputes about questions such as baptism and salvation demonstrate the existence of profound divisions within the Protestant missionary movement. Ambiguous relations, and at times serious conflicts, between rival mission societies were a perennial feature of evangelical expansion and multiplied in the manifold areas where missionaries operated.Footnote 56
In West Africa, the Basel missionaries always operated in a complex setting, obliged to deal with religious competitors, regional authorities, various colonial agencies and military bodies, European planters, African traders, their own trading company and the highly diversified population, who were sometimes helpful but just as often indifferent or actively hostile to their efforts. These groups had a decisive impact on the way missionary strategies and evangelical ideals were enacted on a daily basis.Footnote 57 While it is impossible to follow all of these trajectories in depth, they must be taken into account in order to even comprehend that missionary policy and knowledge was a product of negotiations on the ground. A transregional perspective redirects our attention to the fact that globalisation is a much more complex and contradictory process than is often assumed.Footnote 58
Notwithstanding the competitive nature of missionary endeavours, missionaries operated as brokers of knowledge in multiple directions between different physical localities as well as conceptual spaces that reached beyond religious frameworks.Footnote 59 The Basel Mission generated and circulated knowledge across the globe, increased transregional connectivity and promoted globalised concepts of belonging through their diverse media. The expansion in print culture, the movement of people and the rise of civil society broadened the evangelical public sphere, allowing for evangelicalism to become a genuine but unstable global community.Footnote 60 Since globality is very much a mediated experience, it is crucial to keep in mind that a whole string of people, some of them almost invisible, contributed to the laborious fashioning of global narratives.Footnote 61
2.2 Grassroots Movement
Soon after the founding of the Basel Mission in 1815, the Committee members decided to diversify the society’s financial basis beyond their own class. The strategy was to reach down the social strata to tap the zeal and steady generosity of ordinary believers by opening regional bureaus. These auxiliary societies, called Hilfsvereine, were to organise reading circles and propagate mission literature such as the Basel Mission’s official publications Der Evangelische Heidenbote and Evangelisches Missionsmagazin. They also took on sponsorships for mission contenders and collected money for their education at the seminary in Basel. Originating from the Wurttemberg area, these Hilfsvereine rapidly spread across the Swiss and German Confederations.Footnote 62
By the end of the nineteenth century, auxiliary societies for the Basel Mission had emerged in Baden, Alsace, Strasbourg, the Rhineland and every major Swiss town. These official societies, closely related to the headquarters in Basel, however, were only one type of organisation among many groups engaged in securing moral and financial support for the mission overseas. Numerous other less formal associations, clubs and societies existed next to the officially recognised support groups.Footnote 63 The term “Vereine”—associations—referred to subordinate auxiliaries of the Basel Mission as well as organisationally independent societies. Tens of thousands of devout Christians—many of them women—performed evangelical grassroots work by distributing missionary magazines, raising funds and organising mission services.Footnote 64
Donations by Basel’s economic elite and financial pledges by the London Missionary Society had guaranteed the Basel Mission’s early years but, as time went on, they did not continue to be the society’s principal source of financing. Of course, Committee members and their families sometimes contributed large sums to the Basel Mission. They backed the creation of an imposing mission house in Basel, which still serves as the society’s headquarters today, by funding the purchase of a plot of land and the erection of buildings. Other wealthy and well-placed individuals, who remained outside the immediate leadership group, often supported specific causes and activities, such as the establishment of mission stations in certain areas that were of interest to them. These donations, however, did not constitute a steady and diversified source of income, which is why the Committee members were desperately looking for an alternative.Footnote 65
For this purpose, Karl Sarasin, a silk manufacturer, member of the City Council, the GGG, the City Mission and the Basel Mission Committee, initiated the so-called Halbbatzen-Kollekte—halfpenny collection—in the early 1850s.Footnote 66 He started collecting five Swiss centimes—a halben Batzen—from his domestic staff and workers in his silk factories as a donation to the Basel Mission on a weekly basis.Footnote 67 Soon after Sarasin’s initiative, the Committee founded a specialised society for the Halbbatzen-Kollekte with district treasurers who supervised the collectors. In adopting this strategy, the Basel Mission followed earlier experiences by British missions, such as the Church Missionary Society in London. The halfpenny collection turned out to be a highly profitable financial tool: over 40,000 people donated a total of 68,583 Swiss francs in the first year in 1855.Footnote 68
The Halbbatzen-Kollekte rapidly expanded beyond the city of Basel into the Alemannic countryside and became one of the main financing sources for the Mission. By 1880, the annual revenue summed up to 268,271 Swiss francs and in 1905 it reached 450,000 Swiss francs, generating more than fourteen million Swiss francs in the first fifty years of its existence. The number of individual people donating to the halfpenny collection grew from around 75,000 in the 1860s to over 165,000 donors in 1905.Footnote 69 In 1913, it raised 602,021 Swiss francs, outperforming the revenue of the Basel Mission Trading Company by 60,000 Swiss francs, despite the concurrent cacao boom. It was so successful that the generated surpluses could be invested at interest and held in reserve against future needs.Footnote 70
More importantly, the Halbbatzen-Kollekte illustrates that the Basel Mission fostered social entanglements and emotional ties that reached beyond institutional networks. By contributing five centimes weekly, donors in Europe—among them many women and children from the lower strata of society—actively participated in the mission in West Africa. In return, they received the Kollekteblättli, a booklet that offered vivid depictions of missionary work abroad. They also witnessed the impact of their regular contributions by listening to itinerant preachers or missionaries on home leave, by watching a magic lantern show or by visiting a mission exhibition. The halfpenny collection “provided an opportunity for the poor to achieve great things by giving regular, small bounties,” as Wilhelm Schlatter phrased it in the official chronicle of the Basel Mission in 1916.Footnote 71
The Basel Mission, and indeed the nineteenth-century missionary movement more generally, enjoyed social approval and financial support across many levels of European societies.Footnote 72 Studies about the Wurttemberg region have shown that the Pietist movement did not claim a majority of the members of any class as adherents but actually appealed to individuals from all social backgrounds.Footnote 73 Despite securing support across society, the actual mode of participation in the Basel Mission by people from different classes was quite disparate. While the leadership consisted of members from privileged families, most missionaries carrying out the day-to-day work of evangelism came from modest backgrounds. The majority of the pupils, who entered the Basel Mission seminary, were craftsmen, peasants and tradesmen, and had no university training, in contrast to the bourgeois and academic Committee members. This social disparity was believed to strengthen the hierarchical discipline at the heart of the organisation.Footnote 74
Although the leaders and the rank and file of the Basel Mission occupied widely different positions in the social hierarchies of the time, they shared a common Pietist culture, in which mission was defined as a male enterprise, dominated by paternal authority at its core, with the expectation that male missionaries would duplicate that authority in the Christian communities they established abroad. Women were not included in seminary training and ordination, and those single women and wives who became involved in missionary work in West Africa were from a slightly higher social level than the ordinary male evangelists.Footnote 75 Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, women came to assume unprecedented importance for the Basel Mission and the missionary movement more broadly, as both protagonists and targets of evangelical missionary efforts.
2.3 Women and Children on a Mission
The Basel Mission held on to the ideal of the male celibate missionary until 1837, when it permitted employees to marry, yet continued to be reluctant towards female agency in the field. Despite the fact that piety and patriarchy remained interwoven principles in the governance of the Basel Mission, the attempts to preserve patriarchal domination were always limited by the material indispensability of women’s participation. The great majority of the people collecting the weekly contributions for the Halbbatzen-Kollekte were women and girls from modest backgrounds, whose commitment was acknowledged anonymously in the Basel Mission’s popular publications.Footnote 76 On the occasion of the 50th jubilee of the halfpenny collection, the editor of Der Evangelische Heidenbote wrote:
And who names them all, the diligent contributors and tens of thousands of faithful female collectors in the city and in the countryside, some of which toured tirelessly for decades, often in deep snow for hours, from farm to farm, in order to beamingly bring the collected contributions to the district treasurer! Poor girls, who often lacked basic necessities themselves, have thereby over the years scraped together hundreds of francs for the mission.Footnote 77
Women formed the backbone of the Basel Mission. The Committee considered collecting donations to be an intensely personal affair in which women’s maternal powers of persuasion over society’s weaker beings—children, other women, and especially the lower classes—were believed to stand them in good stead. Approximately 28 per cent of the Basel Mission’s yearly income was generated through the halfpenny collection throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 78 The fact that women’s involvement was largely confined to the more behind-the-scenes tasks, such as collecting subscriptions door-to-door or sewing goods for sale at missionary bazaars, has obscured just how important their financial and moral support was for the evangelical missionary movement.Footnote 79
Women had taken on an active role in the Pietist movement since the eighteenth century by organising and attending Erbauungsstunden—edification or devotional hours—and by participating in Bible societies and support groups for mission societies. The Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft, which gave birth to the Basel Mission, was an organisation of laypeople that was open to both men and women from the onset in 1780. While organised female voluntary work was a relatively recent phenomenon within Protestantism around 1800, Catholic female congregations had attended to the indigent and ill for centuries. Protestant activists, from the Napoleonic wars onwards, began to see them as a model to emulate, best exemplified by the resurgence of the deaconessate ministry model.Footnote 80
The German Lutheran pastor Theodor Fliedner, one of the leading figures of the nineteenth-century Protestant awakening, who was in contact with evangelicals throughout Europe, created the first Order and Institute of Deaconesses in Kaiserswerth, Prussia, in 1836, together with his wife Friederike. In the spirit of “motherhood as a profession,” the idea was to train single women in either nursing or education as a means of re-Christianising society. The Kaiserswerth deaconessate, however, did not remain an institution of the Innere Mission exclusively. From the 1840s, it started sending out single women overseas who could act with relatively little male interference. It was via the home mission, therefore, that evangelical women in German-speaking areas carved out a space for themselves in mission-related work. Over the second half of nineteenth century, more and more women actively and publicly participated in institutions of Christian charity, health care and mission.Footnote 81
The first women to get involved in the Basel Mission abroad were missionary wives who worked alongside their missionary husbands.Footnote 82 The Committee released a marriage statute in 1837, which stipulated that missionaries were allowed to request permission to marry once they had spent two years in their mission fields.Footnote 83 They could either suggest a suitable candidate themselves or ask the Committee to find a potential wife. Approximately 300 women married a Basel missionary overseas between 1837 and 1914.Footnote 84 Most of them did not know their future husbands personally—apart from a single photograph—when they left the European continent and embarked on the journey to join and marry them in India, China or West Africa.
