Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ is Humanities Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the Ohio State University where he specializes in Anglophone African literatures and Yoruba literature. He brings his skills as a literary scholar to bear on the letters that Philip Quaque wrote to London from Cape Coast Castle from 1765 to 1811. Quaque was the first African to train as a Protestant missionary and to devote his life to missionary work in sub-Saharan Africa. Born into an elite family, Quaque referred to himself as the son of Cudjoe Caboceer, the most important political figure among the Fetu peoples at Cape Coast Castle, and Adéẹ̀kọ́ refers to him as the caboceer's grandson, although he was probably a more distant relation or a member of the clan headed by Cudjoe Caboceer. Quaque was taken to England for training by John Thompson, the first Anglican missionary on the Gold Coast. After several years of schooling in England, Quaque was ordained and sent back home by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. He was fairly well known around the Atlantic World in his own time, and the letters he wrote back to his sponsors constitute a remarkable collection of manuscripts written by a West African in the precolonial era. With the rise of Atlantic history, he has also gained scholarly attention, and in 2010 Vincent Carretta and Ty Reese edited a fine collection of his correspondence, a more comprehensive edition than Adéẹ̀kọ́’s.Footnote ¹

Why, then, do we need another edition of the letters? Adéẹ̀kọ́ explains that his goal is to expand the cannon of modern Anglophone African literature and to make the letters more accessible to both literary scholars and to general readers. He claims that Quaque should be seen as a self-conscious modernist and Africanist since he wrote as an African about Africans. He believes that the letters reflect concerns in contemporary African thought, ‘particularly the consequences of religious change for developments in social consciousness and the implication of the intellectual's positioning in the management of the different and contradictory forces that press on self-reflection’ (3). Adéẹ̀kọ́ notes that Quaque was indifferent to the conversion of the enslaved captives who passed through Cape Coast Castle by the thousands during his long residence inside its walls and that, like Phyllis Wheatley and other African converts to Christianity during this period, freedom of the spirit took precedence over freedom of the body. Like most Christians around the Atlantic world, Quaque saw no contradiction between slavery and Christianity, and if he saw an enemy to African progress it was paganism, not slavery.

Adéẹ̀kọ́ divides Quaque's life and letters into five somewhat arbitrary stages marked by changes in his life and labors. He began his work at Cape Coast Castle with optimism and purpose, but he found few converts and soon resigned himself to failure. His attempts to show the British residents of the fort the errors of their ways, particularly with regard to the practice of taking African and mixed-race women as their ‘country’ wives, quickly alienated him from that group. His attacks on the religious practices and beliefs of the Fetu and Fante communities also fell on deaf ears. His one success lay in the founding of a school in the fort for mixed-race children and the children of the local elite, a pioneering effort that has been seen as the forerunner of the modern Ghanaian educational system. In the midst of these initiatives, two of Quaque's wives died, but his third marriage endured until his death.

In attempting to analyze Quaque's literary output, Adéẹ̀kọ́ identifies two personae: the ‘Cape Coast-bound Anglican’ and the ‘Writer-Pastor’. The first speaks with confidence and self-assurance, and describes his battles with both British traders and the Fetu and the Fante in a combative tone. The Writer-Pastor, however, wallows in self-pity and seeks guidance and support from London, even though he is generally met with a silence bordering on indifference. He describes his own people from an outsider's perspective, and his criticisms of their beliefs and culture is as Eurocentric as any produced by a European on the coast. Writing as the Cape Coast-bound Anglican, he expresses his faith and shows more sympathy for his fellow Africans and acknowledges that he is neither fully African nor European. Adéẹ̀kọ́ pushes back against historians who have been critical of Quaque and his missionary efforts, and argues that putting his work into a comparative study of missionaries working under similar difficulties shows him in a more favorable light.

Adéẹ̀kọ́’s editing of the letters presents a number of problems. In an effort to make the letters more accessible to general readers, he has altered punctuation, capitalization, italics, abbreviations, and other matters of style. In the case of capitalization and italicization in particular, these changes obscure matters of emphasis in the letters. He also does not record the intended recipients of these letters, an odd omission. A comparison of the letters here with those in the Carretta and Reese volume raises some larger concerns. In a letter written on 12 May 1773, for example, there are two words spelled differently: ‘path’ (99) appears here, but in Carretta and Reese it is rendered as ‘Paths’.Footnote ² The following phrase from that same letter is written here as ‘porter of the First Congregational Church of Newport’, (100) but in Carretta and Reese the first word in that phrase is ‘Pastor’, a most important distinction.Footnote ³ The same problem occurs in a letter of 28 September 1766 where the phrase ‘few factors’ (49) here is presented as ‘new factors’ in Carretta and Reese.Footnote ⁴ Given these problems, it is difficult to recommend the volume to either scholars or general readers, particularly when the Carretta and Reese volume is available in paperback.