Alexander Worthy Clerk

This article is about the Jamaican Moravian missionary and teacher, Alexander Worthy Clerk. For his great-grandson, the Ghanaian American academic, psychiatrist and sleep medicine specialist, see Alexander A. Clerk.

The Reverend
Alexander Worthy Clerk
Portrait of Alexander Worthy Clerk
Born4 March 1820
Fairfield Plantage, Manchester Parish, Jamaica
Died11 February 1906(1906-02-11) (aged 85)
Aburi, Gold Coast
Nationality
EducationFairfield Teachers' Seminary
Occupations
SpousePauline Hesse (m. 1848)
Children12, including Nicholas
Relatives
Church
Offices held
1st Deacon, Christ Presbyterian Church, Akropong
Orders
OrdinationBasel Mission, 1 September 1872, Gold Coast
ConsecrationFairfield Moravian Church, 1842

Alexander Worthy Clerk (4 March 1820[1][2][3] – 11 February 1906[4][5][6]) was a Jamaican Moravian pioneer missionary, teacher and clergyman who arrived in 1843 in the Danish Protectorate of Christiansborg, now Osu in Accra, Ghana, then known as the Gold Coast.[7][8][9] He was part of the first group of 24 West Indian missionaries from Jamaica and Antigua who worked under the aegis of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society of Switzerland.[10][11][12] Caribbean missionary activity in Africa fit into the broader "Atlantic Missionary Movement" of the diaspora between the 1780s and the 1920s.[1][13][14] Shortly after his arrival in Ghana, the mission appointed Clerk as the first Deacon of the Christ Presbyterian Church, Akropong, founded by the first Basel missionary survivor on the Gold Coast, Andreas Riis in 1835, as the organisation's first Protestant church in the country.[13] Alexander Clerk is widely acknowledged and regarded as one of the pioneers of the precursor to the Presbyterian Church of Ghana. As a leader in education in colonial Ghana, he designed curriculum and pedagogy, co-establishing with fellow educators, George Peter Thompson and Catherine Mulgrave, an all-male boarding middle school, the Salem School at Osu in 1843.[15] In 1848, Clerk was an inaugural faculty member at the Basel Mission Seminary, Akropong, now known as the Presbyterian College of Education, where he was an instructor in Biblical studies.[13] The Basel missionaries founded the Akropong seminary and normal school to train teacher-catechists in service of the mission.[13][16] The college is the second oldest higher educational institution in early modern West Africa after Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone which was established in 1827.[16] Clerk was the father of Nicholas Timothy Clerk (1862 – 1961), a Basel-trained theologian, who was elected the first Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast from 1918 to 1932[7] and co-founded the all boys' boarding high school, the Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School established in 1938.[17] A. W. Clerk was also the progenitor of the historically important Clerk family from the suburb of Osu in Accra.[18][19]

  1. ^ a b Sill, Ulrike (2010). Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood: The Basel Mission in Pre- and Early Colonial Ghana. BRILL. ISBN 978-9004188884. Archived from the original on 21 May 2021.
  2. ^ Jena, Geographische Gesellschaft (für Thüringen) zu (1891). Mitteilungen (in German). G. Fischer. p. 77. nicholas timothy clerk basel.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference :29 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ History in Africa. African Studies Association. 2008. Archived from the original on 17 September 2021.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference :14 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference :22 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ a b "Clerk, Nicholas Timothy, Ghana, Basel Mission". Dacb. Archived from the original on 28 March 2016. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
  8. ^ Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift (in German). M. Warneck. 1903. p. 80. alexander worthy clerk.
  9. ^ Kingdon, Zachary (21 February 2019). Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa: A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. pp. 214, 219. ISBN 9781501337949.
  10. ^ Dawes, Mark (2003). "A Ghanaian church built by Jamaicans". Jamaican Gleaner. Archived from the original on 21 November 2017.
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference :6 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  12. ^ Sundkler, Bengt; Steed, Christopher (4 May 2000). A History of the Church in Africa. Cambridge University Press. p. 719. ISBN 9780521583428. Archived from the original on 10 September 2017.
  13. ^ a b c d Cite error: The named reference :40 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  14. ^ Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso. ISBN 9780860916758. Archived from the original on 7 June 2018.
  15. ^ "Osu Salem". osusalem. Archived from the original on 29 March 2017. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
  16. ^ a b "Presbyterian College of Education, Akropong". Presby. Archived from the original on 5 June 2018. Retrieved 7 June 2018.
  17. ^ "PRESEC | ALUMINI PORTAL". odadee. (in Russian). Archived from the original on 30 March 2017. Retrieved 29 March 2017.
  18. ^ "International Mission Photography Archive, ca.1860-ca.1960". Retrieved 29 March 2017.[permanent dead link‍]
  19. ^ "Alexander Worthy Clerk Jamaican Missionary to Ghana" (PDF).