Officially, missionary wives were helpers of their husbands. In reality, however, their tasks went far beyond that of a housewife and mother. They were deeply involved in the health care of the mission community, in itself a stressful and time-consuming activity. Furthermore, they directed the girls’ schools, taught home economics and handiwork classes, and visited women in surrounding villages, together with African Bible women, to introduce them to the gospel.Footnote 85 It was increasingly difficult for them to practically fulfil all of these duties. When their husbands became fully aware of their burden, they asked the leadership in Basel to send out single women to share their labour and, in particular, to focus on the education and religious instruction of African women.Footnote 86
Gender was central to the Basel Mission in West Africa, for women were believed to hold the key to opening heathen hearts to the civilising influence of Christian love.Footnote 87 Basel was the first Protestant mission society in continental Europe to explicitly engage in the project of a women’s mission in 1841, followed by Berlin a year later.Footnote 88 In contrast to the burgeoning British women’s missions, however, the Basel women’s mission proceeded at a very slow pace. For most of the nineteenth century, the leadership in Basel considered single female missionaries to be more of a challenge than a solution. Eventually, their number slowly increased from the 1880s, leading to the foundation of the Association for Women’s Mission—Verein für Frauenmission—in 1901.Footnote 89 The Committee for Women’s Mission consisted of ten female members, all related to male Committee members.Footnote 90
In the early twentieth century, 151 missionary wives and only 11 single women worked as teachers and nurses for the Basel Mission abroad.Footnote 91 Despite Basel’s early attempts to send out unmarried female missionaries, the Pietist family model ultimately formed the core of the civilising project. Considered to be the most important place of religious socialisation or “the true Church,” the Pietist family served as a role model located at the interface of private and public life, which ought to convey the ideal of Christian marriage and child-rearing practices to West African communities. The Basel missionaries argued that their own children contributed to the esteem and acceptance of the Basel Mission in Cameroon and on the Gold Coast, claiming that abundance of offspring was a major signal of social and cultural prestige in West Africa.Footnote 92
Children and youth were equally important for the mission community at home. By singing in missionary choirs, collecting offerings for the Kindermissionskollekte—children’s mission collection—and selling evangelical publications, they contributed significantly to the Basel Mission’s success.Footnote 93 While boys created handicrafts in all-male youth missionary associations, girls participated in so-called Jungfrauenvereine—maiden associations—and sewed goods for fundraising events. The Basel leadership placed great importance on anchoring the mission among the young generation. Missionaries on home leave and itinerant preachers regularly attended Sunday schools to give lectures, show images and demonstrate objects originating from Africa, since Sunday schools were believed to provide a convenient setting to capture children’s attention and curiosity.Footnote 94
2.4 Beyond the City
The Basel Mission emerged at the initiative of the Pietist Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft during the nineteenth-century evangelical revival in Europe. Wealthy and influential patrician families from Basel favoured the establishment of a mission seminary in the city on the Rhine but the Basel Mission rapidly evolved into a grassroots movement. Thanks to the fervent support of associations and support groups, and a wide-ranging publication network, the Basel Mission was not only firmly anchored in urban society but also found numerous supporters in the Alemannic countryside. The Pietist movement retained particular strength in the villages and small towns of southern Germany.Footnote 95 While patrician men from the city of Basel dominated the Committee, more than half of the overseas staff, all the Inspectors and most of the theology lecturers in the Basel Mission seminary were recruited from the Wurttemberg area before 1914.Footnote 96
Members of voluntary societies anchored the foreign mission within local contexts by organising bazaars, festivals and exhibitions dedicated to the evangelising cause abroad.Footnote 97 The young men who would go on to become Basel missionaries frequently attended these events. The first Basel Mission doctor Rudolf Fisch, for example, was initially introduced to the mission as a teenager when he attended a Basel Mission festival in the Swiss town of Suhr in October of 1873. He vividly recounted the event in his memoirs: “The thought of heathen mission bathed my future in a bright, hopeful light.”Footnote 98 Upon completing his apprenticeship as a saddler in the summer of 1874, Fisch attended another Basel Mission festival in Rothrist, where he witnessed the account of a missionary from the Gold Coast that deeply impressed him. The missionary talked about Paulo Mohenu, a “notorious fetish priest” who had converted to Christianity. Years later, Fisch would care for the old Paulo Mohenu in his final days in Aburi on the Gold Coast.Footnote 99
Fisch applied to join the Basel Mission seminary as soon as he turned eighteen and started his missionary training in August of 1875, together with another twenty-two young men, most of whom were peasants and artisans originating from Wurttemberg.Footnote 100 The Committee favoured a homogenous group of pupils, believing that uniformity in beliefs, education and experience contributed to the predictability and efficiency of training.Footnote 101 Their education took a minimum of five years to complete, and included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, German, medicine, arithmetic, geometry, physics, geography, history, pedagogics, anthropology, Bible classes and catechism.Footnote 102 Considering the seminary’s extensive curriculum and the position of missionaries as Europeans in colonial territories, the missionary profession certainly presented students with the prospect of climbing the social ladder.Footnote 103
Representatives from the industrial working class of large urban areas were notably absent in the seminary. They were nonetheless part of the web of mission; either by donating to the halfpenny collection, or as objects of philanthropic activities. The Christian welfare network connected the bourgeois and academic elite, who were directing the Basel Mission, with both urban blue-collar workers and Pietist rural communities. The Basel Mission created horizontal as well as vertical entanglements between people and groups of different class, gender, denomination and location. Certainly, the highly diverse coalition that provided the moral and financial underpinning of the Basel Mission did not share identical interests or expectations with the decision-makers at the headquarters in Basel but the meshing of their worldviews was sufficient to keep them together for over a century of common effort.
In contrast to earlier missionary organisations, which depended on nobility and royal patronage, missionary societies emerging in the nineteenth century were voluntary organisations, funded by small donations from a large number of people. Both their outreach and their organisation depended on a new social geography and understanding of theology.Footnote 104 Purity was a key element of Pietist faith and practice, which allowed the Basel Mission to create and strengthen a sense of community in their circle of supporters. The leading figures of the Pietist movement justified their evangelising fervour by arguing that the Reformation had not been completed. According to them, too much emphasis had been placed upon purity of doctrine rather than upon purity of life, which led many people, who lived in conscious sin, to depend upon the merits of Christ for salvation.Footnote 105
3 Purity, Healing and Death
Purity is an eminently religious concept, which in almost all faiths is aimed at indicating the proximity or distance of humans from God, thus also marking moral and social differences between people.Footnote 106 Pietists asserted that what set them apart from the rest of society, which they dismissively called “the world,” was their practical approach to purity.Footnote 107 Purity in the Pietist sense of the word was a universal concept, not only encompassing theological tenets but also social norms and cultural practices that outranked church life or confessional purity. Pietism was characterised by an unusual measure of “worldly asceticism,” as Max Weber noted over a century ago.Footnote 108 It offered a holistic ideology, strongly based on ideas of purity and sin, which manifested itself in a specific attitude towards the body, healing and death.
