Thomas Birch Freeman
Thomas Birch Freeman was an Anglo-African Wesleyan minister, missionary, botanist and colonial official in West Africa. He is widely regarded as a pioneer of the Methodist Church in colonial West Africa, where he also established multiple schools. Some scholars view him as the "Founder of Ghana Methodism". Freeman's missionary activities took him to Dahomey, now Benin, as well as to Western Nigeria.
Biographical synopsis
Born in Twyford, Hampshire, England, Thomas Birch Freeman was the son of an African father, Thomas Freeman, and an English mother, Amy Birch.He worked as a gardener and botanist for Sir Robert Harland at Orwell Park, near Ipswich, until dismissed for abandoning Anglicanism for Wesleyan Methodism. Under Freeman, nine schools were established in the colony of Gold Coast in 1841, three of which were for girls. He continued opening schools, and by 1880 had about 83 schools with roughly 3,000 students. In 1838, he went as a Methodist missionary to West Africa, founding Methodist churches in the Gold Coast in Cape Coast and Accra, and establishing a mission station in Kumasi. In 1850, Freeman established agriculture farms at Buela near Cape Coast. He also went to towns in southern Nigeria and to the kingdom of Dahomey. In 1843, while on furlough in Britain, he was active in the anti-slavery cause. After resigning as a missionary in 1857, he was employed by the colonial government as civil commandant of Accra district from 1857 to 1873. Freeman married three times. His first two wives, who were white British women, died soon after they arrived in West Africa, and he subsequently married a local Fante woman. In 1873, he rejoined the Mission and, together with his son, promoted Methodist work in the southern Gold Coast.
Early life
Thomas Birch Freeman was born on 6 December 1809 in Twyford, about three miles from Winchester, Hampshire, England. In those days, Winchester was a bastion of Wesleyan Methodism. His father was a former slave, but his son consistently denied his father had a West Indian origin. Freeman's mother, Amy Birch, was a working-class Englishwoman, who was a housemaid in the home of Freeman's father's master. Amy Birch had previously been married to John Birch, with whom she had three children. When Freeman was six years old, his father died. He lived with his mother in "a middle-class house facing a three-cornered space, a public house, 'The Dolphin', occupying the second, and a cottage, then used as the Wesleyan preaching-house, the third corner of the triangle" in Twyford, where it is presumed he received a solid education, although there is no historical record of the institutions he formally enrolled in. During his childhood, he and his friends used to play pranks on a local cobbler who eventually introduced Freeman to Methodism. This shoemaker lived in the Wesleyan preaching house and was a Methodist class-leader and a lay preacher of his village.Freeman followed in the footsteps of his late father and became a gardener on a Suffolk estate, where he developed an interest in botany. He became head gardener to Sir Robert Harland at Orwell Park on the banks of the Orwell, near Ipswich in Suffolk. Freeman was an avid reader and became knowledgeable in horticulture and listing plants' Latin botanical names. He kept a small library in his rooms. Decades later, when he relocated to the Gold Coast, he exchanged correspondence with Sir William Hooker, the first Director of Kew Gardens near London, the world's leading botanical institution, on West African flora. Freeman also researched and collated scientific data on tropical fauna for Kew Gardens.
Freeman developed a newfound zeal for the Methodist faith, which was frowned upon by his employer, Sir Robert Harland, who asked him to choose between his religion and his career. Around this time, the Methodist Mission Society in England had made a mass appeal for volunteer missionaries to go to Africa to propagate the Gospel. Freeman felt he had received a divine call to become a missionary and responded to the appeal by assuring himself: "It may not be necessary for me to live; but it is necessary for me to go." He consulted his friends on the matter, particularly Peter Hill of Chelmondiston, whom he considered a lifelong family friend. Subsequently, Freeman resigned from his position at Orwell Park. Sir Robert Harland's wife, Lady Arethusa was unhappy with Freeman's decision to leave and tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to stay. Freeman passed a satisfactory examination before a special committee at the old Mission-house in Hatton Garden. After delivering an acclaimed sermon at the Methodist Conference in Leeds, witnessed by a Methodist minister, the Rev. Abraham Farrar, in October 1837, he was appointed a probationary Wesleyan minister at Cape Coast after his ordination in Islington Chapel in London on 10 October 1837. The English missionaries at Cape Coast only had a series of short stints on the Gold Coast as many died from tropical diseases.
Missionary activities in West Africa
Historical context
Methodism was first brought to the Gold Coast by the Wesleyan Methodist Church on New Year's Day in January 1835, by the Rev. Joseph Rhodes Dunwell, a 27-year-old preacher from England. Early Wesleyan missionaries had an Anglican heritage. From the late 1400s onwards, Roman Catholic and Anglican missionaries began arriving on the Gold Coast, though their evangelising endeavours yielded no results. In the 18th century, the Anglican missionaries founded a school at Cape Coast, where the Rev. Philip Quaque was an educator. The school curriculum focused entirely on Biblical knowledge and the building of numeracy and literacy competencies by studying the 3Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic. The textbooks used were scriptural pamphlets distributed by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Later, the curriculum was broadened to include the arts and crafts in agriculture, commerce and joinery. The early missionaries also emphasised girl-child education.This mission school led to the mushrooming of Bible study groups or informal Bible bands, devoted to reading and studying the Scriptures in 1831/32, when there were no European missionary or castle chaplain. The groups kept formal records of their prayer meetings. In 1834, an attendee of one of these groups, William de Graft, requested for copies of the Holy Book through Captain Potter, the captain of a merchant sailing vessel named Congo and a congregant of the Bristol Wesleyan Methodist Church. De Graft had attended the Cape Coast Castle School and worked as a trader at Dixcove. He had earlier fallen out with the colonial Governor over theological differences and was eventually prosecuted, jailed and deported from Cape Coast to Dixcove, while other native Christians were threatened with a fine.
