George Peter Thompson

George Peter Thompson (1819–1889) was a Liberian-born educator, clergyman and pioneer missionary of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society of Switzerland. He was also the first African to be educated in Europe by the mission and subsequently, the first African to be consecrated and ordained a Basel missionary. Thompson was part of the Basel Mission team led by Danish missionary, Andreas Riis that recruited 24 West Indian missionaries from Jamaica and Antigua in 1843, to aid the work of the society.

Early life and education Born in 1819 in Cape Mount, Liberia, George Peter Thompson was orphaned as a child. Thompson spent his childhood in the household of Jehudi Ashmun, the Colonial Agent of Liberia at the time. He was then taken to Europe by the Basel missionary, the Rev. Jacob F. Sessing in 1829, when he was about ten years old. On the basis of his names, his parents were either of Americo-Liberian stock or Sierra Leonean Creole ancestry, descendants of freed slaves from the Americas. Sessing had gone to Cape Mount, Liberia in 1826 as a Basel missionary to set up a religious station or outpost but was unable to win any Christian converts as the natives viewed Christianity as a Western religion. In 1832, Danish missionary, Andreas Riis arrived on the Gold Coast, accompanied by Peter Petersen Jager, a Schleswig native, born in 1808 and Christian Friedrich Heinze, a medical doctor from Sachsen, born in 1804. By July 1832, both Jager and Heinze had died from tropical ailment.

Riis’ weak condition, the unfavourable climate and the European missionary death toll, exceeding eighty percent, forced the Home Committee of the Basel Mission Society to entirely abandon the mission enterprise and recall Riis in 1839, just as it had done earlier in Liberia. The paramount chief's address gave Riis and the Basel Mission a philosophical message to ponder. On 28 May 1842, Andreas Riis and his wife, Anna Wolters, Widmann and Thompson left Basel for the British leeward island of Antigua in the West Indies via Gravesend and Liverpool for the recruitment exercise while Halleur was sent to the Gold Coast to prepare for the logistics for the arrival of the West Indians. A brief welcome event was organised by the Basel Mission at the Christiansborg Castle and the team was received by Edvard James Arnold Carstensen, the Danish Governor at the time, together with George Lutterodt, a personal friend of Andreas Riis who had earlier been Acting Governor of the Gold Coast. In divorce papers, it was stated that she first filed for divorce and the mission awarded her full custody of the children. She was also at liberty to remarry. In the event of her death, the mission would take care of her children. As a divorced woman with young children to feed, she found it difficult to live on her meagre teacher's salary as her ex-husband, Thompson had been expelled from the mission and had departed the Gold Coast. The Basel missionaries on the Gold Coast petitioned the Home Committee on her behalf, detailing her financial difficulties and requesting for debt forgiveness for unpaid loans from the mission, relating to essential needs for her children.

Infractions and dismissal from the Basel Mission In 1845, Andreas Riis, as a disciplinarian, suspended and placed on probation Thompson who had an alleged extra-marital affair with two women. In December 1846, it was disclosed through mutual watchfulness and reporting to superiors by a co-worker that Thompson was having multiple extra-marital affairs with the Ga-Dangme women at Christiansborg and allegedly with three girls at the school. One of girls was named Amba Brobin who had attended the girls’ school at Aburi for two years, had stayed with the Widmann missionary family for a year and was in the preparatory stages for baptism. Thompson had also become arrogant and a drunkard, developing a reputation as a womaniser between 1843 and 1849.

The scandal created a prolonged moral crisis for Catherine Mulgrave. Thompson was effectively put on probation as a missionary for approximately a year and a half and was stripped of his position as a schoolmaster at Salem and transferred to Akropong, to be given a second chance supervised closely by other Basel missionaries, Widmann, Roes, Dieterle, Mohr and their colleagues. One Basel missionary, Friedrich Schiedt defended George Thompson after the allegations of sexual transgressions surfaced. Meanwhile, Mulgrave stayed on the coast where she continued to run the school and raise their two children. Thompson had another affair which was discovered in June 1849. After much probing, Thompson admitted to these affairs which violated his Basel Mission contract. He wrote his statement in the mission house, witnessed the Basel missionary Johannes Stanger.

As the only ethnically African member of the Basel Mission, Thompson faced alienation from his European colleagues. His moral failures and perceived lack of contrition were blamed on his African identity. A missionary wife and educator, Rosina Widmann, née Binder, (1826-1908) saw him as "a bad person," insinuating that he was “the embodiment of a brutish man [...] dangerously unworthy to be part of the mission.” Binder's husband, Johann Widmann questioned his aptitude as a teacher. In an official report to Basel, Thompson was described as having “sunk deep morally...always suspect to us and one could not expect anything good from him because of his conduct.” Some of scholars have posited that, as a tragic character, Thompson was detached from his native African culture and Liberian origins due to the separation of time and place while growing up in Europe, leading to a loss of identity, making him out of sync with his Basel missionary colleagues. Some of his harshest critics like Andreas Riis claimed he did not know his “place and was always striving for something above himself.” He was thus perceived an outsider or “other” in mission circles. Thompson made a direct complaint to the Home Committee about being demeaned by his fellow missionaries and this was corroborated in a letter written by Hermann Halleur on 30 April 1844 to his brother. The Basel home board's response was even more critical: “With your thoughtlessness, you brought these humiliating experiences upon yourself,” a letter sneered.

On his banishment and subsequent departure from the Gold Coast, George Thompson stated that “the mission should remember him in prayers, since he was aware that he went wrong.”

Later years and death After his divorce, defrocking and expulsion from the Basel Mission, George Thompson returned to his homeland, Liberia. Later, he re-joined the Basel Mission in 1876, staying on until his death in 1889.