3.1 Pietist Purity
One of the few remaining textbooks in the Basel Mission archives is Friedrich Reiff’s Die christliche Glaubenslehre als Grundlage der christlichen Weltanschauung.Footnote 109 Reiff was the Basel Mission’s head theology teacher and member of the Committee from 1864 to 1875.Footnote 110 His 1873 publication in two volumes provides a systematic summary of the theological tenets conveyed in the Basel Mission seminary. The heart took centre stage in the Pietist narrative of sin and purity, as Reiff’s manual illustrates. He defined sin as “the abandonment of God caused by selfishness and the orientation towards worldly affairs, which are glorified instead of Him.”Footnote 111 The only effective way to counteract sinful behaviour, according to Reiff, was to recognise the inherent sinfulness of one’s heart, since it constituted “truly the actual moral-religious organ.”Footnote 112
Pietists were noted for an intense emotional fervour that began with a personal conversion experience or “spiritual rebirth,” as they called it.Footnote 113 All believers had to testify to this fundamental change, which after a deep recognition of sin had led them to repent by making a unique and final decision to submit to God. Pietists attached great importance to self-examination as the path to the divine. They believed that moral consciousness originated in the heart and thus emphasised the need to educate the heart through close reading of Scripture and individual piety. To be a born-again Christian meant living a life of ceaseless self-awareness, constantly striving for improvement and betterment in both the spiritual and material realms. Yet, as might be expected, Pietist conversions were in reality often more varied, complex and problematic than in theory.Footnote 114
Pietist conversion not only entailed an internal spiritual rebirth but also went hand in hand with an external transformation encompassing all aspects of life, away from old worldly habits into a vigorous Christian life that expressed itself through asceticism, discipline and social deeds.Footnote 115 Pietists upheld the importance of “loyalty in small things” and rejected what they considered unchristian impulses and behaviour such as aggression, sexuality, passion, indulgence, insults and curses, pub visits, the consumption of spirits and gambling. These practices of renunciation were a means for Pietists to give visible, outward expression to their spiritual ideal of purity. By displaying a shared code of conduct, Pietists expressed community affiliation and distanced themselves from the perceived impurity in the world. Purity regulations kept things apart and marked them as incompatible.Footnote 116
In everyday life, however, purity practices were constantly at risk of being ignored, diluted and compromised. To prevent this, the maintenance of Pietist purity crucially relied on rigid social ethics, discernible in the organisational structure of the Basel Mission, which reproduced the patriarchal hierarchy of Pietist families and communities.Footnote 117 The Committee members justified their right to occupy the centre and to prevail over the organisation’s affairs on the grounds that they had been directly called by God to create and control the organisation.Footnote 118 They believed that the agrarian Pietist background of most mission candidates made them amenable to hierarchical discipline and thus served God’s plan. The personal qualifications that governed admission and life in the Basel Mission seminary reveal the premium that was placed on the acceptance of authority as something religiously and organisationally indispensable.Footnote 119
Pietist purity expressed itself, among other ways, in readiness to obey established authority. The decisive criterion for acceptance to the Basel Mission seminary was a candidate’s convincing account of spiritual rebirth that signalled complete emotional surrender to the larger Pietist cause. In the Committee’s eyes, a true Christian, and therefore suitable mission contender, was not merely a baptised person but a born-again individual, who recognised their inherent sinfulness and their dependency on God’s grace. Applicants had to describe the exact moment of their own conversion and the authenticity of the account had to be confirmed by a witness, usually the candidate’s own local minister, who was known to the Basel Mission.Footnote 120 Practices of self-examination were a vital component of Pietist faith. Whether openly dialogical or solitary, introspection was by no means a private affair but always shared within the community.Footnote 121
Pietists corresponded, sometimes over great distances, with spiritual friends and leaders, and kept diaries, which they shared during edification assemblies and devotional hours.Footnote 122 By publicly confessing an awareness of their own sins and exhibiting an earnest desire for sanctification, through diaries and correspondences, they affirmed their membership in the Pietist community. The autobiographies written by the young men who wished to join the Basel Mission seminary show that many of them were familiar with the use of devotional literature and practices of pious introspection.Footnote 123 They often contrasted their own spiritual rebirth with drunkenness, laziness, disobedience, personal vanity and petty theft in the world around them. Entering the seminary and becoming an active and committed Christian meant turning one’s back on such temptations and living a life under the discipline and mutual criticism of Pietist fellowship.Footnote 124
In the period from 1880 to 1914, between 30 and 80 men applied for a place at the Basel Mission seminary each year, of which between 14 and 25 were admitted as pupils.Footnote 125 The Committee cited a lack of “moral integrity” and “divine vocation” as the most common reasons for turning down applicants.Footnote 126 Those who did gain entry to the boarding school were subject to a detailed set of strict house rules, which stipulated order, abstinence and thrift. Purity, health and cleanliness were explicitly linked in these guidelines, with each pupil required “to wash his body diligently, in order to keep it pure and healthy.”Footnote 127 The rigid regulations, including a meticulous daily timetable, dress code and severe sanctions in case of lapses, posed a major challenge to the mission contenders. Only about a third of them completed their training.Footnote 128 Purity regulations were a means for the leaders of the Basel Mission to create a sense of belonging by drawing lines of inclusion and exclusion.
In her classic 1966 study Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas showed that concepts of purity were never merely expressions of experience but also instruments to systematise perceptions and synchronise them within a community. She applied Emile Durkheim’s arguments about the distinctiveness of the sacred and the profane in order to explore the system of boundary maintenance that ensured the purity of social categories through the exclusion of objects and people that did not belong.Footnote 129 Purity is the utopian dream of precision in cognitive organisation. While the properties of purity remain elusive, the consequences of impurity are more concrete and elaborated in detail. Concepts of purity thus become particularly effective in contrast to impurity.Footnote 130
3.2 Healing and Deliverance Theology
The meaning of purity for the Basel Mission gained another layer of complexity with the appropriation of scientific medicine and the training of medical missionaries in the 1880s. Although healing had been part of Pietism ever since the movement gained momentum, most adherents had reservations about the morality and efficacy of scientific medicine.Footnote 131 In the early nineteenth century, a strand of Pietism had emerged, led by Christian Blumhardt, which explained the existence of illness as well as antisocial or immoral behaviour with reference to Satan. Blumhardt focused on the liberation of the sick from the Devil and established the first systematic healing theology in Wurttemberg.Footnote 132 His healing and deliverance ministry was not an isolated phenomenon within Pietism but an example of a much wider practice throughout Germany and Switzerland in the nineteenth century.Footnote 133
Even more significant than Christian Blumhardt to the development of Pietist healing concepts and practices was his nephew, Johann Blumhardt, who became the most important healing and deliverance practitioner in Wurttemberg in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 134 Thousands of believers visited him annually in healing pilgrimages, which flourished from the 1840s until his death. Blumhardt viewed healing as a purely supernatural process and strongly questioned the effectiveness of scientific means of restoration.Footnote 135 The tension between his healing ministry and the medical establishment was exacerbated when the medical community successfully lobbied church authorities to prevent Johann Blumhardt from performing Pietist healing rituals, such as laying on hands and praying for the afflicted, in his parish in 1846.Footnote 136
Mission and healing were both significant aspects of Pietism. Bad Boll, where Johann Blumhardt relocated in 1852, became the centre of healing, whilst Basel developed as the hub of missionary activities.Footnote 137 Many figures in the Pietist movement, such as Johann and Christian Blumhardt, participated in both of these spheres. Christian Blumhardt was one of the founding members of the Basel Mission and the first Inspector from 1815 until his death in 1838. His nephew Johann Blumhardt worked at the mission seminary from 1830 to 1837, teaching Hebrew, mathematics, physics and chemistry. After leaving Basel to work as a healing and deliverance theologian, he remained closely attached to the Mission.Footnote 138
Medical staff were part of the earliest Pietist evangelising projects overseas. The Tranquebar mission to India—a joint venture established in 1706 between Pietists from Halle, Danish reformed circles and the Anglican Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge—included medical practitioners. Likewise, the Pietist Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine—Moravian Church—dispatched orderlies to Western India, Ceylon and Astrakhan from 1735.Footnote 139 The Basel Mission first employed a medical man in 1822, who practised in the Caucasus region for nine years.Footnote 140 The first medical practitioner working for the Basel Mission in West Africa was Christian Friedrich Heinze. He arrived on the Gold Coast in 1831, after the loss of the entire initial batch of four missionaries there. Ironically, he succumbed to what was referred to as “the fever” within six weeks of his arrival.Footnote 141
Medicine became an increasingly materialistic concept during the course of the nineteenth century, questioning the tenets of spiritual healing. While the link between Pietist healing, medical aid and missionary endeavours overseas had existed from the start, the use of scientific medicine—that is the conceptualisation and treatment of the body as a biological organism that could be scientifically understood—remained taboo for most of the nineteenth century. After the death of Heinze, the Committee refrained from employing medical staff since they feared that medical science would undermine their holistic approach to healing. They recognised, nevertheless, that medical knowledge was crucial to the survival of the missionaries in the field. They integrated basic medical notions and practices into missionary training, without at the same time giving up on their religious holism or subscribing to the scientific view of the body held by the medical community.Footnote 142
From 1845, all mission contenders were given medical lectures that followed Pietist tenets of healing as part of their five-year course at the seminary in Basel.Footnote 143 Carl Streckeisen, the general practitioner of the institution, provided the lessons, which included “healing,” “pastoral medicine” and “clinic,” meaning the teaching of students at the bedside.Footnote 144 Streckeisen also arranged for portable pharmacies and medical boxes to be sent to the mission stations abroad. They contained technical literature, drugs and medical instruments such as “bloodletting fleams” and “cupping glasses.”Footnote 145 The medical procedures, which the missionaries had acquired during their formation in Basel, however, proved generally ineffective and oftentimes even harmful when applied during their stays in West Africa. Moreover, there was never enough medicine to meet the needs of the missionaries and the people they sought to serve with these supplies.
3.3 Deadly Mission
“Tropical fevers,” the Basel missionaries on the Gold Coast lamented in 1838, had cost them eight out of ten lives in the first decade of their enterprise. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what the missionaries referred to as “tropical fevers” represented a large variety of diseases that Europeans dreaded when venturing into the tropics. Death was omnipresent and continued to threaten the existence of the Basel Mission in West Africa into the twentieth century.Footnote 146 Missionary Karl Stolz commented on the passing of his friend Ferdinand Ernst in Cameroon in 1910: “This is Africa! We are dying while greeting each other. Tonight, we bury one of us and tomorrow morning we are receiving another one.”Footnote 147 The Basel missionaries’ conviction in their divine mission and their Pietist faith resulted in an apparent outward resilience to grief and misfortunes.
