PAUL JENKINS

Presbyterian Church of Ghana to be open to a renewed discussion of the incorporation of
pre-Christian rites of social cohesion.
Structuring the subject matter of this paper with its intention to do justice to two dif-
ferent regions and their traditional polities, whilst also reflecting on the application of visual
sources to the specific question of church-state relations, has of course not proved easy. I
begin with a cursory statement of the history of the Basel Mission and its photography in
Ghana and Cameroon, and continue with the definition and in-depth contemplation of what
I consider a genre of missionary portraits of kings and chiefs in the Cameroon Grassfields
during the Inter-War Period reflecting-to anticipate my results-the open interaction of
two different categories of office-holders, kings/chiefs and missionaries. I then compare
those findings with the portraits of kings and chiefs taken by Basel missionaries in the years
before 1914 in Cameroon, especially those taken by a lady of unusual talent, which help to
define, by comparison, the characteristics of the genre of the inter-war period there. Finally
I turn to photographs from Ghana, and pursue with those holdings the themes which have
arisen with the holdings from Cameroon.
The Basel Mission and its Photography in West
Africa: A Chronological Summary
According to the website statistics of the Basel Mission photo collection there are 1,200
"hits" when a search is made for Ghanaian and Cameroonian images with the keywords
"king" and "chief," 65 percent of them Cameroonian images, 35 percent Ghanaian.2° There
is a certain paradox in the way that the number from Cameroon is larger than that from
Ghana , since the first pertinent photograph from a Basel missionary in Ghana dates back
to the late 1860s,21 and the earliest from the Cameroon Grassfields to only 1902.22 The dif-
ference can partly be ascribed to the different historical trajectories of the Basel Mission in
Ghana and Cameroon, and partly to the increasing ease with which photographs could be
taken over time.
The Basel Mission first sent missionaries to Ghana in 1828.23 In the 1850s it was es-
tablishing inland stations in what is now the Eastern Region of Ghana, moving into Asante
when that state became accessible to mission work in 1896. It participated in the coming of
the high colonial period in the early twentieth century as a provider of schools, and through
its Trading Company's involvement in the export of cocoa.24 During the First World War,
however, the Basel Mission and its Trading Company were expelled from this British colony.
The Trading Company was allowed to return after the war under specific conditions which
included a full separation of the two organizations. The missionaries were allowed back in
limited numbers only in the mid-1920s, at first under the tutelage of the Scottish Mission,
and in any case in the context of an African church, newly established with formal indepen-

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