Christian Protten
The Ga-Danish missionary of Christiansborg a century before him.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Church & Scholarship · Osu, Accra · 1834–1917
Before 1895, the history of the Gold Coast was written by Europeans: traders, governors, missionaries, each describing the coast from the deck of a ship or the walls of a fort. Then a Ga-Danish pastor from Osu published a book of more than three hundred pages built on something they had never bothered to collect: what Africans themselves remembered. Carl Christian Reindorf spent decades asking old men and women about wars, kings and migrations, and wrote down what they told him. Without him, whole chapters of Ghana's past, the Battle of Katamanso among them, would survive only in the words of the other side.
Carl Christian Reindorf was born on 31 May 1834 at Prampram, the small trading port east of Accra beside Fort Vernon. His mother, Hannah Anowah Ama Cudjoe, was a Ga woman from the old Dutch quarter of Accra. His father was a soldier at the Danish garrison of Christiansborg, himself the son of a Danish merchant, Augustus Frederick Hackenburg, who had arrived on the coast in 1739 and later served as Danish governor.
The Euro-African families of Osu: Reindorf belonged to a whole class of families around the castle, the Ga-Danish and Ga-German households with names like Reindorf, Richter, Hesse, Svanikier and Larsen, born of Danish officers and traders and Ga women. They were brokers, soldiers, clerks, traders and, later, teachers and pastors. See the Danish Gold Coast and Richter's Fort, the fortified house of one of those families.
He went first to the Danish school at Christiansborg and was baptised in 1844. In 1846 he moved to the school of the Basel Mission, the Swiss-German mission that had arrived in Osu in 1828 and, after early deaths, rebuilt itself under the Danish pastor Andreas Riis and a group of West Indian Christians brought from Jamaica in 1843.
Reindorf trained as a catechist, taught in the mission's schools at Christiansborg and at the seminary at Akropong, and wrote hymns in Ga that are still sung in Presbyterian churches. On 13 October 1872 he was ordained a full minister of the Basel Mission, one of the first Africans to reach that rank in it.
He finished the manuscript in 1889, and it was printed in Basel in 1895 as The History of the Gold Coast and Asante, based on traditions and historical facts, comprising a period of more than three centuries from about 1500 to 1860. It was the first full history of the Gold Coast written by one of its own people.
The book follows the Ga, Fante, Akwamu, Akyem and Asante states, their migrations and wars, the arrival and rivalry of the Europeans, the slave trade, and the long struggle between Asante and the coast. It remains in print and is still a standard source for historians of Ghana. A second edition appeared in 1951, and scholars met in Basel in 1995 to mark its centenary.
Why it matters: Reindorf wrote in the same generation as the Yoruba historian Samuel Johnson in Nigeria. Both were African pastors of European missions who decided that their peoples' memory deserved a written history of its own, before the colonial era swept it away.
Reindorf did what the European writers had not: he went to the people who remembered. For years he interviewed elders, chiefs, linguists and old soldiers in Ga and Twi, collected family and state traditions, and set them against the written records of the forts and the missions.
The result is not neutral. He was a Ga Christian from Osu, and his book looks at the past from Accra; Asante historians have their own versions of many events he describes. But he named his sources, and he preserved voices that no one else recorded. Much of what later scholars know about the Ga and the eastern coast before 1860 comes through him.
Reindorf was born eight years after the Battle of Katamanso of 1826, when the coastal peoples broke Asante's power near Dodowa. He grew up among men who had fought in it, and his account, drawn from their memories, is one of the fullest we have: the order of battle, the role of the Ga and their allies, the capture of the Asante camp.
More on the wars: Nsamankow, 1824, the Anglo-Asante wars, and the Asante expansion under Opoku Ware I, which Reindorf also recorded.
He spent his last years back in Osu and died there on 1 July 1917, aged 83. The chiefs and people of Osu gave him a full state funeral, an honour usually reserved for chiefs. The pastor who had argued with his missionaries was buried as one of the town's elders.
Walk the lanes behind Osu Castle and the old family names are still there. Reindorf, like Richter, Hesse and Larsen, is still carried by families living in the old Ga-Danish family houses of Osu, close to the castle where Carl Christian's father served, as we have seen for ourselves. It is one of the few places in Ghana where the Euro-African world of the forts has left not only buildings but families.
Visiting Osu: Osu Castle (our dedicated site: osucastle.ghana-net.com), the old Basel Mission buildings and Ebenezer Presbyterian Church, and the family houses around them are all within walking distance. Please remember they are homes: ask before photographing people or houses.
The Ga-Danish missionary of Christiansborg a century before him.
The Basel missionary who rebuilt the mission of Reindorf's youth.
The first African Anglican priest, at Cape Coast Castle.
The world his family came from, fort by fort.
Also: Accra, Homowo, People of Ghana and the 1,000-year timeline, which uses Reindorf as a source for several entries.
Reindorf was a man of two worlds, the grandson of a Danish governor and a Ga woman, a pastor of a Swiss mission who practised Ga medicine, and he used both to do something new. His history has its biases, as every history does, and it sees the past from Osu. But it was written by someone who belonged to the country he described, from the testimony of people who had lived it. Every Ghanaian historian since stands a little on his shoulders, and his family still lives by the castle where his story began.
Verified: 29 September 2026. His birth at Prampram on 31 May 1834, his parents and his grandfather Augustus Frederick Hackenburg, his schooling and baptism, his ordination on 13 October 1872, the completion of his book in 1889 and its publication in Basel in 1895, his retirement to his Hebron farm in 1893, his death on 1 July 1917 and his state funeral in Osu follow the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, the Library of Congress authority record and published scholarship. The presence of the family name in Osu today is our own observation. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.