A request for missionaries was made by one John Aggrey, a Fante royal, who was initially publicly flogged and denied the Cape Coast paramount chieftaincy due to his Christian faith. By 1864, he was the reigning sovereign of Cape Coast, devoted to the improving the spiritual welfare and educational needs of his people. Through Potter's ingenuity, the Wesleyan mission society sent not only Bibles but a Methodist missionary, Joseph Rhodes Dunwell of Yorkshire. Dunwell arrived on 4 January 1835 and immediately started his public ministry at Cape Coast, organising weekly meetings with local Christians. Dunwell died after six months on the Gold Coast, on 24 June 1835, from tropical fever. By 1844, 15 missionaries had died on the coast. Within the first eight years of Methodist mission in Ghana, out of a total of 21 missionaries sent to the Gold Coast, 11 died, including all five of Dunwell's successors. Among these were George O. Wrigley of Lancashire and his wife, Harriet, who both sailed on 12 August 1836 and arrived on 15 September 1836, 15 months after the death of Dunwell. He was assisted by Peter Harrop of Derbyshire, who came to the Gold Coast with his wife on 15 January 1837; Harrop died on 11 February 1837, three days after his wife had died and three weeks after their arrival. Harriet Wrigley died on the same day as Mrs. Harrop. Nine months later, George Wrigley succumbed to a tropical ailment at Cape Coast on 16 November 1837. It is noteworthy that after only eight months in Cape Coast, Wrigley read the Ten Commandments in Fante on Sunday, 28 May 1837, preached in Fante three months later, on 20 August, and on 3 September 1837, he performed baptism using liturgy spoken in the Fante language. All five missionaries were buried in graves below the pulpit of the first Methodist chapel at Cape Coast. In Accra, the Wesleyan mission founded a theological institute in 1842 to train teachers-catechists. This institution was originally put into the care of the missionary couple, the Rev. and Mrs. Shipman. However, after the death of the school's first principal, the Rev. Samuel Shipman, the project was abandoned.
Earlier on, James Hayford, a colonial representative of the British Merchant Company Administration in Kumasi, had started a Methodist Fellowship of a sort in Kumasi. Another Fante Christian and trader, John Mills, co-led the fellowship at Kumasi. Hayford was on good terms with the Asante royal family and was permitted to conduct a church service at the Asantehene's palace. Subsequently, Thomas Birch Freeman arrived on the Gold Coast in this period in 1838. Motivated by the positive development of Hayford's activities, Freeman had raised £60 for the Kumasi mission. Over nearly two decades, from 1838 and 1857, together, with his student, William de Graft, his mission activities took him to the Gold Coast, the Asante hinterlands, Yorubaland and to Dahomey. There was an organisational realignment in 1854, when the church constituted its district governance into circuits and Thomas Freeman was elected the chairman. William West succeeded Freeman in 1856. On 6 February 1878, the Methodist Synod initiated the process to devolve the district into two separate ministries to improve organisational efficiency. This new step was confirmed at the British Conference in July 1878. P. R. Picot became the head of the Gold Coast District while John Milum chaired the Yoruba and Popo District in Western Nigeria. Mission work in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast was started in 1910. There was a lull of disagreement with the colonial government and in 1955, Methodist evangelism resumed in northern Ghana under the leadership of the Rev. Paul Adu, the first indigenous missionary in that part of the country.
The Methodist Church in Ghana became self-governing in July 1961 and based on a Deed of Foundation, enshrined in the Constitution and Standing Orders of our Church, it was named the Methodist Church Ghana. Prior to its autonomy, the Methodist Church Ghana maintained ties to different Methodist bodies: the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, British Methodist Church and the Methodist Missionary Society, which all formed an ecclesiastical merger in 1932. Five new districts, including Kumasi, were also created in 1961. The Rev. Brooking was the first resident minister to be stationed in Kumasi as the locus point of Methodism in Asante. The church now has a total membership of more than 600, 000 congregants spread across 17 dioceses, 3,814 societies, 1,066 pastors, 15,920 local preachers, 24,100 Lay Leaders. The Methodist Church Ghana also owns an orphanage, hospitals, clinics and schools.
Sampson Oppong, an indigenous evangelist and prophet, though sheer missionary zeal, collaborated with the Methodist Church in Kumasi to propagate the Gospel in the Ashanti and Brong Ahafo Regions. The Methodist church adopted an episcopal system in 1999. In the latter part of the 20th century, Methodism in Ghana spread through print and electronic mass media as well as church planting. This success of Methodism in reaching the native peoples of the Gold Coast can be attributed to the denomination's historical "anti-clericalism, anti-Calvinism, anti-formalism, anti-confessionalism and anti-elitism".