The Twi Bible
The complete Bible in Twi, finished in 1871 and printed in Basel.
Ghana-Net.com · Greater Accra · Eastern Region · Volta Region
Two Protestant missions, one from Switzerland and one from northern Germany, arrived on the Gold Coast within twenty years of each other. The first buried almost all its early missionaries and was saved by Christians from the Caribbean. The second wrote the Ewe language down. Between them they built the schools, the written Twi and Ewe, and the two largest Protestant churches of southern Ghana, and they were thrown out in the First World War. This is how Swiss and German missionaries shaped Ghana, told without the hymns.
On 18 December 1828, four young missionaries of the Evangelical Missionary Society of Basel landed at the Danish settlement of Christiansborg, beside Osu Castle: Karl Friedrich Salbach, Gottlieb Holzwarth, Johannes Henke and Johannes Gottlieb Schmid. Most came from Württemberg in southern Germany; the society was based in Basel, Switzerland.
Henke was dead within months. All four died within three years. When a second group arrived in March 1832, including a Danish missionary named Andreas Riis, they found the graves of the first.
The coast killed Europeans. Malaria and yellow fever made the Gold Coast one of the deadliest postings in the world for anyone without immunity. In the Basel Mission's early decades, missionaries and their wives died at a rate that would close any organisation today. The mission kept sending more.
In 1835 Riis moved the mission up into the cooler Akuapem hills, to Akropong, the seat of the Akuapem state. He built a house, learned the language, and converted almost no one. In 1840 he was recalled, and Basel came close to abandoning the Gold Coast.
Instead it tried something new. In 1843 Riis returned with Johann Georg Widmann and George Thompson, bringing with them some two dozen Christian families and single people from the Caribbean, most of them from Jamaica, recruited through the Moravian Church. They were people of African descent, a generation out of slavery, sent to show that Africans could be Christians without becoming Europeans.
They are the forgotten founders of Ghanaian Presbyterianism. The West Indian settlers farmed, taught and preached at Akropong, and the church there became the mission's foundation. The seminary opened at Akropong in 1848, today the Presbyterian College of Education, is the oldest teacher-training college in Ghana. From Akropong the mission spread to Aburi, Abokobi, Kyebi, Abetifi and on into Asante country.
The Basel Mission's most lasting work was not a church but a language on paper. Johann Gottlieb Christaller, who arrived at Osu in January 1853, spent fifteen years on the Gold Coast working with Ghanaian colleagues, above all David Asante and Theophilus Opoku, to put Twi into writing.
The complete Bible in Twi, finished in 1871 and printed in Basel.
A Twi grammar in 1875 and a two-volume dictionary in 1881, still used by linguists.
A collection of 3,600 Twi proverbs, gathered from the people who spoke them.
The missionaries worked in the same way on Ga at Christiansborg. The effect was double-edged: the Akuapem form of Twi became the written standard, and the mission decided what the "correct" language looked like on the page.
The North German Mission Society, based in Bremen and known in Ghana simply as the Bremen Mission, sent its first missionaries to the Gold Coast in 1847. Lorenz Wolf reached Peki, in Ewe country east of the Volta, that year. Like Basel's first men, the early Bremen missionaries died fast, and the mission moved to the coast at Keta, then inland again to Ho, Amedzofe and, across the later border, Lomé.
After 1884, when Germany took Togoland, most of the Bremen stations found themselves in a German colony. By 1914 the mission had two stations in the British Gold Coast and seven in German Togo, and a church of around 11,000 members.
What Christaller did for Twi, the Bremen missionaries did for Ewe. J. Bernhard Schlegel translated the four Gospels, printed in 1861. The whole New Testament followed in 1877, and the complete Ewe Bible in 1913. Diedrich Westermann, later one of Europe's leading Africanists, produced an Ewe dictionary of more than 15,000 words in 1905 and a grammar in 1907.
A standard Ewe that did not exist before. The missionaries built a written language out of many spoken dialects. That common written Ewe, taught in mission schools on both sides of the colonial border, helped create a shared Ewe identity, and so, indirectly, the Ewe unification movement that shaped the 1956 plebiscite. See our Ewe mini-dictionary.
Both missions were bound up with commerce. From 1859 the Basel Mission ran its own trading company, which in the twentieth century became the Union Trading Company (UTC), a name still remembered in Ghana. The Bremen Mission was closely tied to the Bremen merchant house of Vietor, whose head sat on the mission's own board.
Domestic slavery was legal on the Gold Coast until 1874, and some of the mission's own converts owned slaves. For years the Basel Mission tolerated it, and in the 1860s it faced a bitter internal dispute before it finally required its members to free them. The subject is still rarely discussed in church histories.
The Basel workshops trained carpenters, masons and blacksmiths, and the mission farms experimented with coffee and cocoa. The best-known name in the cocoa story, Tetteh Quarshie, came out of that world of mission-trained craftsmen.
Converts were often moved into separate mission quarters, the Salems, laid out in straight lines beside the old towns. They were meant to protect new Christians; they also cut them off from their own families, festivals and chiefs.
When war broke out in 1914, British and French troops occupied German Togoland within weeks. The Bremen Mission's German staff were arrested and deported; by the mission's own count, 52 of its workers were interned. In the British Gold Coast, the Basel missionaries, Swiss and German alike, were expelled in 1917.
The expulsions made the African churches. In 1918 the Basel congregations met in their first synod at Akropong under Scottish oversight, with Peter Hall, a descendant of the Caribbean settlers of 1843, as their first Moderator. In 1926 they took the name Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast, today the Presbyterian Church of Ghana. In May 1922 the Ewe congregations met at Kpalimé and declared their own church independent under Pastor Robert Kwami, today the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
Christ Presbyterian Church and the old seminary, the heart of the Basel Mission. An easy trip from Accra, combined with Aburi on the same ridge.
Where the Basel Mission began in 1828, in the shadow of Osu Castle, a few streets from Richter's Fort.
The Bremen Mission country: Ho with the Volta Regional Museum, and the mountain village of Amedzofe.
Presbyterian and E.P. schools across southern Ghana, many on their original mission sites, educated a large part of the generation that led the country to independence.
Andreas Riis, the man who took the Basel Mission to Akropong, is the subject of a series on CapeCoastCastle.com, including a critical African reflection on his legacy.
And a man at war with himself: the life of the Basel Mission's founder at Akropong.
What the Basel Mission's founder left behind, seen from the Ghanaian side.
From holy zeal to colonial reality: the journey to the Gold Coast.
Ho and the Volta Region's historic journey, the Bremen Mission's country.
The Danish castle beside which the Basel missionaries landed in 1828.
The Basel and Bremen missionaries gave southern Ghana written Twi and Ewe, its oldest teacher training college and schools that educated the independence generation. They also traded for profit, tolerated slave-holding among their own converts for years, separated converts from their families, and decided what Ghanaian languages should look like on paper. Both churches only became truly Ghanaian when the missionaries were thrown out. And the people who saved the Basel Mission in 1843 were not Swiss or German at all, but Caribbean Christians whose names hardly anyone remembers.
Verified: 28 September 2026. The 1828 arrival and names, the 1832 group, Akropong 1835, the 1843 Caribbean settlers, the 1848 seminary, the 1917 expulsion, the 1918 synod and Peter Hall, and the 1926 name follow the Presbyterian Church of Ghana's own history. Christaller's dates follow standard biographies. The Bremen Mission's dates, translations, the 52 interned workers and the 1922 Kpalimé synod follow the Norddeutsche Mission's published history. The mission's trading ties and the slave-holding controversy follow standard histories of the missions. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.