Historicizing Child Labor in Africa

E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class has had a significant impact on the work of African labor historians.Footnote ⁵ In the 1970s, Africanists began critiquing the conception of Africa as “being bound by some kind of tribalism” and “ending the search for a kind of African authenticity.”Footnote ⁶ These changes in the way African labor histories, in particular, were written enabled Africanists to address larger questions of greater theoretical importance. Frederick Cooper criticizes early scholarship by Africanist labor historians for following a teleological blueprint suggesting that everything Thompson discussed in his work led to the formation of the English working class.Footnote ⁷ Cooper argues that, rather than suggesting that Africans could also be workers, Africanists should also explore whether the meanings Africans “attached to work, the kinds of work groups in which they participated, and the notions they had of collectivity affected their actions in an era of capitalist intrusions.”Footnote ⁸ To date, much of the history of labor in Africa has been concerned with the proletarianization of African workers and has largely excluded children. Although child labor in Africa is very much a contemporary concern and has received attention from nongovernmental organizations and human rights organizations including the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the Anti-Slavery Society, there is still much work to be done on its history.

To date, the most significant contribution to the history of African child labor has been Beverly Grier's work on colonial Zimbabwe. Her Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe is the first book-length historical study to look at notions of childhood in Africa and the experience of children as laborers; it has set an important standard for the fields of African labor history and childhood studies. Relying on James and James' (2004) theory of childhood, Grier emphasizes that ideas of childhood in Zimbabwe were contested not only within the framework of African patriarchy, but also by the colonial state, European settlers, and children themselves.Footnote ⁹ In her analysis of children as social actors, Grier stresses the agency of children and their role in African labor dynamics and social processes. This article will emphasize the importance of studying the history of child labor and the experience of childhood by arguing that its inclusion in the study of African labor history can further complicate the narrative of childhood in Africa.

Historical Context: Early Colonial Ghana and the Basel Mission

By the sixteenth century, the Twi speaking Akan people had become the dominant political group in the region that would become colonial Ghana. Akan society was organized into states, families, and kinship groups.Footnote ¹⁰ In Akan communities, the extended family was an important institution that had been developed as a means of organizing shared labor, particularly large-scale efforts like clearing forests and planting crops. These groups were organized primarily along matrilineal lines; however, unrelated people were often brought into these extended families. It was particularly common for slaves to be assimilated into the family group. This aspect of domestic slavery or dependency was cause for much discussion among European missionaries and colonial officials and contributed to the debate over slavery's continued existence in Ghana following British annexation of the region.Footnote ¹¹ In the nineteenth century, the Basel Mission Society became heavily involved in this debate and even contemplated the purchase of slave children, whom they imagined would live at the mission station as “refugees.”

During the early nineteenth century, significant changes in the West African economy occurred, as the focus shifted from the export of slaves to the export of agricultural products like palm oil, palm kernels, cocoa, and other “legitimate trade” items.Footnote ¹² This development resulted in the increased use of slaves in the local economy; slaves became the largest component of the labor force in West Africa.Footnote ¹³ Thus, as Paul Lovejoy suggests, slavery became more of a social institution than it had been previously.Footnote ¹⁴

The British abolition of the slave trade served as a blockade of what had been Asante's principal export and greatest source of income—slave labor. Initially, the British faced a significant challenge for regional supremacy. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, some of the coastal rulers aligned with the British against the Asante and the British formally annexed the region in 1874, following the last British-Asante War (1873–1874).Footnote ¹⁵ Despite this, colonial authorities actually had limited control in the region, and, thus, collaboration with African communities was necessary.Footnote ¹⁶ In the interior, the Basel Mission faced the same challenges as colonial officials. In order to establish mission stations and encourage local Africans to send their children to mission schools, members of the Basel Mission also needed to negotiate with African community leaders and parents of local children.Footnote ¹⁷

At the height of western missionary activity, there existed a deeply ingrained belief that sending missionaries abroad was essential. The movement to abolish slavery and the slave trade had created “a sense of shared humanity” and Christian people, particularly evangelical Protestants, felt they had an obligation to spread the message of the gospel to former slaves.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, the effort to “civilize” Africans became a fundamental feature of European religious societies.Footnote ¹⁹ T. Jack Thompson, an historian of African Christianity, argues that by the second half of the nineteenth century, photographs taken by European missionaries in Africa were vital tools “in the ideological armoury of the mission society at home.”Footnote ²⁰ Essentially, missionary photography contributed to the idea that Africa and Africans were inherently inferior to Europeans “technologically … culturally, morally and religiously.”Footnote ²¹ Thompson argues that these photographs played a crucial role in engendering European popular support for the missionary effort on the African continent while also shaping European stereotypes of what Africa and Africans were like. These kinds of images were disseminated to a popular audience in Britain through the collaboration of abolitionist and missionary groups. As Michael Barnett argues, abolitionist and missionary interests drew upon and learned from each other as part of a larger humanitarian imperialist effort.Footnote ²²