While suffering and death certainly fed missionary narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice, the high mortality rate also meant that Africans were unlikely to view European missionaries and their medicine as inherently superior. In 1870, the Basel missionary Elias Schrenk, stationed in Christiansborg, addressed a request for a scientifically trained mission doctor to the Committee, stating: “We lack the charisma of biblical healing, we also lack scientific medicine, we cannot treat seriously ill people with good conscience, therefore we must solicit for a doctor.”Footnote 148 Schrenk explicitly expressed what many Basel missionaries on the Gold Coast perceived as a frustrating period for the mission. Their letters and reports show that they regularly felt overwhelmed and helpless against the diseases they encountered, fearing not only for their own health but also deploring that it undermined their credibility in the eyes of potential converts.
The Committee received numerous requests for the dispatch of a mission doctor from missionaries on the Gold Coast, based on three main arguments. Firstly, the missionaries emphasised that a medical missionary would be able to provide vital medical care to the members of the missionary community in a centrally located sanatorium.Footnote 149 Hitherto, the Basel missionaries relied on the health services provided by the colonial government in Christiansborg and on the skills of African medical men. They were always acutely conscious of their lack of training for the medical work they found so necessary. The specialised books in the medical boxes, for instance, proved useless since they required prior medical training that the missionaries did not possess. Therefore, they solicited the employment of a mission doctor, who would be able to counteract the high mortality rate among them, which lay around fifty per cent in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 150
Secondly, the letters highlighted the exploration of tropical diseases, especially the different types of fevers, as an important assignment. Interestingly, they also encouraged the study of certain West African remedies since they had experienced their efficacy first-hand.Footnote 151 The letters written by Basel missionaries on the Gold Coast, particularly before the 1880s, show that they had an open mind about African concepts and methods of healing. They often preferred African over European remedies, believing that they were more suitable for local diseases than the medicine available at colonial health facilities. People on the Gold Coast, in turn, took kindly to the Basel missionaries’ healing practices, since they showed many similarities with their own. Laxatives made from Glauber salt, which the missionaries brought with them, for example, proved highly popular since bowel cleansing was an important bodily practice on the Gold Coast.Footnote 152
Thirdly, the Basel missionaries in West Africa stressed the potential of mission medicine as a tool of conversion. They argued that by combining the effectiveness of scientific medicine with the narrative of biblical healing, people on the Gold Coast could be persuaded of the superiority of Christian medicine and faith. They noticed that members of their parishes often found themselves drawn back to what they called “witch doctors” when their remedies proved ineffective against their ills.Footnote 153 Mission medicine, in their eyes, offered a way of demonstrating the validity of Christian explanations and methods. Historians, however, have debated how effective medicine was as a tool of conversion because, for much of the nineteenth century, it was not obviously more effective than African systems of healing.Footnote 154
The British government physician Francis J. G. Gunn, who was stationed on the Gold Coast from 1863 to 1865, lent substance to the Basel missionaries’ appeals for a medical missionary. In a letter to the Committee in 1865, he regretted that missionaries were placed in medical charge “who really must be acting in total darkness and therefore destroying as often as saving life.”Footnote 155 Gunn affronted the leadership in Basel by asking: “Who are the murderers in the sight of God: the staff members who have been deployed improperly or the society that has placed them in this uncomfortable situation?”Footnote 156 Confronted with these allegations, the Inspector of the Basel Mission at the time, Joseph Josenhans, pointed at the social make-up of the mission pupils, most of whom did not have an academic formation. He expounded that integrating a training programme for scientific doctors into the seminary was too formidable a challenge, both organisationally and financially.Footnote 157
Why not then, as Gunn suggested, recruit a medical man connected with the Basel Mission?Footnote 158 Indeed, an opportunity had arisen in 1845 when Streckeisen, the medical teacher in the seminary, asked to be sent to the Gold Coast “to promote the gospel among the Negroes by means of medical help.”Footnote 159 The Committee acknowledged that he was “a serious, favourable, altruistic man” but refused to send him overseas doubting that he was “actually converted.”Footnote 160 Streckeisen’s request was treated with suspicion as to his true motivations and ambitions. The leaders in Basel feared that his medical work would outshine the overriding aim of their work in West Africa, the salvation of souls. Since Streckeisen had not officially testified to his spiritual rebirth or undergone the close scrutiny of training and life in the seminary, they were not willing to take this risk.
More importantly, the employment of an academically qualified physician endangered the social hierarchy within the Basel Mission. According to a Committee report dating from 1873, the decision-makers in Basel feared that the “autonomous nature and decision-making ability of academically trained doctors” would undermine their authority.Footnote 161 As a result of this, mission contenders interested in medical work were asked to choose between their missionary vocation and a medical career, which generally resulted in their exclusion from the Basel Mission.Footnote 162 Furthermore, incorporating university graduates, mostly people from the urban middle and upper classes, into the missionary enterprise would have undermined the Committee’s recruitment strategy, which was based on finding amenable candidates from a homogenous rural background, skilled in crafts, agriculture and construction.
The African General Conference, consisting of Basel missionaries based in West Africa, actively supported Gunn’s demand, pointing inter alia at the prohibitive prices of British colonial and military doctors. Their conference proceedings presented manifold arguments for the sending of a medical missionary, including his contribution to the sciences, his financial autonomy, the medical education and training of Africans, the fight against “quackery” and the “enhancement of European medicine with African medicinal herbs.”Footnote 163 In his response to the African General Conference in 1865, Inspector Josenhans maintained, nonetheless, that healing was primarily a spiritual matter:
Be patient, my dear brothers! Although it is true that a capable physician provides better care than an incapable one, the LORD alone is the right physician; those who are as close to Him as you missionaries should trust in His special help and certainly feel confident that, despite the lack of a capable physician at your side, you will not miss out on anything essential, now or in eternity.Footnote 164
In West Africa, however, the primacy of saving souls over healing bodies seemed displaced. Clearly, the success of the Basel Mission crucially depended on the survival of the missionaries in the field. By the 1880s, Pietist healing had been considerably depreciated by the growing persuasiveness and effectiveness of scientific theories, practices and technologies, leaving the leaders of the Basel Mission no choice but to integrate the training and methods of scientific medicine into their evangelising project. Continuous missionary work was simply inconceivable without effective health care. The Basel missionaries’ confrontation with the pervasive problem of illness and death in West Africa laid the foundation for the reformulation of Pietist concepts of healing and purity by exposing them to scientific theories of disease and hygiene.
Notes
- 1.
For an overview of the scholarship on the Erweckung, see Andrew Kloes, The German Awakening: Protestant Renewal after the Enlightenment, 1815–1848, Oxford 2020.
- 2.
Martin Brecht/Klaus Deppermann/Ulrich Gäbler/Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), Geschichte des Pietismus, 4 vol., Göttingen 1993–2004; Hartmut Lehmann, Engerer, weiterer und erweiterter Pietismusbegriff, in: Pietismus und Neuzeit 29 (2003), p. 18–37; Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe, Baltimore 2013; Christian T. Collins Winn et al. (eds.), The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, Eugene 2011; Justin A. Davis, Pietism and the Foundations of the Modern World, Eugene 2019.
- 3.
Wurttemberg Pietism is well documented. See Ulrike Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum. Eine historische Anthropologie der Frömmigkeit, Göttingen 2005; Andreas Gestrich, Pietismus und ländliche Frömmigkeit in Württemberg im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, in: Norbert Haag/Sabine Holtz/Wolfgang Zimmermann/Dieter R. Bauer (eds.), Ländliche Frömmigkeit. Konfessionskulturen und Lebenswelten, Stuttgart 2002, p. 343–357; Hartmut Lehmann, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart 1969.
- 4.
Wurttemberg had a population of 1.3 million in 1812, rising to about 2 million by the end of the century. See Jenkins, Württemberg als Hauptsäule der historischen Basler Mission.
- 5.
Erika Hebeisen, Leidenschaftlich fromm. Die pietistische Bewegung in Basel 1750–1830, Köln/Weimar/Wien 2005; Thomas K. Kuhn/Martin Sallmann (eds.), Das “fromme Basel”. Religion in einer Stadt des 19. Jahrhunderts, Basel 2002.
- 6.
Karl Rennstich, Mission—Geschichte der protestantischen Mission in Deutschland, in: Ulrich Gäbler (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 3: Der Pietismus im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, Göttingen 2000, p. 308–319; Lucian Hölscher, Geschichte der protestantischen Frömmigkeit in Deutschland, München 2005, p. 347–351.
- 7.
Judith Becker, Zukunftserwartungen und Missionsimpetus bei Missionsgesellschaften in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Wolfgang Breul/Jan Carsten Schnurr (eds.), Geschichtsbewusstsein und Zukunftserwartungen in Pietismus und Erweckungsbewegung, Göttingen 2013, p. 244–270; Ibid., “Gehet hin in alle Welt…”. Sendungsbewusstsein in der evangelischen Missionsbewegung der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Evangelische Theologie 72 (2012) 2, p. 134–154.
- 8.
Thomas K. Kuhn/Veronika Albrecht-Birkner (eds.), Zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne: Erweckungsbewegungen als historiographische Herausforderung, Berlin 2017; Gustav Adolf Benrath, Die Erweckung innerhalb der deutschen Landeskirchen, in: Ulrich Gäbler (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 3: Der Pietismus im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, Göttingen 2000, p. 150–271.
- 9.
By 1800, the Kingdom of Wurttemberg alone counted more than fifty of these voluntary societies.
- 10.
