Andreas Riis

Andreas Riis (12 January 1804 – 13 January 1854 ) was a Danish minister and pioneer missionary who is widely regarded by historians as the founder of the Gold Coast branch of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society. A resident of the Gold Coast from 1832 to 1845, Riis played a critical role in the recruitment of 24 West Indian missionaries from Jamaica and Antigua in 1843 to aid the work of the mission in formal education, agriculture and the propagation of the Gospel in colonial Ghana. As the first Basel missionary in Akropong in 1835, he laid the groundwork for the first mission house, eventually resulting in the founding of the first Christian church there which later became the Christ Presbyterian Church, Akropong.

Early life and education

Andreas Riis was born on 12 January 1804 in a small artisan town, Løgumkloster in northern Duchy of Schleswig near the German-Danish border. In Pietist towns and villages, a traditional rural lifestyle was commonplace as were the local production and supply of food and occupations in the crafts such as carpentry, welding and blacksmithing. Andreas Riis' father, Andreas Petersen Riis (c. 1744 – 1819) was a farm owner, a window maker and a glazier. His mother was Anna Maria F. Philipsen (1765–1850). Riis' father had been married previously to an older woman, Maren Petersdatter (1728–1791).

Missionary activities on the Gold Coast

Early years Riis then sailed to Accra on the Gold Coast together with Peter Petersen Jager, a Schleswig native, born in 1808 and Christian Friedrich Heinze, a medical doctor from Sachsen, born in 1804. They arrived in Christiansborg on 21 March 1832 and were received by a Ga-Danish Euro-African friend of the mission, George Lutterodt who assisted them in renting a house.

Earlier in March 1827, the Basel Mission had selected four young men from rural Switzerland and southern Germany between the ages of 23 and 27 years. After consultation with his traditional elders and fetish priests, the paramount chieftain, Addo Dankwa gave land to Andreas Riis to set up a mission station. In the edition of the Mission Magazin in 1839, the Basel Mission's magazine, an article, "Riis: Missionsreise von Akropong in das Aquambu", celebrated Riis' exploits in the establishment of the Akropong mission station as a preliminary triumph of the sole Basel missionary survivor on the Gold Coast. For nearly eight years Riis had been unable to take credit for a single conversion and baptism of a native to Christianity. In the face of very unfavourable conditions, the Basel Mission authorities decided to recall Riis to Switzerland and the mission was to be closed. According to oral traditions, at the valedictory durbar organized in honour of Riis, the paramount chief, Okuapehene, Nana Addo Dankwa, is known to have remarked, "How can you expect so much from us? You have been staying among us all along for a short time only. When God created the world, He made the Book (Bible) for the European and animism (fetish) for the African, but if you could show us some Africans who could read the Bible, then we would surely follow you".

Also accompanying the group was an Angolan-born, Jamaican trained teacher, Catherine Mulgrave who became school principal the Danish-run Christiansborg Castle School in Osu which had been taken over by the Basel Mission. Riis also had the Reverend J. G. Widmann, a German clergyman as his assistant. They also had donkeys, horses, mulls and other animals and agricultural seeds and cuttings such as mango seedlings which they were going to introduce to the Gold Coast economy. Other tropical seedlings brought by the West Indian missionaries include cocoa, coffee, breadnut, breadfruit, guava, yam, cassava, plantains, cocoyam, banana and pear. Cocoyam, for example, is now a Ghanaian staple. Later on in 1858, the missionaries experimented with cocoa planting at Akropong, more than two decades before Tetteh Quarshie brought cocoa seedlings to the Gold Coast from the island of Fernando Po, then a Portuguese protectorate.

Alleged infractions, recall and dismissal Due to fraught interpersonal relations with his missionary colleagues and locals, "the Home Committee requested a general summation of Riis' practices on the Gold Coast." Pharo died on 28 September 1900 in Frederikshald. A 1958 scholarly piece authored by the Swiss German church historian and theologian, Hans Werner Debrunner, on Riis' life dubbed him, albeit in hagiographic and hyperbolic terms, as the "Moses of the Ghana Presbyterian Church".