Andreas Riis: a lifetime of colonial drama

Abstract

This article traces the adventures of Andreas Riis, a missionary assigned to the Gold Coast (West Africa) by the Basel Mission in the nineteenth century, as a narrative of landscapes, local inhabitants and power to show the complexity of missionary discourse. Various unpublished documents from the Basel Mission Archive in Switzerland show how Riis set himself as paradigm of a superior culture in possession of modernity and exportable European values capable of engendering and trivializing landscapes in terms of racial and ideological representation of otherness. This paper is not intended for an audience of contextual Bible study but for those interested in critical reading of missionary history where imagination triumphed over realities and situates Riis within the genre of travel writing.

Institute of African Studies: Research Review 2005, Vol. 21(1): 29-44