On the renewed interest in the Bible in Basel, see Hans Hauzenberger, Basel und die Bibel. Die Bibel als Quelle ökumenischer, missionarischer, sozialer und pädagogischer Impulse in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Basel 1996.
- 11.
Martin Brecht/Friedrich de Boor/Klaus Deppermann/Harmut Lehmann/Andreas Lindt/Johannes Wallmann (eds.), Die Basler Christentumsgesellschaft, Göttingen 1982.
- 12.
Horst Weigelt, Die Diasporaarbeit der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine und die Wirksamkeit der Deutschen Christentumsgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Ulrich Gäbler (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 3: Der Pietismus im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, Göttingen 2000, p. 113–148.
- 13.
On the term “patrician” in the Basel context, see Schär, Tropenliebe, p. 42; Philipp Sarasin, Stadt der Bürger. Bürgerliche Macht und städtische Gesellschaft, Basel 1846–1914, Göttingen 1997, p. 13. For a critical view on the use of the term, see Sara Janner, Zwischen Machtanspruch und Autoritätsverlust. Zur Funktion von Religion und Kirchlichkeit in Politik und Selbstverständnis des konservativen alten Bürgertums im Basel des 19. Jahrhunderts, Basel 2012, p. 30–31.
- 14.
Basel’s upper class was composed of old as well as new money generated by global trade and industries such as silk, cotton and tobacco.
- 15.
This legislative and executive council of the Swiss Confederacy was a meeting of delegates of the individual cantons and existed in various forms since the beginnings of Swiss independence until the formation of the Swiss Federal State in 1848. See Andreas Würgler, Die Tagsatzung der Eidgenossen: Politik, Kommunikation und Symbolik einer repräsentativen Institution im europäischen Kontext, Epfendorf 2010.
- 16.
Matthias Manz, Basel. Von der Helvetik bis zur Kantonstrennung (1798–1833), in: Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007387/2016-01-13/#HVonderHelvetikbiszur Kantonstrennung 28 17 98–183,329, version 13.01.2016 (last access: 22.07.2022).
- 17.
Claudia Opitz, Von der Aufklärung zur Kantonstrennung, in: Georg Kreis/Beat von Wartburg (eds.), Basel. Geschichte einer städtischen Gesellschaft, Basel 2000, p. 150–185.
- 18.
Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas, Chicago 2000, p. 17.
- 19.
Sarasin, Stadt der Bürger, p. 91–119; Schär, Tropenliebe, p. 38–78; Janner, Zwischen Machtanspruch und Autoritätsverlust, p. 73–160.
- 20.
Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, p. 59.
- 21.
Regina Wecker, 1833 bis 1910. Die Entwicklung zur Grossstadt, in: Georg Kreis/Beat von Wartburg (eds.), Basel. Geschichte einer städtischen Gesellschaft, Basel 2000, p. 196–224.
- 22.
Martin W. Pernet, Nietzsche und das “fromme” Basel, Basel 2014, p. 41–64; Janner, Zwischen Machtanspruch und Autoritätsverlust, p. 161–293.
- 23.
Thirty-three of the forty men who served on the Committee between 1815 and 1900 had relatives in positions of responsibility in the Basel Mission. The admission and re-election of a Committee member had to be decided unanimously by all other members to avoid disagreements. On the social makeup of the Basel Mission Committee, see Jon Miller, Missionary Zeal and Institutional Control. Organizational Contradictions in the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast, 1828–1917, London/New York 2003, p. 38–45.
- 24.
The Inspector was chosen from the existing Committee members and had to be elected unanimously. See Tobias Eiselen, “Zur Erziehung einer zuverlässigen, wohldisziplinierten Streiterschar für den Missionskrieg”. Basler Missionarsausbildung im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Werner Ustorf (ed.), Mission im Kontext. Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte der Norddeutschen Missionsgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, Bremen 1986, p. 47–120, here p. 48–49.
- 25.
Wilhelm Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission 1815–1915, vol. 1, Basel 1916, p. 93.
- 26.
Gustav Wanner, Die Basler Handels-Gesellschaft A.G. 1859–1959, Basel 1959; Giorgio Miescher, Hermann Ludwig Rottmann. Zu den Anfängen der Basler Missions-Handels-Gesellschaft in Christiansborg (Ghana), in: Lilo Roost Vischer/Anne Mayor/Dag Henrichsen (eds.), Werkschau Afrikastudien, vol. 2: Brücken und Grenzen, Münster 1999, p. 345–362; Andrea Franc, Wie die Schweiz zur Schokolade kam. Der Kakaohandel der Basler Handelsgesellschaft mit der Kolonie Goldküste (1893–1960), Basel 2008; Heinrich Christ, Zwischen Religion und Geschäft. Die Basler Missions-Handlungs-Gesellschaft und ihre Unternehmensethik, 1859–1917, Basel 2015.
- 27.
Heinrich Christ, Mission und Geld. Die Missions-Handlungs-Gesellschaft, in: Christine Christ-von Wedel/Thomas K. Kuhn (eds.), Basler Mission. Menschen, Geschichte, Perspektiven 1815–2015, Basel 2015, p. 93–98.
- 28.
Urs Hofmann, “Nur das Evangelium vermag die soziale Frage zu lösen”. Die reformierte Kirche und die Armenpolitik im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, in: Josef Mooser/Simon Wenger (eds.), Armut und Fürsorge in Basel. Armutspolitik vom 13. Jahrhundert bis heute, Basel 2011, p. 134–142.
- 29.
Sara Janner, GGG 1777–1914. Basler Stadtgeschichte im Spiegel der “Gesellschaft für das Gute und Gemeinnützige”, Basel 2015; Beatrice Schumacher, Braucht es uns? Selbstbilder, Arbeitsweisen und organisatorische Strukturen der Schweizerischen Gemeinnützigen Gesellschaft (1810–1970), in: ibid. (ed.), Freiwillig verpflichtet. Gemeinnütziges Denken und Handeln in der Schweiz seit 1800, Zürich 2010, p. 37–69.
- 30.
Basel was the first Swiss city to be connected to the railways and became the leading commercial city in the Swiss Confederation. See Wecker, 1833 bis 1910. Die Entwicklung zur Grossstadt.
- 31.
Martin Schaffner, Die Basler Arbeiterbevölkerung im 19. Jahrhundert. Beiträge zur Geschichte ihrer Lebensformen, Basel/Stuttgart 1972; Luca Trevisan, Das Wohnungselend der Basler Arbeiterbevölkerung in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Basel 1989.
- 32.
In 1843, the GGG published an extensive study on the working conditions in Basel’s silk ribbon factories: Gesellschaft für das Gute und Gemeinnützige (ed.), Über die Fabrikarbeiter-Verhältnisse der Baseler Industrie. Berichterstattung einer von der Baselerischen Abteilung der Schweizerischen Gemeinnützigen Gesellschaft aufgestellten Kommission, Basel 1843. See further William O. Shanahan, Der deutsche Protestantismus vor der sozialen Frage 1815–1871, München 1962, p. 378; Sarasin, Stadt der Bürger, p. 51.
- 33.
Martin Lengwiler, Wissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Der Einfluss der Gelehrtengesellschaften und Experten auf die Sozialpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Josef Mooser/Simon Wenger (des.), Armut und Fürsorge in Basel. Armutspolitik vom 13. Jahrhundert bis heute, Basel 2011, p. 111–122, here p. 116–117.
- 34.
Basel’s factory laws were the first of their kind resulting from Protestant initiative in the German-speaking world. See Shanahan, Der deutsche Protestantismus, p. 382.
- 35.
Karl Stückelberger, Die Armen- und Krankenfürsorge in Basel, Basel 1906, p. 9–13, 29–55.
- 36.
Sara Janner, Korporative und private Wohltätigkeit. “Stadtgemeinde” und Stadtbürgertum als Träger der Armenpflege im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Josef Mooser/Simon Wenger (eds.), Armut und Fürsorge in Basel. Armutspolitik vom 13. Jahrhundert bis heute, Basel 2011, p. 101–109, here p. 101.
- 37.
Shanahan, Der deutsche Protestantismus, p. 373–388; Arnd Götzelmann, Die Soziale Frage, in: Ulrich Gäbler (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 3: Der Pietismus im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, Göttingen 2000, p. 272–307.
- 38.
Norbert Friedrich/Traugott Jähnichen, Geschichte der sozialen Ideen im deutschen Protestantismus, in: Helga Grebing (ed.), Geschichte der sozialen Ideen in Deutschland. Sozialismus—katholische Soziallehre—protestantische Sozialethik. Ein Handbuch, 2nd ed., Wiesbaden 2005, p. 867–1102, here p. 877–888, 895–903.
- 39.
Thomas K. Kuhn, Religion und neuzeitliche Gesellschaft. Studien zum sozialen und diakonischen Handeln in Pietismus, Aufklärung und Erweckungsbewegung, Tübingen 2003.
- 40.
Hans Anstein, Fünfzig Jahre Stadt-Mission in Basel. Rückblick auf die Tätigkeit der Evangelischen Gesellschaft für Stadt-Mission in Basel in den Jahren 1859 bis 1909, Basel 1909; Ernst Hauri, Die Evangelische Gesellschaft für Stadtmission in Basel. Kurze Darstellung ihrer Entwicklung von 1859–1959, Basel 1959; Irina Bossart, “Wuchern mit dem anvertrauten Pfunde” oder Krisenbewältigung durch Evangelisierung. Die Basler Stadtmission in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Doctoral Thesis, University of Basel, 2009.
