The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the First African Anglican Missionary

The life and letters of Philip Quaque, the first African Anglican missionary; edited by Vincent Carretta and Ty M. Reese. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010. xii + 219 pp. ISBN 13-978-0-8203-3319-9. US$39.95. The life of Philip Quaque (ca.1740-1816) was an extraordinary one. Born on the Cape Coast of West Africa, he was brought, with two other boys, to England in 1754 by the Society for the Propagation for the Gospel to be educated here and then returned to Africa as Anglican missionaries. One of the boys died in England, the second was confined in a mental asylum, but Quaque successfully completed his education, was ordained in 1765, and, after marrying an Englishwomen, returned to the Cape Coast in February 1766. With the exception of one return visit to England, when he brought his children to be educated here, he spent the rest of his life in or around the Cape Coast castle, where he served as not only the SPG's missionary, but as the chaplain of the Committee of Merchants Trading to Africa. He, an African, was thus living for much of his life with Europeans in the same building that was used to house thousands of slaves prior to their being shipped to the West Indies or North America. Indeed his grave, in the centre of the courtyard at Cape Coast castle is only yards from the dungeons in which the slaves were kept. The SPG expected its missionaries to report back regularly on the progress (or lack of it) which they were making, and preserved in the Society's archive, now held by the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House in Oxford, are around forty letters written by Quaque between 1765 and 1811. These have been known to scholars for many years, and in recent times transcripts of some of them have been accessible through the internet, but this is the first time they have been published in full and made more widely available. Moreover, Carretta and Reece have done an excellent job of tracking down other letters of Quaque, primarily to other Anglican divines in North America, and these substantially increase our knowledge of his thinking. They have also included a number of key documents which refer to Quaque, both from the SPG archive and other sources such as the National Archives. Taken as a whole, the seventy-eight documents reproduced here not only provide much important source material on the history of Christian missions, on the European community in West Africa, and on the society and culture of 18th century West Africa more generally, but also reveal significant cross-cultural currents in trade, religion and literacy. In their introduction, the editors have done a good job of chronicling Quaque' s life and placing it in context. There is only one major lacuna, and that relates to Quaque's death and subsequent reputation. They draw attention to the hostile accounts of Quaque promulgated in the early 19th century by Sarah (Bowdich) Lee and John Beecham, both of whom suggested that at the end of his life Quaque lost his Christian faith and reverted, at least in part, to fetishism. Quite rightly, Carretta and Reese will have none of this, and quote Governor Dawson, who wrote to the African Committee in 1816 that during his fifty-one years in Africa Quaque had "conducted himself in a manner becoming his profession". However, they do not mention the important additional evidence provided by Quaque's will. At the time of his death Quaque was owed five years' salary by the SPG (£369 according to Pascoe's standard history of the Society), and this, together with another sum of £100 he bequeathed to the Rev. W. Philip who had already been appointed as Quaque's successor as chaplain to the garrison at Cape Coast shortly before Quaque's death. He would hardly have done this had he not remained committed to his calling and his Christian faith. Quaque's reference in his last letter of 1811 to members of his own family "raising up a malicious dispute" with his wife, and to their "avaricious dispossisions" [sic] suggests that there may have been disputes about money in his last years. …