The large Christian population in Africa today is evidence of the enduring effects of the “Christianization” of the continent, a process in which the Basel Mission Society was deeply involved. Europeans were familiar with the West African coast by the late eighteenth century because of their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, but they did not immediately begin any significant missionary work there. In some cases, slaves were encouraged to take part in Christian religious activities, but there was no real missionary presence among the local populations.Footnote ²³ Early attempts to establish missionary settlements were often decimated by disease: The missionaries died before they could make any significant inroads in the evangelization of the African population.Footnote ²⁴

Missionary involvement in Africa was originally confined to Sierra Leone and the Cape of Good Hope, but by the 1830s it had expanded significantly and the West African forts of Christiansborg (the “home base” of the Basel Mission), Elmina, and Cape Coast also became centers of missionary activity.Footnote ²⁵ The original purpose of the Basel Mission Society was not direct involvement in colonial African missionary activity, but rather the training of male members who would join the British and Dutch mission societies already established on the continent.Footnote ²⁶

This position eventually changed, and in December 1828 the Basel Mission sent its first representatives to West Africa. All four of the men who arrived in 1828 were dead by August 1829 and a second group, which arrived in 1832, was dispatched to continue the work of their deceased brothers.Footnote ²⁷ The Basel Mission opened its first seminary in Christiansborg in 1843, where it trained teachers and assistant preachers. By 1848, it had established an additional seminary in Akropong as well as a number of primary schools for African children. In 1867, the Basel Mission opened its first middle school for students who had aged out of the elementary schools but were still not ready to enter the seminaries.Footnote ²⁸

Children, Slave Labor, and the Basel Mission

Following their victory in the Asante War, the British were able to create a series of agreements with local rulers that resulted in the creation of the Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate. The “Colony” was the area in which it was generally accepted that the British had established formal rule. Towns like Cape Coast and Christiansborg, which could be controlled by the presence of large forts, were considered to lie within the “Colony.” The “Protectorate” referred to the majority of the Gold Coast, namely the interior. The interior was, in many ways, outside the control of the colonial administration, but it was still subject to the Emancipation Ordinance and the abolition of slavery.Footnote ²⁹ The abolition of slavery was, however, something that was very difficult to enforce outside the Crown colony along the coast and, as a result, systems of debt and dependency continued to exist in the interior of the colony.

Ironically, as part of its abolitionist efforts, the Basel Mission did occasionally purchase slaves so that they could live at the mission as “free” Africans.Footnote ³⁰ The liberated slaves, however, were expected to work off the cost of their purchase through the performance of various duties assigned by the missionaries.Footnote ³¹ Johannes Muller, a member of the Basel Mission stationed mainly in Anum, noted that the formerly enslaved rarely felt obligated to work for the missionaries who purchased their freedom.Footnote ³² Blinded by their own prejudices, the missionaries were unable to draw parallels between their expectation that these newly “freed” Africans should be required to work for them, and that of the African system of debt bondage. There are numerous complaints in the Basel Mission correspondence regarding “ungrateful subjects” who did not want to work for the missionaries and simply “ran off” or “returned to the households of their former masters.”Footnote ³³

Correspondence among a number of Basel missionaries stationed in the colony in 1893 indicates that they had seriously considered buying a large number of slave children and allowing them to live at the mission station as “free” people, provided that they paid off the cost of their purchase with their labor. Overall, the missionaries who commented on this proposal were against the idea of establishing this type of refuge for children acquired through purchase.Footnote ³⁴ The missionary Friedrich Ramseyer believed that if they bought slave children, “this would simply stimulate the traffic” in the region, which he opposed. But, if they did not purchase slave children, Ramseyer did not “see how the mission [was] to get them into its hands.” For Ramseyer, the most desirable option was to welcome to the mission those slaves who had escaped their masters on their own.Footnote ³⁵ Ultimately, the idea of purchasing a large number of slaves was rejected by the missionaries. They preferred the idea of the mission station serving as a refuge where runaway slaves and former slaves could come to seek “protection.”Footnote ³⁶

