Pongas mission

Indigenous Cultures and Christian Conversion in Ghana and Sierra Leone, 1700–1850 was curated in association with the Bodleian Library. 

This collection contains records compiled by the United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG), a UK-based Anglican missionary organisation that operates globally. From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century the USPG went by the name of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). 

This collection contains letters and supplementary material compiled by the organisation’s West African branches during the period 1700–1850. It includes the papers of Thomas Perronet Thompson, the first governor of the Colony of Sierra Leone, and those of Rev. Phillip Quaque, the first African to be ordained a minister of the Church of England. The collection contains a variety of sources that evidence the continuation of the slave trade. There is also material on the influential Rio Pongas mission conducted by the West Indian Church. The documents in this collection grant insights into the nature of British colonialism, the process of Christian conversion, and the functioning of the slave trade in West Africa.

In January 1752 Reverend Thomas Thompson arrived at James Fort on the Gambia river. This marked the launch of the first mission by The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in West Africa (more than fifty years after its incorporation by royal charter during the reign of William III). From 1766 onwards, the mission was overseen by the Reverend Philip Quaque, the first African to be ordained into the priesthood of the Church of England. Although an Anglican bishopric of Sierra Leone was established by the Church Mission Society in Freetown, there seems to have been a pause in SPG activity in the region following Quaque's death in 1811. This hiatus drew to a close during the mid-nineteenth century. This period witnessed the establishment of the West Indian Church Association for the Furtherance of the Gospel in Western Africa and its mission to the Rio Pongas.