The Danish Gold Coast
Christiansborg and the eastern forts, 1658–1850.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Church & Scholarship · Osu, Accra · 1715–1769
A hundred years before the Basel missionaries built their churches in Osu, a Ga boy from the shadow of Christiansborg Castle was already a Christian missionary. Christian Jacob Protten, son of a Danish soldier and a Ga mother, was taken to Copenhagen as a child, studied at its university, joined the Moravian Brethren of Herrnhut in Saxony, married a formerly enslaved Caribbean woman preacher, and came home to teach the children of the castle. In 1764 he published the first grammar of the Ga and Fante languages. Almost nobody in Accra today knows his name.
Christian Jacob Protten was born on 15 September 1715 at Christiansborg, the Danish castle at Osu. His father, Jacob Protten, was a soldier of the Danish garrison. His mother, Aafio Dedei, was a Ga woman from a family with a claim to a stool; under Ga matrilineal rules, her son was seen by some as a possible heir.
He grew up in the mixed world of the castle town, the Ga-Danish households that would later produce the Reindorfs, Richters and Hesses, and learned to read at the small Danish school inside the castle.
In 1727, aged about eleven, he was taken to Denmark by the Danish chaplain of the castle, together with another Ga-Danish boy, Frederik Svane. He was baptised in Copenhagen and later studied at the University of Copenhagen. He and Svane were among the very first West Africans to study at a European university, in the same years as Anton Wilhelm Amo, from Axim, was studying and teaching at Halle and Wittenberg in Germany, and Jacobus Capitein at Leiden.
Three Gold Coast students in Europe: Amo in Germany, Capitein in the Netherlands and Protten in Denmark, all in the 1730s. Each was an experiment by a European power; each found the experiment harder to live than it had been to plan.
In Copenhagen Protten met the Moravian Brethren (Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine), the Pietist community of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf at Herrnhut in Saxony, which was sending missionaries to the Caribbean, Greenland and beyond. Protten joined them. In 1737 the Moravians sent him back to the Gold Coast with a German brother, Heinrich Huckuff, to begin a mission. It collapsed within months: Huckuff died and Protten was left alone and without support.
A German first: German historians describe Protten as the first missionary of a German mission society in sub-Saharan Africa, almost a century before the Basel and Bremen missions. Compare the older German presence on the coast, the Brandenburg forts.
Rebecca was born enslaved on Antigua in 1718, taken to the Danish island of St Thomas, freed, and became one of the leading Moravian evangelists among the enslaved people of the Danish West Indies, a Black woman preaching in a slave society. After the death of her first husband she travelled to Herrnhut, and on 6 June 1746 she married Christian Protten there.
Their marriage was not easy. Protten was difficult, argued often with Zinzendorf and the Moravian leaders, and in 1756 the couple were asked to leave Herrnhut. Protten went back to Christiansborg alone for several years. In 1765 Rebecca joined him on the Gold Coast, the first time she set foot in Africa.
Two lives of the Black Atlantic: an enslaved woman from the Caribbean and a Ga-Danish man from Africa, meeting in Saxony and ending their lives together in a slave-trading castle in Accra. Few couples trace the triangle of the Atlantic world as completely.
In 1764 Protten published in Copenhagen En nyttig grammaticalsk Indledelse til tvende hidindtil gandske ubekiendte Sprog, Fanteisk og Acraisk: "A useful grammatical introduction to two hitherto entirely unknown languages, Fante and Accra", written for Danes, with the sounds spelled as a Dane would hear them. It is the first recorded grammar of both languages, and the first time Ga was written down in any systematic way.
A century later the Basel missionary Johannes Zimmermann, working with Carl Christian Reindorf and others, built the full Ga grammar and dictionary and translated the Bible into Ga. Protten had begun the work alone, a hundred years before them.
With the Moravians' approval, Protten became headmaster of the Christiansborg Castle School, teaching the children of the castle's Ga-Danish families to read and write, as he had been taught there himself half a century earlier. Rebecca taught with him.
Protten died at Christiansborg in 1769, in August or October according to different records. Rebecca stayed on and died there in 1780. The Danish trade in enslaved people from the castle continued around their school throughout; Denmark was the first European country to ban the trade, in a law of 1792 that took effect in 1803.
Protten left no church, no congregation and no institution that survived him. The Moravian mission to the Gold Coast never took root, and the Basel Mission, which did, started its own history in 1828. He wrote in Danish, a language almost no Ghanaian reads, and his manuscripts lie in archives in Herrnhut and Copenhagen. So the first African missionary of Accra, and the first man to write down its language, has no monument in the town where he was born.
What survives: the grammar of 1764, his diary and letters in the Moravian archives, the memory kept alive by historians of the Moravian church and of Rebecca Protten, and the Ga-Danish world of Osu itself.
Osu is in central Accra, about 20 minutes by taxi from the city centre or from Accra International Airport. Osu Castle stands on the shore at the end of the old town; access has long been restricted, so check before you go. Walk the lanes behind it to see the old family houses of the Ga-Danish families, and the Basel Mission quarter a little inland.
More: our dedicated site osucastle.ghana-net.com, the forts of Accra and Richter's Fort a few streets away.
Christiansborg and the eastern forts, 1658–1850.
The Ga-Danish pastor and historian a century after him.
His contemporary at Cape Coast, the first African Anglican priest.
The Danish Basel missionary who came to Osu after him.
Also: the languages of Ghana, Accra, People of Ghana and the 1,000-year timeline.
Christian Protten failed at most of what he set out to do. His first mission collapsed, he quarrelled with the Moravian leadership, and his school in the castle had few pupils and no successor. But he was the first person to write down the grammar of Ga and Fante, one of the first West Africans at a European university, and, with Rebecca, part of one of the most remarkable marriages of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. He lived and taught inside a slave-trading castle and left no record of fighting the trade, like almost every churchman of his time. Accra has statues to many people. It has none to the man who first wrote its language down.
Verified: 29 September 2026. His birth on 15 September 1715 at Christiansborg, his parents, his journey to Copenhagen in 1727, his Moravian mission of 1737, his marriage to Rebecca Protten at Herrnhut on 6 June 1746, the 1764 grammar, his headship of the castle school and his death at Christiansborg in 1769 follow Peter Sebald's research, the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, the Moravian Archives and published scholarship on Rebecca Protten. Sources differ on his death date (August or October 1769). Corrections welcome and will be published in full.