For members of the Basel Mission, the ideological and legal commitment to ending slavery in the colony was often replaced by “the pragmatic agenda of colonial administrators.”Footnote ³⁷ Their ability to enforce antislavery laws was severely limited by the precarious control the colonial government had over the region outside the colony proper.Footnote ³⁸ Additionally, the missionaries relied heavily upon alliances with indigenous elites whose social and political power was generally derived from the ownership of slaves and access to labor.Footnote ³⁹ It is, then, not surprising that the same principles applied to interactions between the African communities and the Basel Mission. Members of the Basel Mission considered the eradication of slavery to be an important part of the missionary project. However, the missionaries also felt that the conversion of Africans to Christianity should take priority over abolition efforts. Essentially, slavery was deemed to be tolerable until the Church was well established in the region.Footnote ⁴⁰

The “Missionary Project”: Reshaping African Childhood

In colonial Ghana, the European “civilizing mission” was reflected in the missionaries' condemnation of African social and cultural practices and their efforts to Christianize African people.Footnote ⁴¹ In his work on the history of humanitarianism, Michael N. Barnett suggests that while European missionaries often held varying opinions regarding non-Western and nonwhite peoples, they did recognize a shared humanity. He argues that the “missionary project” could only have been sustainable if a notion of “the fundamental unity of humanity” existed.Footnote ⁴² According to Barnett, abolitionist and missionary efforts drew both inspiration and knowledge from each other. Nineteenth-century imperial humanitarians believed that colonialism, Christianity, and commerce “could provide the will and the way to emancipate slaves, save sinners and souls, and position backward societies on the path to civilization.”Footnote ⁴³ This cultural, religious, and economic paternalism guided the actions of the Basel missionaries in colonial Ghana as they established schools, churches, and farms throughout the region.

In communities where the Basel Mission maintained a strong presence, the missionaries instituted rules regarding what kind of behavior was considered acceptable. In particular, the missionaries were interested in the creation and maintenance of “good Christian families.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1871, the Basel Mission authorities in Switzerland inquired as to the lifestyles of African Christian couples in the region; specifically, they wanted to know whether they ate and prayed together regularly. In response, Waltraud Haas, a mission member who reported from various stations and schools in colonial Ghana, explained that this was difficult for the missionaries to confirm because “there is no order about the way they live,” and the Africans naturally “act much differently in the presence of the missionaries.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In addition to his response to the question about African couples, Haas expressed concern about the relationship between African parents and their children. He explained that children in the region were viewed in terms of the monetary value they could bring to their families and that they did not “belong to their parents, but to the wife's family.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Haas suggested that unless this system could be broken down, the development of Christian family life would be virtually impossible in the region.Footnote ⁴⁷ Haas's reflections about marriage, family, and childhood suggest that members of the Basel Mission understood children to be extremely important to their work in the region. In his view, raising children in an environment that more closely mimicked the social and cultural practices of Western Europe was essential to the successful development of Protestantism in the colony. Haas believed that in order to foster the ideals of Christian family life in colonial Ghana, it was necessary to break down existing African family structures. Additionally, his concern suggests that the labor of African children would be much easier for Europeans to exploit if the Mission was successful in breaking down traditional societal structures.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Basel missionaries believed that moral corruption was rampant in African culture and that this demanded the establishment not only of separate Christian quarters within African towns, but entirely separate villages for African converts. If segregated villages were established, African children would be “brought up properly,” and it would be much easier for the Mission to educate and train them.Footnote ⁴⁹ Andreas Riis, one of the founding members of the Mission's initiative in colonial Ghana, stated that for the Basel Mission, “there is nothing more blessed than the snatching of children from perdition.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Members of the Basel Mission viewed all contact with non-Christian family and community members to be potentially dangerous to African children, resulting in “evident damage to their souls.”Footnote ⁵¹

In order to separate African children from their parents and communities, the missionaries advocated for children's boarding schools at the mission stations, as opposed to day schools. They argued that African children were “industrious and learn well, but their character and life is not satisfactory” because they were being raised by “pagans, among pagans.”Footnote ⁵² This would also give the Mission more control over the type of labor African children undertook and ensure that it would be to the Mission's advantage. If children attended school only four or five days each week, for only part of the day, their parents and communities would have maintained a significant degree of control over their labor power as well as their upbringing, and the Basel Mission would have had less control over the pupils. When many students did not return to the mission station after visits with their families over the Christmas holidays, the missionaries assumed that some of these children had been pawned by their “heathen” parents.Footnote ⁵³ However, it is equally likely that parents decided that they no longer wanted to give the missionaries absolute control over their children and their labor and decided against long periods of separation.