- 41.
Alexandra Przyrembel, Der Missionar Johann Hinrich Wichern, die Sünde und das unabänderliche Elend der städtischen Unterschichten um 1850, in: WerkstattGeschichte 57 (2011), p. 53–67.
- 42.
Anstein, Fünfzig Jahre Stadt-Mission in Basel, p. 13.
- 43.
Albert Ostertag, Jahresbericht der Stadtmission vom 1. April 1868, Basel 1869, p. 13.
- 44.
Basel counted 47,000 inhabitants in 1870, 112,227 in 1900 and 135,918 in 1910. See Josef Mooser, Armenpflege zwischen Freiwilligkeit und Verstaatlichung. Träger und Reformen der Armenpolitik im Umbruch zur Grossstadt um 1900, in: ibid./Simon Wenger (eds.), Armut und Fürsorge in Basel. Armutspolitik vom 13. Jahrhundert bis heute, Basel 2011, p. 177–204, here p. 179.
- 45.
Irina Bossart, 150 Jahre Basler Stadtmission. “… hervorgerufen durch den Ernst der Zeit”, in: Basler Stadtbuch 130 (2009), ed. by Christoph Merian Stiftung, p. 143–145, here p. 143.
- 46.
Anstein, Fünfzig Jahre Stadt-Mission in Basel, p. 16. On the attempts to evangelise Italian immigrants in Zurich, see Ernst Matthias Rüsch, “Conversation über das Eine, was not tut”. Evangelisch-reformierte Italienerseelsorge im Kanton Zürich im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Zürich 2010.
- 47.
Schaffner, Die Basler Arbeiterbevölkerung im 19. Jahrhundert, p. 103–105.
- 48.
Rennstich, Mission—Geschichte der protestantischen Mission in Deutschland, p. 311–312.
- 49.
Alexa Geisthövel/Ute Siebert/Sonja Finkbeiner, “Menschenfischer”. Über die Parallelen von äusserer und innerer Mission um 1900, in: Rolf Lindner (ed.), “Wer in den Osten geht, geht in ein anderes Land”. Die Settlementbewegung in Berlin zwischen Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik, Berlin 1997, p. 27–50; Thorne, “The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable”; Habermas, Mission im 19. Jahrhundert, p. 664–671; Comaroff/Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2.
- 50.
Evangelische Gesellschaft für Stadtmission Basel, BMA, U.15; Korrespondenz zwischen der Basler Mission und der Basler Stadtmission sowie Stadtmissionsgesellschaften in Deutschland und im Elsass, 1913–1952, BMA, QH-10.16.
- 51.
Habermas, Mission im 19. Jahrhundert, p. 656–657; Dana L. Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion, Chichester 2009, p. 1; Michael Gladwin, Mission and Colonialism, in: Joel D. S. Rasmussen/Judith Wolfe/Johannes Zachhuber (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, Oxford 2017, p. 282–304, here p. 282.
- 52.
The missionaries of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft even trained at the seminary in Basel from 1850, when their own society was unable to sustain its own training facility. See Eiselen, “Zur Erziehung einer zuverlässigen, wohldisziplinierten Streiterschar”, p. 47.
- 53.
Paul Jenkins, Short History of the Basel Mission, Basel 1989, p. 13.
- 54.
Matthäus Feigk, Von Edinburgh nach Oegstgeest. Die transnationalen missionarischen Netzwerke Europas am Beispiel der Basler Mission 1910–1920, in: Linda Ratschiller/Karolin Wetjen (eds.), Verflochtene Mission. Perspektiven auf eine neue Missionsgeschichte, Köln/Weimar/Wien 2018, p. 45–64.
- 55.
Die Basler Missionsgebiete, in: Führer durch die Völkerkundliche Ausstellung der Basler Mission, Basel 1908, BMA, Box “Missionsmuseum”, without signature.
- 56.
Andrew Porter, ‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780–1914, in: The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (1997) 3, p. 367–391, here p. 380.
- 57.
See for instance the insightful microhistory study by John Middleton, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Christianity in a Ghanaian Town, in: Africa 53 (1983) 3, p. 2–19.
- 58.
Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen have put forward the concept of translocality to account for the diversity of Asian and African experiences and agency in the transformatory process often subsumed under the blanket term of globalisation. Translocality very consciously attempts to transcend the elitist focus of much of global history. Ulrike Freitag/Achim von Oppen, Introduction: ‘Translocality’. An Approach to Connection and Transfer in Area Studies, in: ibid. (eds.), Translocality. The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective, Leiden 2010, p. 1–24.
- 59.
Abigail Green/Vincent Viaene, Rethinking Religion and Globalization, in: ibid. (eds.), Religious Internationals in the Modern World. Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750, Basingstoke 2012, p. 1–19; Egger/Gugglberger, Editorial.
- 60.
Christopher Clark/Michael Ledger-Lomas, The Protestant International, in: Abigail Green/Vincent Viaene (eds.), Religious Internationals in the Modern World. Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750, Basingstoke 2012, p. 23–52.
- 61.
Richard Hölzl has introduced the concept of “imperial communication work” to analyse the complex processes through which missionary narratives were created. See Richard Hölzl, Imperiale Kommunikationsarbeit. Zur medialen Rahmung von Mission im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, in: medien&zeit 31 (2016) 2, p. 3–17.
- 62.
By 1819, the Basel Mission could count on the backing of 15 societies, which not only pledged their general support but also guaranteed the training costs of 28 pupils. See Eiselen, “Zur Erziehung einer zuverlässigen, wohldisziplinierten Streiterschar”, p. 50.
- 63.
Schlatter, Die Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 1, p. 38–57.
- 64.
Simone Prodolliet, Wider die Schamlosigkeit und das Elend der heidnischen Weiber. Die Basler Frauenmission und der Export des europäischen Frauenideals in die Kolonien, Zürich 1987, p. 14–15.
- 65.
Miller, Missionary Zeal, p. 43–45.
- 66.
On Karl Sarasin, see Josef Mooser, Der “christliche Unternehmer” Karl Sarasin. Sozialer Protestantismus in der Schweiz und in Deutschland, 1860–1880, in: Thomas K. Kuhn/Martin Sallmann (eds.), Das “fromme Basel”. Religion in einer Stadt des 19. Jahrhunderts, Basel 2002, p. 73–92; Marcel Köppli, Protestantische Unternehmer in der Schweiz des 19. Jahrhunderts. Christlicher Patriarchalismus im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung, Zürich 2012, p. 111–158; Schär, Tropenliebe, p. 66–78.
- 67.
On the history of the Halbbatzen-Kollekte, see Beatrice Tschudi-Barbatti, Die Halbbatzen-Kollekte. Ein Kapitel aus der Finanzgeschichte der Basler Mission, Licentiate Thesis, University of Zurich, 1992.
- 68.
Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 1, p. 224.
- 69.
Tschudi-Barbatti, Die Halbbatzen-Kollekte, p. 112–119.
- 70.
Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 1, p. 335; Miller, Missionary Zeal, p. 44; Eiselen, “Zur Erziehung einer zuverlässigen, wohldisziplinierten Streiterschar”, p. 53–54.
- 71.
Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 1, p. 223.
- 72.
Lionel Gossman argued that the Basel Mission “was the expression of religious fervor of wide pietistic circles throughout Germany and Switzerland and it enjoyed broad support among all classes in Basel.” Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, p. 57.
- 73.
Martin Scharfe, Die Religion des Volkes. Kleine Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte des Pietismus, Gütersloh 1980, p. 136; Mary Fulbrook, Piety and Politics: Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in England, Württemberg and Prussia, Cambridge 1984, p. 36–40.
- 74.
Miller, Missionary Zeal, p. 35–45.
- 75.
Line Nyhagen Predelli/Jon Miller, Piety and Patriarchy: Contested Gender Regimes in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Missions, in: Mary Taylor Huber/Nancy C. Lutkehaus (eds.), Gendered Missions. Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice, Ann Arbor 1999, p. 67–112, here p. 73.
- 76.
Bernhard C. Schär, Philanthropie postkolonial. Macht und Mitleid zwischen der Schweiz und Indien, 1850–1900, in: Alix Heiniger/Sonja Matter/Stéphanie Ginalski (eds.), Die Schweiz und die Philanthropie. Reform, soziale Vulnerabilität und Macht (1850–1930), Basel 2017, p. 127–140.
- 77.
Hans Anstein, Das Jubiläum der Halbbatzenkollekte, in: Der Evangelische Heidenbote 78 (1905), p. 9.
- 78.
Anke Schürer-Ries, Die Sammlerinnen und Sammler für die Balser Mission, in: Christine Christ-von Wedel/Thomas K. Kuhn (eds.), Basler Mission. Menschen, Geschichte, Perspektiven 1815–2015, Basel 2015, p. 99–100, here p. 99.
- 79.
For Britain, historians such as Susan Thorne and Jeffrey Cox have assessed that “the foreign mission cause was very probably the largest mass movement of women” and that “the missionary enterprise was predominantly female.” Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England, p. 94; Jeffrey Cox, Global Christianity in the Contact Zone, in: Judith Becker (ed.), European Missions in Contact Zones: Transformation Through Interaction in a (Post-)Colonial World, Göttingen 2015, p. 27–44, here p. 31.
- 80.
