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Philip Quaque: First African to be educated at Oxford and the first black Anglican Priest
Philip Quaque (or Quacoe; both pronounced Kweku) was an African priest, missionary, and educator in Cape Coast, a city in the Fante Confederacy, later becoming Gold Coast, now Ghana. Born in 1741 in Cape Coast, Quaque was a part of the hybrid cosmopolitan society that grew up in the shadows of the large European trading forts, like Cape Coast Castle. He was a relative of one of the local political elites who helped secure for him schooling in London. He was of a Fante ethnic background as his name Quaque (Kweku) is one given to a male child born on a Wednesday. Because of his African heritage and English training, Quaque stood at the intersection of two different cultural, religious, and racial worlds.
Philip Quaque was in his teens when he was taken from Fante (now Ghana) to England for education by a missionary from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in 1754.
Quaque would, after a decade, become the first African to be ordained as a minister of the Church of England. He also became well-known for being the first African Anglican missionary in the Gold Coast, having returned to the Gold Coast to serve for fifty years as the society’s missionary and chaplain at the Cape Coast castle.
Though his missionary efforts, according to historians, did not yield the desired results, he would provide a unique perspective on the effects of the slave trade and its abolition in Africa through a series of letters he wrote to London and North America during his period of work in the Gold Coast.
Biography
Born in Cape Coast then known as (Gold Coast) and named Kweku, he was said to be the son of Birempong Cudjo, a caboceer or chief’s agent in Cape Coast. In 1754, Kweku was one of three Fante children taken to England for education by a missionary from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Rev. Thomas Thompson, M.A. (Cantab) the first Anglican missionary to West Africa.
Of the three children, Thomas Cobbers died in 1758, while William Cudjoe suffered a mental breakdown and died in 1766. Kweku fared better. The two brothers were baptised at St Mary’s Church, Islington in London on 7 January 1759, which they had attended for four years. Kweku took the name Philip. He studied theology at the University of Oxford and in 1765 was ordained in the Church of England. Phillip Quaque was the first African to be ordained as a minister of the Church of England. The same year, he married Catherine Blunt, an English woman, and the two returned to Cape Coast the following year.
The Royal African Company employed Quaque as the chaplain at Cape Coast Castle. He set up a small school in his own house, “especially for the training of Mulatto children who were growing in large numbers”, and attempted to work as a missionary, but having forgotten most of his native tongue, Fante, he was unable to make any conversions and experienced difficulty connecting with the natives. He married twice more, these times to African women, and in 1784 sent his two children for education in London. He was a co-founder of the philanthropic group, ‘Torridzonian Society’ that fundraised for educational causes.
Letters of Philip Quaque
Quaque wrote a series of letters to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, London from 1765 to 1811 telling of his successes, trials, and hardships during his time at Cape Coast Castle. These letters also depict a colorful and insightful image of life on the West African coast during his time there, such as the workings of African politics and territorial and trade relations. He tells of a number of things including the large number of deaths of Europeans shortly after their arrival, including the death of his first wife in 1766. Most of his letters speak mainly of his baptisms, paying special attention to those that included “others,” or non-mulatto children. Though his school was initially “for the instruction of mulatto children only of both sexes,” Quaque did eventually begin taking in African children.
Through his letters, particularly the one dated 1767, we get a thorough sense of the difficulty of Quaque’s job as a missionary and how it conflicted with the traditionally polytheistic society he was living in. Also very telling through his letters is the influence of the endeavors of European nations to gain control, or at least an advantage, along the coast. In his letter dated July 30, 1775, he mentions the resulting bloodshed of a conflict, which he later mediated, between the local Dutch allies and his own townspeople. Such conflicts, as well as competition with the slave trade and the American Revolution, play a large role in the number of factors behind Quaque’s supposedly limited success. Yet for these reasons, many grant Quaque glory for the number of baptisms he was able to perform, as well as the fact that he consistently stayed in touch with the Society over the course of several decades, even into his state of illness, despite the London headquarters only sending him 3 letters in response during his entire time stationed there.
Legacy
Quaque took the name Philip and went on to study theology in Oxford becoming the first African to be educated there, before being finally ordained in 1765 by the Bishop of London in the chapel of St. James. The same year, he married Catherine Blunt, an English woman, and the two returned to Cape Coast the following year, where Quaque became the society’s missionary and also a chaplain to the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (CMTA) at Cape Coast Castle, the principal slave-trading site of the CMTA.
Quaque is remembered for his influence on both early Christian missions and schooling in Gold Coast. He corresponded with Anglican officials, laypeople, politicians, and other people of African descent around the Atlantic, and much of that writing has been preserved. British merchants were well-established at Cape Coast castle when Quaque was born. When he was a child, Anglican missionaries under the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) began to expand their efforts in Gold Coast, eventually with an eye to recruit African missionaries. With help from family connections, the SPG chose to send Quaque to London for schooling in religious and missionary work. He stayed so long in London that he forgot his native tongue, but returned to Cape Coast in 1766, married to an English woman and newly ordained as an Anglican priest.
For the next five decades, he worked to promote the Anglican faith in Gold Coast. Unfortunately, he faced numerous setbacks in his efforts. Many locals were happy to listen to missionaries as long as they gave out food and drink, but were not interested in converting to Christianity. Quaque was not regularly compensated by either the SPG or the merchant group that ran Cape Coast castle, so he was forced to barter in the local marketplace for food and supplies. This proved to be more than just inconvenient, as both organizations accused him of either focusing too much on commerce or too little on his mission. While he often wrote that his mission lacked success, Quaque’s schools trained a generation of students who would—along with their descendants—rise to prominence in Gold Coast society. In the long term, his work achieved much and his volumes of correspondence are valuable in the ways they show Gold Coast society from a unique perspective.
He revealed his opposition to slavery at a time when people hardly questioned the trade in their writings, and even when his employers supported and facilitated the trade.
With a salary of £50 per annum, Quaque opened a small private school for mulatto children in his own room in the Cape Coast Castle. The pattern of education was based on the English charity school system of Islington. Quaque gave religious instruction and taught reading and writing; the children were taught arithmetic only when they could read very well, according to accounts by the Dictionary of African Christian Biography.
Set up with the aim to also train clerks to the Public Office, the school, by 1797, had three of its students working as writers for the Committee of Merchants in Cape Coast. It would, in subsequent years, produce a generation of students who would rise to prominence in Gold Coast society. His school produced many prominent African elites and intelligentsia.
It is reported that the only black children who were in attendance were mostly children of wealthy Africans. It later started enrolling children from African homes. The school was maintained jointly by the Committee of Merchants and the SPG through its committee in London.
However, maintenance of the school was later given to a local educational authority called the Torridzonian Society which was formed in Cape Coast in 1787, and to which Quaque belonged. Under the society’s administration, the school became the first on the Gold Coast to introduce school uniforms for its pupils.
Philip Quaque died in 1816 in Cape Coast, aged 75 years. He was buried in the Cape Coast Castle courtyard. The Cape Coast school he established in 1766 was named the Philip Quaque Boys School in his memory.