Child Labor at Basel Mission Schools

In colonial Ghana, the arena in which the Basel Mission had the most direct and sustained access to African children was the mission school. Freed adult laborers often left the mission station, making it difficult for the Basel Mission to secure the consistent paid labor of adults.Footnote ⁵⁴ Children, on the other hand, were constantly present at mission schools, where they were engaged in various kinds of domestic and agricultural labor. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Basel Mission established stations and schools in various parts of the interior in an effort to establish the Protestant religion. The Mission's quarterly and annual reports offer insight into the missionaries' approach to the education and Christianization of African children as well as the ways in which they attempted to control their labor.

In an 1897 report from the Abetifi Mission School, in the Eastern Region, missionaries described African children as being similar to European children, but “a bit more stubborn and crafty.”Footnote ⁵⁵ They reported that the students, who were also laborers at the mission station, had been instructed to plant a maize farm, but the task was completed only after they had been placed under “constant supervision.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Furthermore, the report indicates that the fence surrounding the maize fields was constructed “so badly and looked after so pathetically that there was no harvest at all” because it failed to keep out sheep and goats that consumed the maize before it matured.Footnote ⁵⁷

The author of this report concluded that, “African boys have little interest in working” and would only do so when they were constantly monitored.Footnote ⁵⁸ The missionaries noted that it was difficult for teachers at the schools to impress upon African children the importance of the work that was required of them. In their correspondence with headquarters in Switzerland, mission representatives declared that their goal was to “make these youths not only Christian and pious, but hardworking members of their nation and follow[ers] of evangelical principles.”Footnote ⁵⁹

This dissatisfaction felt by members of the Basel Mission regarding the “work ethic” of African children and the quality of the work they performed provokes a number of questions. Did the missionaries show the children how to construct a fence the way they wanted? Did the children understand the function the fence was meant to serve? Is it possible that what the missionaries perceived to be stubborn and lazy behavior was actually an attempt by the children to resist being controlled by the missionaries? Similarly, is it also possible that building a poor enclosure was an attempt to sabotage the corn crop as a form of rebellion? Or, were the children merely being children and engaging in play?

“Mrs. Ramseyer and a houseboy picking roses in the garden,” c. 1896–1906.Footnote ⁶⁰ Rosa Luise Ramseyer was stationed in the Abetifi region of colonial Ghana where pupils performed various domestic tasks in addition to working in the fields and gardens at the mission station.Footnote ⁶¹

Children represented the future of the colony and the missionaries wanted to educate and train them in a way that would benefit the Basel Mission itself. Training African children in the Calvinist tradition and teaching trades such as carpentry, weaving, and farming helped to bind children to the Mission through their youth and adulthood. For example, reports indicate that the missionaries elected not to plant many native fruits and vegetables; rather, they preferred to concentrate on things like coffee and cocoa, which were not traditionally planted by the local people.Footnote ⁶² This decision by Basel missionaries in the colony was linked to the larger expansion of the cash-crop economy associated with growing demand from external markets.Footnote ⁶³ The cultivation of both coffee and cocoa require a significant amount of labor, much of which would have been done by students at the mission schools.

Between 1851 and 1914, the Basel Mission made significant strides in the areas of agriculture and trade.Footnote ⁶⁴ The missionaries developed a large trading network and implemented European-style farms and plantations on which they experimented with different crops including coffee, tobacco, various fruits, and cocoa.Footnote ⁶⁵ The missionaries established a “farm school” to train Africans in the “scientific cultivation of the soil and for experimentation with as many crops and fruit trees as possible.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Members of the Basel Mission recognized the importance of cocoa as an export crop, and by the 1880s cocoa began to eclipse most other large-scale agricultural production. The missionaries spread cocoa pods throughout the region and encouraged its production at all their stations.Footnote ⁶⁷ Cocoa plantations became very important to the economic survival of the Basel Mission in colonial Ghana as they engaged increasingly in agricultural, commercial, and industrial activities.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Mission's reliance on child labor to achieve economic stability did not go unchallenged. As Beverly Grier has shown in her study on colonial Zimbabwe, African children were fully capable of negotiating the terms of their labor, withholding it and resisting its devaluation at the hands of missionaries. For example, in 1884, at the Basel Mission boarding school in Abetifi, the missionaries decided to end their monetary support for the level four class and resolved that clothing would be distributed to all pupils only once per year. This resulted in what the Mission records describe as a “revolt” that manifested in a “breakdown of relations between the house father in the school and the pupils.”Footnote ⁶⁹ During this “revolt,” the children “refused to work for their lesson.”Footnote ⁷⁰ When they did work, they “deliberately set out to annoy [the housefather] by their laziness, and if he punished any of them they simply ran away.”Footnote ⁷¹ As a result of the large number of children who left and presumably returned to their families, the Mission ended up closing the Abetifi boarding school later that year.Footnote ⁷²