Karen Nolte, “Local Missionaries”. Community Deaconesses in Early 19th Century Health Care, in: Martin Dinges/Robert Jütte (eds.), The Transmission of Health Practices (c. 1500 to 2000), Stuttgart 2011, p. 105–116; Catherine M. Prelinger, The Nineteenth-Century Deaconessate in Germany. The Efficacy of a Family Model, in: Ruth Ellen B. Joeres/Mary Jo Manyes (eds.), Germany Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Bloomington 1986, p. 215–229.
- 81.
In her insightful study on the work and life of Kaiserswerth deaconesses in late Ottoman Beirut, Julia Hauser has shown that “the concept of spiritual motherhood allowed them to transgress the sphere of domesticity even while remaining within its boundaries on a metaphoric level.” Hauser, German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut, p. 325.
- 82.
Dagmar Konrad, Missionsbräute. Pietistinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Basler Mission, Münster 2001.
- 83.
Waltraud Haas, Erlitten und erstritten. Der Befreiungsweg von Frauen in der Basler Mission 1816–1966, Basel 1994, p. 25; Judith Becker, Frauen in der Mission und Mädchenschulen, in: Christine Christ-von Wedel/Thomas K. Kuhn (eds.), Basler Mission. Menschen, Geschichte, Perspektiven 1815–2015, Basel 2015, p. 57–62, here p. 57; Konrad, Missionsbräute, p. 34.
- 84.
Dagmar Konrad, Im Dienst des Herrn: Schweizer Missionarsfamilien des 19. Jahrhunderts in Übersee, in: Christine Christ-von Wedel/Thomas K. Kuhn (eds.), Basler Mission. Menschen, Geschichte, Perspektiven 1815–2015, Basel 2015, p. 63–68, here p. 64.
- 85.
On the role of Bible women in the Basel Mission in India, see Mrinalini Sebastian, Reading Archives from a Postcolonial Feminist Perspective: “Native” Bible Women and the Missionary Ideal, in: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 19 (2003) 1, p. 5–25.
- 86.
Predelli/Miller, Piety and Patriarchy, p. 81.
- 87.
Prodolliet, Wider die Schamlosigkeit; Ulrike Sill, Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood: The Basel Mission in Pre- and Early Colonial Ghana, Leiden/Boston 2010.
- 88.
Inspired by initiatives in England, the Basel Mission’s second Inspector Friedrich Wilhelm Hoffmann founded the Frauenverein zur Erziehung des weiblichen Geschlechts in den Heidenländern—Society for the Education of the Female Gender in the Heathen Lands—in 1841.
- 89.
Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 1, p. 384. For further developments, see Christine Keim, Frauenmission und Frauenemanzipation. Eine Diskussion in der Basler Mission im Kontext der frühen ökumenischen Bewegung (1901–1928), Münster 2005.
- 90.
Haas, Erlitten und Erstritten, p. 58.
- 91.
Susanne Wille, Dienen, kämpfen, beten: Die ersten unverheirateten Schwestern im Dienst der Basler Mission an der Goldküste 1857–1917, Licentiate Thesis, University of Zurich, 2001, p. 18.
- 92.
The children born to Basel missionaries abroad were sent back to Switzerland once they had reached school age. Between 1853 and 1914, more than 1,200 mission children had to separate from their parents overseas and migrate to the mission’s children’s house in Basel. Dagmar Konrad, Schweizer Missionskinder des 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte 29 (2015), p. 163–185, here p. 164; Konrad, Im Dienst des Herrn, p. 66.
- 93.
Zusammenfassung der Referate. Reisepredigerkonferenz in Freudenstadt 1910, BMA, QH-14.1.
- 94.
Patrick Harries, Dompter les sauvages domestiques. Le rôle de l’Afrique dans les Écoles du dimanche en Suisse romande, 1860–1920, in: Sandra Bott/Thomas David/Claude Lutzelschwab/Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl (eds.), Suisse—Afrique (18e–20e siècles): De la traite des Noirs à la fin du régime de l’apartheid/Schweiz—Afrika (18.–20. Jahrhundert): Vom Sklavenhandel zum Ende des Apartheid-Regimes, Münster 2005, p. 227–246.
- 95.
Eckhard Hagedorn, Nur eine “Schwabenkaserne”? Die Bedeutung der Basler Mission für den deutschen Südwesten, in: Uri Robert Kaufmann (ed.), Die Schweiz und der deutsche Südwesten. Wahrnehmung, Nähe und Distanz im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Ostfildern 2006, p. 97–108.
- 96.
Paul Jenkins, The Basel Mission in West Africa and the Idea of the Christian Village Community, in: Godwin Shiri (ed.), Wholeness in Christ. The Legacy of the Basel Mission in India, Mangalore 1985, p. 13–25, here p. 18.
- 97.
As Karolin Wetjen and Rebekka Habermas have shown for Central and Northern Germany, smaller towns and villages learnt about the colonies from missionaries and, in particular, from what contemporaries called “mission friends”, who supported the numerous informal as well as officially recognised mission associations. Karolin Wetjen, Das Globale im Lokalen: Die Unterstützung der Äusseren Mission im ländlichen lutherischen Protestantismus um 1900, Göttingen 2013; Habermas, Colonies in the Countryside.
- 98.
Rudolf Fisch, Self-composed CV until 1911, p. 3, BMA, Personal File Rudolf Fisch BV 985.
- 99.
Ibid., p. 3–4; Rudolf Fisch, Letter to Committee, 03.07.1886, BMA, D-1.45.6.
- 100.
Fisch, Self-composed CV until 1911, p. 4–5.
- 101.
Miller, Missionary Zeal, p. 45–54.
- 102.
Curricula of the evangelical missionary school, in: Seminar BM, Studienpläne und Reformvorschläge, BMA, QS-03.07.
- 103.
According to Christraud Geary, most Basel missionaries in Cameroon came from the peasantry or old Mittelstand and were “upwardly mobile and education-minded.” Christraud M. Geary, Impressions of the African Past: Interpreting Ethnographic Photographs from Cameroon, in: Visual Anthropology 3 (1990) 3, p. 289–315, here p. 296.
- 104.
Susan Thorne, Religion and Empire at Home, in: Catherine Hall/Sonya O. Rose (eds.), At Home with Empire. Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, Cambridge 2006, p. 143–165, here p. 148–149.
- 105.
David Crowner/Gerald Christianson, General Introduction, in: ibid. (eds.), The Spirituality of the German Awakening, Mahwah 2003, p. 5–41, here p. 10–14.; Gerhard Härle, Reinheit der Sprache, des Herzens und des Leibes. Zur Wirkungsgeschichte des rhetorischen Begriffs puritas in Deutschland von der Reformation bis zur Aufklärung, Tübingen 1996, p. 99–126.
- 106.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London/New York 1966; Härle, Reinheit der Sprache, des Herzens und des Leibes; Peter Burschel/Christoph Marx (eds.), Reinheit. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Historische Anthropologie, Wien/Köln/Weimar, Böhlau 2011; Andrew Brower Latz/Arseny Ermakov (eds.), Purity: Essays in Bible and Theology, Eugene 2014; Valentin Groebner, Wer redet von der Reinheit? Eine kleine Begriffsgeschichte, Wien 2019.
- 107.
Hartmut Lehmann, Absonderung und neue Gemeinschaft, in: ibid (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4: Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten, Göttingen 2004, p. 488–497.
- 108.
Weber interpreted this as a precondition for the formation of a capitalistic spirit and the genesis of the modern world. See Max Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus, in: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 20 (1904), p. 1–54; Ibid., Die Protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus, in: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 21 (1905), p. 1–110. For a similar argument, see Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Tübingen 1912, p. 773–789; 827–835; 918–926. On Weber’s interpretation of Pietism, see Hartmut Lehmann, Max Webers Pietismusinterpretation, in: ibid. (ed.), Max Webers “Protestantische Ethik”. Beiträge aus der Sicht eines Historikers, Göttingen 1996, p. 50–65.
- 109.
Friedrich Reiff, Die christliche Glaubenslehre als Grundlage der christlichen Weltanschauung, 2 vol., Basel 1873.
- 110.
Julia Ulrike Mack, Menschenbilder. Anthropologische Konzepte und stereotype Vorstellungen vom Menschen in der Publizistik der Basler Mission 1816–1914, Zürich 2013, p. 91–92.
- 111.
Reiff, Die christliche Glaubenslehre, vol. 2, p. 79.
- 112.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 438.
- 113.
As Hartmut Lehmann has expounded, the full meaning of specific Pietist words such as “spiritual rebirth” or “God’s Kingdom” is difficult to evaluate. Hartmut Lehmann, Einführung, in: ibid. (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4: Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten, Göttingen 2004, p. 1–18, here p. 9.
- 114.
Jonathan Strom, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion, University Park, Pennsylvania 2018; Judith Becker, Conversio im Wandel. Basler Missionare zwischen Europa und Südindien und die Ausbildung einer Kontaktreligiosität, 1834–1860, Göttingen 2015.
- 115.
Markus Matthias, Bekehrung und Wiedergeburt, in: Hartmut Lehmann (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4: Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten, Göttingen 2004, p. 49–79.
- 116.
Maria Lugones, Purity, Impurity, and Separation, in: Signs 19 (1994) 2, p. 458–479; Angelika Malinar/Martin Vöhler, Einleitung: Un/Reinheit. Konzepte und Praktiken im Kulturvergleich, in: ibid. (eds.), Un/Reinheit. Konzepte und Praktiken im Kulturvergleich, Paderborn 2009, p. 9–18.
- 117.
Miller, Missionary Zeal, p. 54–60.
- 118.
