Christian Protten
The Ga–Danish missionary of Christiansborg, his contemporary in Accra.
Ghana-Net.com · People of Ghana · Church & Scholarship · Cape Coast · 1741–1816
In 1754 three Fante boys from Cape Coast were put on a ship to England to be made into Christians. One died of smallpox, one lost his mind. The third, Kweku, came home twelve years later as the Reverend Philip Quaque, the first African ever ordained a priest of the Church of England, with an English wife and hardly any Fante left. For the next fifty years he preached in the chapel of Cape Coast Castle, paid by the company that shipped enslaved people from its dungeons. He is buried in the courtyard, a few steps from the doors they went through. Few lives show the contradictions of the Gold Coast so starkly.
Kweku was born in Cape Coast in 1741, the son of Birempong Cudjo, a caboceer, one of the powerful African brokers who stood between the Fetu and Fante towns and the English merchants in the castle. Families like his lived from the castle's trade, and that included the trade in people.
In 1754 the Reverend Thomas Thompson of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), the Church of England's missionary society, arranged to send three boys to England to be educated as future missionaries to their own people: Kweku, Thomas Cobbers and William Cudjoe. It was an experiment in making African clergy.
The other two: Thomas Cobbers died in England in 1758. William Cudjoe fell into mental illness and died in 1766. Kweku was the only one who finished the course the SPG had planned for all three. The Thompson who sent them later wrote a pamphlet arguing that the African slave trade was consistent with humanity and religion.
Kweku was schooled in London under a teacher paid by the SPG. On 7 January 1759 he was baptised at St Mary's, Islington, and took the name Philip. He studied theology; some accounts say at Oxford, though the evidence for that is thin.
In 1765 the Bishop of London ordained him deacon and then priest. He was the first African ordained in the Church of England. The same year he married an Englishwoman, Catherine Blunt, and was appointed "missionary, schoolmaster and catechist to the Negroes on the Gold Coast".
Not the first on the coast: twenty years earlier the Dutch had sent another Gold Coast boy home as a minister: Jacobus Capitein, ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1742 and posted to Elmina. Capitein had famously defended slavery as compatible with Christianity. Compare also Anton Wilhelm Amo, the Axim-born philosopher in Germany.
Quaque and Catherine arrived at Cape Coast in February 1766. Twelve years in London had made him an English clergyman in all but birth. He had largely lost his mother tongue and had to preach to Fante listeners through an interpreter, which cost him standing in the town. Catherine died within about a year of their arrival.
He later married twice more, both times African women, and sent his children to be educated in England, as he had been. He made only one more visit to England, in 1784–85. The rest of his life, fifty years in all, was spent at Cape Coast.
Quaque had two employers. The SPG paid him as a missionary, often late. The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, which ran Cape Coast Castle after the Royal African Company, paid him as chaplain to the castle's garrison and officials. Above the chapel where he preached, the company's officers lived; below it, in the dungeons, enslaved Africans waited for the ships.
What he said about it: the surviving letters show a man troubled by the drunkenness, disease and immorality of the European garrison, and by the indifference of the town to his preaching, and constantly short of money. They show far less open protest against the trade he lived beside than a modern reader might hope. He was a man of his time and of his employer, and that is part of the story, not a footnote to it. See who sold whom.
Quaque's lasting work was not conversion, of which there was little, but teaching. From 1766 he ran a small school, mostly for the children of European men and African women, the "mulatto" families of the castle, and for the sons of African traders. Some years he had no pupils at all, some years over a dozen. It is remembered as one of the first Western-style schools on the Gold Coast.
The school's line continues in the Philip Quaque Boys' School in Cape Coast, which carries his name. The pupils of such schools became the literate Fante families from whom, a century later, came the lawyers and nationalists of the coast, men like John Mensah Sarbah.
For almost half a century Quaque wrote to the SPG in London, reporting on his work, complaining of his pay, describing the wars, epidemics and politics of the coast. The letters survive and have been published in a modern edition. They are one of the very few eighteenth-century accounts of the Gold Coast written by an African, and among the earliest writings in English by any African author.
Philip Quaque died at Cape Coast on 17 October 1816, aged about 75, after fifty years of service, and was buried in the courtyard of Cape Coast Castle. His grave lies a few yards from the entrance to the male slave dungeons, and near the graves of British governors including George Maclean and his wife, the poet Letitia Landon.
Remembered: Cape Coast marks Philip Quaque Day on 17 October, and a memorial tablet stands at Christ Church, the Anglican church in the town. For visitors from the African diaspora, the grave of an African priest paid by the slave company, beside the Door of No Return, is one of the most difficult things in the castle.
Cape Coast is about three hours west of Accra by the coast road. The grave is in the castle courtyard and is included in the guided tour of Cape Coast Castle; ask your guide to point it out, as not every tour stops there. Christ Church and the Philip Quaque Boys' School are in the town nearby.
Plan the visit: Cape Coast Castle, our dedicated sites CapeCoastCastle.com and CapeCoastCastleMuseum.com, and current entrance fees.
The Ga–Danish missionary of Christiansborg, his contemporary in Accra.
The pastor who wrote the first history of the Gold Coast.
The castle, its memory and who speaks for it.
The missionaries who came after him and changed the country.
Also: the history of slavery in Ghana's forts, the forts and castles hub, People of Ghana and the 1,000-year timeline.
Philip Quaque is easy to celebrate and easy to condemn, and both are too simple. He was a child taken from his home for an experiment that killed his two companions, and he survived it. He became the first African priest of the Church of England, taught the children of the castle for half a century and left one of the earliest African voices in English. He also served, and was paid by, the slave trade he lived beside, and left little record of fighting it. His grave in the courtyard of Cape Coast Castle holds all of that at once, which is exactly why every visitor should stop there.
Verified: 29 September 2026. His birth in 1741, the SPG voyage of 1754, the fate of his two companions, his baptism in January 1759, ordination in 1765, return in February 1766, marriage to Catherine Blunt, service as chaplain and missionary, death on 17 October 1816 and burial in the castle courtyard follow published scholarship, including the modern edition of his letters. His study at Oxford is uncertain and is presented as such. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.