The Religious Space of Knowledge: The Basel Mission, Worldwide Webs and Pietist Purity

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.

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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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 1815.¹²

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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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 1903.³⁵ 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 1903.³⁶

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.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.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.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 1859.⁴⁰ 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.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.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.”⁴³

Basel had seen an upsurge in immigration since 1848, particularly from other regions in Switzerland, southern Germany, Alsace and Italy.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.⁴⁵ The City Mission’s declared goal was to religiously assimilate these immigrants into the Protestant population of the city.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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).⁵⁵

Fig. 2.1

Die Basler Missionsgebiete, in: Führer durch die Völkerkundliche Ausstellung der Basler Mission, Basel 1908, BMA, Box “Missionsmuseum”, without signature

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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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 1855.⁶⁸

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 1905.⁶⁹ 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.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 1916.⁷¹

The Basel Mission, and indeed the nineteenth-century missionary movement more generally, enjoyed social approval and financial support across many levels of European societies.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.⁸¹

The first women to get involved in the Basel Mission abroad were missionary wives who worked alongside their missionary husbands.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.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 1914.⁸⁴ 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.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.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.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.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 1901.⁸⁹ The Committee for Women’s Mission consisted of ten female members, all related to male Committee members.⁹⁰

In the early twentieth century, 151 missionary wives and only 11 single women worked as teachers and nurses for the Basel Mission abroad.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.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.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.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.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 1914.⁹⁶

Members of voluntary societies anchored the foreign mission within local contexts by organising bazaars, festivals and exhibitions dedicated to the evangelising cause abroad.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.”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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.¹⁰⁹ Reiff was the Basel Mission’s head theology teacher and member of the Committee from 1864 to 1875.¹¹⁰ 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.”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.”¹¹²

Pietists were noted for an intense emotional fervour that began with a personal conversion experience or “spiritual rebirth,” as they called it.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.¹²¹

Pietists corresponded, sometimes over great distances, with spiritual friends and leaders, and kept diaries, which they shared during edification assemblies and devotional hours.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.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.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.¹²⁵ The Committee cited a lack of “moral integrity” and “divine vocation” as the most common reasons for turning down applicants.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.”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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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 1846.¹³⁶

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.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.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 1735.¹³⁹ The Basel Mission first employed a medical man in 1822, who practised in the Caucasus region for nine years.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.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.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.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.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.”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.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.”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.”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.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.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.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.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.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.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.”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?”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.¹⁵⁷

Why not then, as Gunn suggested, recruit a medical man connected with the Basel Mission?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.”¹⁵⁹ The Committee acknowledged that he was “a serious, favourable, altruistic man” but refused to send him overseas doubting that he was “actually converted.”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.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.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.”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.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.