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"
Andreas Riis: Missionary
Born: January 12, 1804, Ingumkloster, Denmark (then Schleswig)
Died: January 13, 1854
Occupation: Danish minister, missionary for the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society
Active Mission Work in Gold Coast: 1832–1845
Known For: Founding the Basel Mission in the Gold Coast; recruiting 24 Afro-Caribbean missionaries from Jamaica and Antigua in 1843.
Andreas Riis was a product of northern European Protestant discipline—raised in a household that blended religious fervor with pragmatic trade skills (he was trained as a window-maker and glazier). Though he confessed to a youth of “frivolity,” he found spiritual purpose in his early twenties, entering the Basel Mission with modest education but intense conviction.
Riis was a man of drive, duty, and deep complexity. He saw Africa not only as a mission field but as a battleground between Christianity and “heathenism,” between European order and African “chaos,” and between divine calling and human suffering.
He was willing to suffer and see others suffer for what he saw as God’s work — even if it cost African lives, and ultimately, his own family.
Riis' role in the Gold Coast cannot be separated from the colonial project unfolding around him. While officially a religious emissary, his actions reveal the entanglement of missionary work with colonization, race ideology, land control, and systems of power.
Riis believed in the moral and cultural superiority of European Christianity, and this conviction shaped how he viewed the African people: as souls to be saved, but also as minds and lands to be reshaped. His writings and actions reflect a deep paternalism, reinforced by a Eurocentric lens that often reduced local customs to primitive curiosities.
He commanded, rather than negotiated. He interpreted resistance from African workers as laziness, and mocked requests for rest. Yet, paradoxically, he relied on African knowledge, including that of a traditional healer who likely saved his life when European medicine failed.
This duality of dependency and disdain marked much of his approach to Africa.
Riis faced brutal hardships during his early years in the Gold Coast. Within months of his arrival in 1832, his fellow missionaries died from tropical diseases, and he himself barely survived.
In one of the few moments of cultural humility, he abandoned European medicine and trusted a local African doctor. Riis admitted the treatment was more effective than anything he had known — a moment of acknowledgment that Africa had its own systems of value and knowledge, even if he rarely voiced such respect publicly.
His reports to the Basel Mission were filled with ambivalence: deep frustration with the climate and people, but also unstoppable zeal to claim land and souls for Christ.
The Gate, Andreas Riis stepped trough! Just behind this gate, one can locate the female and male dungeons! The dungeons cant be any worse! (c) Remo Kurka
Riis eventually turned away from the coastal stations to settle inland in Akropong, among the Akwapim. He viewed this location as a healthier climate and a more “untainted” environment for missionary success.
Yet his arrival and settlement in Akropong is emblematic of missionary-colonial power dynamics:
He refused negotiations with his African porters.
He asserted authority without formal permission.
He demanded access to land — and once granted, began building a mission compound that served religious, educational, and territorial purposes.
He openly admitted to “taking possession of land, body, and mind” in order to fulfill his heavenly mission.
To local people, Riis was known as Osiadan — “the builder” — but also “the stubborn one”. He saw himself as righteous; others, perhaps, saw him as reckless.
Riis’ writings reflect a racial hierarchy that permeated missionary and colonial ideology. Africans were, to him, often “slow,” “unreliable,” and “childlike.” These sentiments reinforced the view of missionaries as moral guides and civilizers, and locals as recipients of wisdom — not partners in dialogue.
He also feared African women’s sexuality, describing it as a temptation for unmarried missionaries. His request for a wife was granted by the Basel Mission, who sent Anna Margaretha Wolters — a white, religious, fragile woman meant to guard against interracial relationships and “preserve” missionary integrity.
Anna’s life was tragic. She bore Riis three children — all of whom died on the Gold Coast. She herself perished in 1845 and was buried at sea, her death symbolizing the cost of colonial mission work on personal and familial levels.
Perhaps Riis’ most impactful legacy was his initiative in 1843 to recruit 24 West Indian missionaries from Jamaica and Antigua. These men and women, already Christian and of African descent, were better suited for the tropical climate and played a central role in establishing education, agriculture, and Christianity in what would become colonial Ghana.
This action marked a major turning point — the beginning of an Africanized mission that would outlast European dominance. Yet even here, Riis’ actions can be read in two ways: as visionary inclusion, or as pragmatic control. After all, these recruits were also viewed through the same colonial lens — useful intermediaries in a project still rooted in European superiority.
Riis was no simple saint. He was not merely a “bringer of the Gospel” — he was also a land-grabber, a cultural disruptor, and a gatekeeper of colonial power structures. He worked alongside — not apart from — the systems of domination that would define the 19th-century Gold Coast.
His story challenges the romanticized version of missionaries as pure-hearted cultivators of civilization. Riis was a man of conviction, yes — but also a man of contradictions.
His ethnographic descriptions, his use of slave labor, and his reliance on racial hierarchies all place him firmly within the imperial machinery of the age.
Andreas Riis remains a towering, if controversial, figure in Ghanaian religious and colonial history. He planted the seeds of Christianity that would take deep root in the Akwapim hills and beyond. But those seeds were often sown with the tools — and the tone — of the colonizer.
His life is a case study in zeal without sensitivity, faith mixed with force, and spiritual mission woven tightly into the politics of empire.
Further reading (PDF) - ANDREAS RIIS: A LIFETIME OF COLONIAL DRAMA