At a Loss for Words: A Reflection on Colonial “Aphasia” and the Basel Mission Archive

I have made several attempts to write this reflective piece on our joint excursion between students and researchers from the University of Basel and several institutes in Ghana in July 2024. While writing I keep searching for words to explain my experience in the Basel Mission Archives (BMA). Perhaps I am experiencing that loss for words which the Basel-based historian Georg Kreis describes as “colonial aphasia”.[1] Aphasia is a medical term for the incapability of articulating specific thoughts. He uses the term to highlight the gap in historical literature and language that discusses the colonial past. Switzerland never owned formal colonies but was involved in colonial networks through the activities of its traders, military personnel, and missionaries in colonies occupied by other European powers around the world.[2]

In this short text, I want to reflect on our excursion’s visit to the BMA and the remnants of coloniality found in the archive. The process of colonization is not only measured in the occupation of territory or the exploitation of resources, but also manifests in ideologies that allow for the subjugation of non-European cultures.[3] When reading the historic documents written by Basel missionaries we are met with a specific vocabulary and a one-sided worldview. One question arose during our stay at the archives: How do we talk about this shared colonial past to combat “colonial aphasia” without simply reproducing the narratives employed by the missionaries?

The translation process

Our Ghanaian colleagues ordered specific documents in advance to conduct their research. We split our group in half, so that we would have enough space and spent a day of our excursion doing research in the archives. Those of us who speak German tried to translate documents for our Ghanaian colleagues. Many of the documents in the BMA were written by Swiss or German missionaries in Ghana – or on the Gold Coast as it was known then – during the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries. I was paired with Bernard Obese Ntow to work on his research concerning missionary doctors.

The British author L.P. Hartley once wrote: “The past is a foreign country”[4]. My former linguistics lecturer at the University of Neuchâtel used this quote to illustrate that we have to familiarize ourselves with the historical context to trace the meaning of words. In the case of the Basel Mission (BM), there is an additional layer: Not only are we trying to understand a specific Christian community within the context of nineteenth-century Basel, but we are also trying to understand their engagement with local communities on the Gold Coast.

Bernard and I read through a status report written by the mission doctor Rudolf Fisch. Luckily, the text was typewritten and not in the contemporary Kurrent script, which I cannot decipher.  Even so, I felt self-conscious, since my knowledge of academic translation is very rudimentary. Several times I found myself searching for a translation for outdated German words. Some words were specific to the nineteenth century colonial context. For example, I asked myself whether the word “Medizinmann” was equivalent to the English word “medicine man” or the more frequent but derogatory term “witch doctor”? Historian Linda Ratschiller suggests that the missionaries made distinctions between different traditional practitioners,[5] but it is hard to gauge to what extent. Add to that the fact that the author of this text, the BM doctor Rudolf Fisch, was most likely translating a Gã or Twi word into German in the first place. 

The problems of intercultural translation became strikingly evident when Dr. Fisch described a local medicinal practice as brutal and ineffective: “The poor people could not stand this treatment for long, I could hardly bear to see how they suffered so indescribably.”[6] I am unfamiliar with traditional and historic medicinal practices on the Gold Coast. Since Dr. Fisch does not use much detail to describe the practice and instead underlines that his patients were “taken away from my treatment by their relatives”[7] although they had been improving.  He implies that the relatives did not know what was good for their loved ones.  It was hard for me to make sense of what I was reading, let alone translate it, because Dr. Fisch did not go into much detail describing the motivations behind the practice or how it was administered. He only described it as a form of cutting the skin. Bernard explained to me that Dr. Fisch might have been referencing a traditional Ghanaian practice of releasing pain or illness by placing shallow cuts in specific places. Without exploring the reasons why people might feel apprehensive about his treatments, Dr. Fisch only mentions the practice briefly as a backdrop for his own “superior” medicinal treatment. Only after Bernard explained to me how the cuts were supposed to help with the illness, was I able to translate Dr. Fisch’s word. It was not enough to know English and German. The translation of these missionary letters required an understanding of the historical and cultural context.

The coloniality of archive

Archives, as formal institutions, are places of selective remembrance where knowledge is catalogued and stored for future use. They are also a distinctly European institution that developed alongside the imperial expansion of the nineteenth century.[8] The kind of documents that are stored in archives reflect a knowledge production focused on “what was significant to the European eye”.[9] Archival records can perpetuate a specific colonial language that upholds narratives of othering non-European cultures.[10] The historian Richard King wrote: “The colonial domination of the West over ‘the rest’ in recent centuries has caused many Western categories, ideas, and paradigms to appear more universal and normative than they might otherwise have seemed.[11] The BMA is no exception: it too upholds Eurocentric narratives through the words it uses – and the words it omits.

This Eurocentric worldview becomes apparent when looking at the content of documents in the BMA. While the documents testify of a “shared history”,[12] they also illustrate that the relationship between missionaries and locals was asymmetrical. Documents in the BMA such as Dr. Fisch’s annual report highlight a European perspective and interpretation of local customs. Dr. Fisch’s account is a specific “translation” of the historic events into terms understood by mission headquarters in Basel to account for the allocation of mission funds. The practice of skin cutting is used to underline how locals would rather suffer and die than let him administer his western medicinal treatments.

The coloniality of the archive lies not only within its contents, but also in the way that information is catalogued and preserved. While there are documents in other languages in the BMA, many documents that preserve the Eurocentric perspectives of the missionaries (including some patronizing or even racist words) are written in German and often in the contemporary Kurrent script that few people can read. This adds another layer of inaccessibility to the study of colonial relationships between the local population and the missionaries.

During our excursion, we only spent a brief amount of time in the BMA. Although some members of our research group stayed longer after the excursion, there was barely time to scratch the surface of the documents of interest. It would have been fruitful to gain more insight into events and practices described by the missionaries in their sources by our colleagues from Ghana. When we visited the depot archive of the Museum of Cultures in Basel, I was impressed by the knowledge shared with us about the artifacts by our Ghanaian colleagues. 

We may try to speak about a “shared history” or an “entangled” history of the BM, but unfortunately, research has been very lopsided so far. The excursion allowed only a shallow and deeply unprofessional insight into the BMA as my Swiss colleagues, and I were searching for the right words in English. Much is to be done regarding the accessibility of the BMA. Just as there are debates about returning cultural artefacts from the Museum of Cultures in Basel,[13] there need to be more debates about actually sharing our joint history. The history of the BM in Ghana is layered and complex, making it hard to find the right words to talk about it. However, making archives more accessible for everyone by digitizing content, translating or publishing research in English could be an important step in overcoming this aphasia. Sharing a history also means creating a shared space of historical research.

Portrait Alyna Reading
About the author:Alyna Reading

I am currently working on my Master’s degree in European Global Studies at the University of Basel. Since writing my Bacherlor’s thesis about the Swiss SMB catholic mission press in Rhodesia I have been interested in the role of Switzerland in colonial endeavors. My interest lies in interdisciplinary approaches to understanding coloniality through the lens of history, law and religious science. Alongside my academic interests, I am engaged in a community garden and enjoy spending time outdoors.