Eiselen, “Zur Erziehung einer zuverlässigen, wohldisziplinierten Streiterschar”, p. 49.
- 119.
Plan der neuen Gestaltung der Hausordnung des Missionshauses in Basel, Mai 1860, BMA, Q-9.31; Verordnungen über die persönliche Stellung der Missionare, Basel 1886, BMA, Q-9.21.7; Haus-Ordnung der evangelischen Missions-Anstalt zu Basel, Basel 1888, BMA, X.III.12; Hausordnung der evangelischen Missions-Anstalt zu Basel, Basel 1912, BMA, X.III.12a.
- 120.
Miller, Missionary Zeal, p. 94.
- 121.
On the Protestant tradition of introspection from the Reformation to Pietism, see Hölscher, Geschichte der protestantischen Frömmigkeit in Deutschland, p. 65, 68–72, 76.
- 122.
Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum, p. 124–145.
- 123.
On the basic narrative patterns of Pietist autobiographic writing, see Magnus Schlette, Die Selbst(er)findung des Neuen Menschen. Zur Entstehung narrativer Identitätsmuster im Pietismus, Göttingen 2005.
- 124.
Jenkins, The Basel Mission in West Africa and the Idea of the Christian Village Community.
- 125.
Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 1, p. 346.
- 126.
Eiselen, “Zur Erziehung einer zuverlässigen, wohldisziplinierten Streiterschar”, p. 57–58.
- 127.
Haus-Ordnung der evangelischen Missions-Anstalt zu Basel, Basel 1888, p. 8, BMA, X.III.12.
- 128.
Eiselen, “Zur Erziehung einer zuverlässigen, wohldisziplinierten Streiterschar”, p. 68–69. Also see Josef Haller, Das Leben im Basler Missionshaus, Basel 1897.
- 129.
Douglas, Purity and Danger.
- 130.
They are what Reinhart Koselleck called “asymmetrical antonyms”—binary terms with a universal claim—conceived to exclude mutual recognition. Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt a. M. 1989.
- 131.
On the healing tradition in Wurttemberg Pietism, see Katharina Ernst, Krankheit und Heiligung. Die medikale Kultur der württembergischen Pietisten im 18. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart 2013.
- 132.
These themes within Christian Blumhardt’s theology of healing and deliverance can be traced back to the earlier works of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger and even earlier to writings of Johann Albrecht Bengel. But neither Oetinger nor Bengel put healing and deliverance at the centre of their theology as Christian Blumhardt did.
- 133.
Another major figure from Blumhardt’s era whose name was closely associated with him was Dorothea Trudel. Between 1851 and 1856 Trudel opened two healing homes in Mannedorf in the canton of Zurich to care for the sick. See Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Die Heilung von Kranken durch Glaubensgebet. Mit Zeugnissen aus der Gegenwart, 2nd ed., Leipzig 1924, p. 71–76.
- 134.
Frank D. MacChia, Spirituality and Social Liberation. The Message of the Blumhardts in the Light of Wuerttemberg Pietism, Metuchen 1993; Dieter Ising, Johann Christoph Blumhardt. Leben und Werk, Göttingen 2002; Christoffer H. Grundmann, “Jesus ist Sieger!” Heilungen im Wirken des Pfarrers Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805–1880), in: Irmtraut Sahmland/Hans-Jürgen Schrader (eds.), Medizin- und kulturgeschichtliche Konnexe des Pietismus. Heilkunst und Ethik, arkane Traditionen, Musik, Literatur und Sprache, Göttingen 2016, p. 235–251.
- 135.
Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Krankheit und Heilung an Leib und Seele. Auszüge aus Briefen, Tagebüchern und Schriften, ed. by Dieter Ising, Leipzig 2014.
- 136.
Daniel J. Koehler, Pilgrimage of Protestants. Miracles and Religious Community in J. C. Blumhardt’s Württemberg, 1840–1880, in: Michael Geyer/Lucian Hölscher (eds.), Die Gegenwart Gottes in der modernen Gesellschaft. Transzendenz und religiöse Vergemeinschaftung in Deutschland, Göttingen 2006, p. 60–85, here p. 75.
- 137.
Richard Toellner, Medizin und Pharmazie, in: Hartmut Lehmann (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4: Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten, Göttingen 2004, p. 332–356, here p. 346.
- 138.
Blumhardt collected weekly offerings for the Basel Mission every Saturday evening at Bad Boll. He was a frequent speaker at mission festivals, informed various congregations of the work of the mission, wrote a handbook about its history and maintained close contact with missionaries throughout his life.
- 139.
Christoffer H. Grundmann, Pietism, Revivalism, and Medical Missions. The Concern for the Corporeality of Salvation in A. H. Francke, P. Parker, and G. Dowontt, in: Christian T. Collins Winn et al. (eds.), The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, Eugene 2011, p. 296–306; Ibid., Von der caritas in missionibus zur ärztlichen Mission—Ein Gang durch die Frühgeschichte missionsärztlicher Arbeit in Übersee unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Halles, in: Richard Toellner (ed.), Die Geburt einer sanften Medizin. Die Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle als Begegnungsstätte von Medizin und Pietismus im frühen 18. Jahrhundert, Halle 2004, p. 124–140; Toellner, Medizin und Pharmazie, p. 348.
- 140.
For Rudolf Friedrich Hohenacker’s personal file, see BMA, BV 0019.
- 141.
Marion Baschin, “[…] und war ein Stück Grümpel mehr im Lande”. Die gescheiterten Versuche einer homöopathischen Ausbildung für Missionare der Basler Mission, in: Robert Jütte (ed.), Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte. Jahrbuch des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung, vol. 29, Stuttgart 2011, p. 229–274, here p. 242; Friedrich Hermann Fischer, Der Missionsarzt Rudolf Fisch und die Anfänge medizinischer Arbeit der Basler Mission an der Goldküste (Ghana), Herzogenrath 1991, p. 27; Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 3, p. 26.
- 142.
On the relationship between Christianity, healing and scientific medicine, see Amanda Porterfield, Healing in the History of Christianity, Oxford 2005.
- 143.
Fischer, Der Missionsarzt Rudolf Fisch, p. 110; Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 1, p. 29.
- 144.
Medizinischer Unterricht, in: Lehrfächer 1864–1907, BMA, QS-3.18.4.
- 145.
Schlatter, Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 1, p. 375.
- 146.
141 missionaries and their wives died on the Gold Coast between 1828 and 1913, not counting children. See Jenkins, A Short History of the Basel Mission, p. 6.
- 147.
Karl Hauss, Der Pionier der Balimission. Aus dem Leben von Ferdinand Ernst, Basel 1910, p. 41.
- 148.
Elias Schrenk, Request for a mission doctor, Christiansborg, 24.11.1870, BMA, D-1.22a.50.
- 149.
Johann Gottlieb Christaller, Letter to Committee, Akropong, 01.09.1866, BMA, D-1.18b.10.
- 150.
Christoph Wilhelm Locher, Letter to Committee, Christiansborg, March 1863, BMA, D-1.13b.84; Johann Georg Widmann, Letter to Committee, Akropong, 06.11.1843, BMA, D-1.2.11.
- 151.
Johann Adam Mader, Letter to Committee, Akropong, 27.06.1865, BMA, D-1.17.4.
- 152.
Johannes Christian Dieterle, Letter to Committee, Akropong, 21.05.1849, BMA, D-1.3.17; Charles Alexander Gordon, Some Observations on Medicine and Surgery as Practised by the Natives of the Portion of the West Coast of Africa, in: Edinburgh Medical Journal 2 (1856/1857), p. 529–537, here p. 532; Hermann Vortisch, Statistik und Bericht über das erste Halbjahr 1904 der ärztlichen Mission auf der Goldküste, in: Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropenhygiene 9 (1905), p. 346–354, here p. 352; Rudolf Fisch, Über die Darmparasiten der Goldküstenneger, in: Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropenhygiene 12 (1908), p. 711–718, here p. 712.
- 153.
Elias Schrenk, Request for a mission doctor, Christiansborg 24.11.1870, BMA, D-1.22a.50.
- 154.
Vaughan, Curing Their Ills; Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization and Mobility in the Congo; White, Speaking with Vampires; Worboys, Colonial and Imperial Medicine; Livingston, Debility and the Modern Imagination in Botswana.
- 155.
Francis J. G. Gunn, Letter to Committee, Abokobi, 15.05.1865, BMA, D-1.17.11.
- 156.
Ibid.
- 157.
Fischer, Der Missionsarzt Rudolf Fisch, p. 109–112.
- 158.
Frances J. G. Gunn, Letter to Committee, Abokobi 15.05.1865, BMA, D-1.17.11.
- 159.
Committee report, 12.11.1845, BMA, Komitee-Protokoll 1845, §531.
- 160.
Ibid., 18.11.1846, BMA, Komitee-Protokoll 1846, §572.
- 161.
Ibid., 15.01.1873, BMA, Komitee-Protokoll 1873, §27.
- 162.
Fischer, Der Missionsarzt Rudolf Fisch, p. 111; Schlatter, Die Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 1, p. 233.
- 163.
Schlatter, Die Geschichte der Basler Mission, vol. 3, p. 187.
- 164.
Jospeh Josenhans, Letter to Christoph Wilhelm Locher, 18.09.1865, BMA, D-2.5, p. 72.
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Ratschiller Nasim, L.M. (2023). The Religious Space of Knowledge: The Basel Mission, Worldwide Webs and Pietist Purity. In: Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885-1914. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27128-1_2
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