There were also instances in which members of the Basel Mission, in their attempt to exploit the labor of African children, disregarded existing social and cultural practices that resulted in conflict with the local people and the loss of child laborers. In the Begoro region in 1878, the Basel Mission experienced a great deal of trouble recruiting children for its school. According to Basel Mission correspondence, the local people were afraid of Christianity, and they worried that if a child went to school, the family would “be visited by ill-luck or death” and the child would leave the family prematurely.Footnote ⁷³ According to the missionaries, African parents were particularly reluctant to send their daughters to school because it would delay marriage.Footnote ⁷⁴

The missionaries appear to have attributed African unwillingness to send their children to school to the fact that the majority had not yet converted to Christianity and were, therefore, skeptical of its influence. In the missionaries' estimation, African parents were exhibiting an irrational degree of apprehension regarding their children's attendance.Footnote ⁷⁵ The missionaries did not consider that families were dependent upon the labor of their children for survival or that African parents may not have trusted the missionaries to care for their children properly.

Another example of this conflict over the labor of children occurred in Begoro in the 1880s. In this case, there were clashes between local Africans and the Basel Mission over whether the boys who were enrolled in school should be permitted to leave for the duration of snail-hunting season so they could help their families.Footnote ⁷⁶ A meeting of local African families decided that they would only send their children to the mission school if they were compensated for their children's labor each month.Footnote ⁷⁷ This demand for payment by African parents was not confined to the Begoro region; in 1884, Johannes Tschopp, a member of the Basel Mission, reported that he was frequently badgered by parents and other relatives of boys at the Abetifi school seeking remuneration from the missionaries. He notes that he had even been asked for £4, “the usual price of a man.”Footnote ⁷⁸ This suggests two very interesting things. First, the Basel Missionaries were using children's labor in a way that was incompatible with existing systems and schedules of labor. Second, African parents, families, and the community in general were losing a traditionally important component of their collective labor force. Thus, they felt they should be compensated because control over the labor of their children and the profits garnered from it were being diverted to support the mission's survival.

There were also instances in which African youth were able to organize themselves in order to dictate the terms of their labor. In August 1876, the Basel Mission's unskilled adult and adolescent work force in Begoro went on strike. At the time, the supply of this type of labor in the region was greater than the missionaries' need, enabling them to reduce wages and offer employment only to those who were willing to work for significantly lowered pay.Footnote ⁷⁹ Soon after the wages had been cut, “no boys came to work,” and the missionaries heard that “they had sworn an oath or made a law that no further work should be done unless the old payment … was revised.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The strike continued for two weeks before the missionaries were forced to raise wages to their previous level.Footnote ⁸¹

Reports in the Basel Mission archive indicate that the missionaries viewed African children's attendance at their schools as beneficial to the societies they were attempting to shape in Africa. However, many of their actions in colonial Ghana are evidence of a very clear misunderstanding of, or disregard for, existing social, cultural, and economic systems. African parents' request for payment in exchange for their children's attendance at mission schools may have been a response to the degree of control missionaries had exerted over their children. It may also have been an attempt to regain control over their children's labor so that it would benefit the family rather than the Basel Mission. The request for payment clearly shows that local communities were not completely satisfied with their children's attendance at mission schools and the ensuing loss of the children's labor.

Labor and Girlhood

While African boys attended mission schools and were used as laborers much more commonly than African girls, there were indeed instances in which girls were present as both laborers and pupils. For example, in 1866, five servant girls were pupils at the Akim school where they attended classes in the mornings and learned needlework in the afternoons.Footnote ⁸² According to Mission reports, “the local women do not know anything about sewing.”Footnote ⁸³ In an effort to establish familiar European gender roles in Africa, the Basel Mission felt this was an important skill for African girls to learn.

Members of the Basel Mission observed that, “apart from smiths and basket weavers, there are no distinct professions in the Gold Coast.”Footnote ⁸⁴ They reported that what would have been done in Europe by “various craftsmen” was being done by ordinary local people.Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, they were surprised when they observed this work (milling, baking, butchery, tailoring, and weaving) was being done primarily by women, in addition to their labors in the home and in the fields.Footnote ⁸⁶ The missionaries deemed it necessary that, in addition to cleaning, cooking, and agricultural tasks, African girls should be taught crafts like sewing so they would be able to take care of the mission house and tend to domestic tasks.Footnote ⁸⁷ In contrast, boys were being trained as “carpenters and masons” and “learning to be sawyers, how to use a plane, and how to cook and backe [sic].”Footnote ⁸⁸ In Akropong, male children were responsible for “making a new coffee plantation, and a corn farm” and helping in the construction of a new chapel at the mission station.Footnote ⁸⁹

Mission reports indicate that in 1876 there were twelve “strong girls” working at the station because they could not employ men without raising wages.Footnote ⁹⁰ The missionaries wanted to establish a girls' school in Begoro, but they were “having difficulty even getting sufficient numbers of girls to work in the house.”Footnote ⁹¹ The girls who did work in the Begoro mission house usually came from the Kukurantumi region (about 100 kilometers north of Accra), and, according to Basel Mission records, their parents and community leaders were often reluctant to allow them to work at the mission station. In the missionaries' view, this anxiety stemmed from a situation in which two African girls had been given instruction in the Church and then refused to marry “heathens.”Footnote ⁹² While it is clear that the relationship between African families and the Basel Missionaries was always tenuous, the missionaries seem to have had more success convincing parents to send their boys, rather than their girls, to work and school at the mission station.

The missionaries were also having trouble recruiting girls to come to the school in Fankyeneko, about thirty kilometers further north. According to missionary reports, African girls were required, by their families, to mind younger siblings and community members as well as help with domestic tasks such as cooking. The missionaries believed that these responsibilities made African girls less likely to attend mission school than their male counterparts.Footnote ⁹³ This suggests that, because of existing African social and cultural norms, the Basel Missionaries were able to more effectively utilize the labor of African boys than that of African girls. African boys were more likely to be involved in seasonal work such as collecting snails, harvesting palm oil, and agricultural and trade-related work. This enabled them to attend school more regularly than African girls, who were responsible for daily domestic tasks.Footnote ⁹⁴

“Sewing school on a veranda in Abetifi. Along the railing a bunch of bananas and a parrot in a cage,” c. 1888–1896.Footnote ⁹⁵

The records do not specify who was responsible for teaching sewing and other skills to local girls, but photographs of the Basel Mission's experience in colonial Ghana indicate that female members of the mission, often the wives of missionaries, filled this role. The gendering of education and training reflects European conceptions of labor division based on gender roles that were not necessarily reflective of African ideas and practices. As indicated above, the Basel Missionaries were aware that African women were responsible for a great deal of work that, in Europe, would have been done by male tradespeople. Rather than incorporating these native practices, the missionaries made a concerted effort to reconstruct gender roles in a way that more closely resembled those entrenched in European society.

According to Paul Jenkins, handwork classes for African girls were usually held on the verandas of mission houses. The skills of sewing, crocheting, and mending were essential to the task of dressmaking, which was performed only by women and girls.Footnote ⁹⁶ Jenkins argues that the Basel Mission created a demand for new clothing by establishing different standards of dress for African women in both public and domestic spaces. The missionaries also created new occasions for which they expected African women and girls to take extra care with the way they looked and dressed, in particular their attendance at the institutions of church and school. Through the entrenchment of school and church as everyday institutions, the fashion of women and girls was transformed to reflect European standards.Footnote ⁹⁷ Thus, according to Jenkins, the missionaries created not only an increased demand for women's clothing, but also an exclusively female profession that was much more familiar to Europeans than Africans. This transformation of women's clothing was also important to the broader civilizing mission of the Basel Mission, in that standards of dress for African women and girls were being determined by what was deemed appropriate for their attendance at church and school. Photographs taken by members of the Basel Mission suggest that outside of school and church, women and girls often chose to wear their traditional clothing rather than European-style dresses.