Nicholas Timothy Clerk (28 October 1862 – 16 August 1961) was a Gold Coast theologian, clergyman and pioneering missionary of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society in southeast colonial Ghana. His father was the Jamaican Moravian missionary and teacher, Alexander Worthy Clerk (1820 – 1906), who worked extensively on the Gold Coast with the Basel Mission and co-founded in 1843 the Salem School, a Presbyterian boarding middle school for boys. Born on the Gold Coast, N. T. Clerk was educated in Germany and Switzerland. He returned to Ghana and worked as a missionary, congregational pastor and church planter. He was later elected the first Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast, in effect, the chief ecclesiastical officer, equivalent to the chief administrator, leading the overall strategic operations of the national Reformed Protestant church organisation, a position he held from 1918 to 1932. A staunch advocate of secondary education, Nicholas Timothy Clerk became a founding father of the all-boys Presbyterian boarding school in Ghana, the Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School, established in 1938. As Synod Clerk, he pushed vigorously for and was instrumental in turning the original idea of a church mission high school into reality.
Early life and education
Gold Coast Nicholas Timothy Clerk was born on 28 October 1862 at Aburi, about twenty miles north-east of the Ghanaian capital, Accra. N. T. Clerk was a second generation descendant of the historic Clerk family of Accra. His father was Alexander Worthy Clerk, a Jamaican Moravian missionary who was among the first group of West Indians, recruited by the Danish minister, Andreas Riis (1804–1854) of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society in 1843. Riis lived on the Gold Coast from 1832 to 1845. His mother, Pauline Hesse (1831–1909) was from the Gold Coast, and was of Danish, German and Ga descent. His aunt was Regina Hesse (1832 –1898), a pioneer educator and school principal. He studied at Basel Mission primary and boarding middle schools in Aburi. During his basic school years, Clerk took subjects in reading, writing, arithmetic, biblical studies, history, geography, science, music and general religion. This was followed by pedagogy and theology training at the Basel Mission Seminary, now the Presbyterian College of Education, Akropong, in the state of Akuapem, 32 miles (51 km) north-north-east of Accra where he showed strong interest in Christian missionary work and stayed until the end of 1883. He was described by his biographer, the Swiss German church historian and theologian, Hans Werner Debrunner, as "a sturdy lad who had inherited his father's intelligence...and was by far the best student" at the Akropong seminary. The Basel missionaries founded the Akropong seminary in 1848 as the second oldest higher educational institution in early modern West Africa after Fourah Bay College, established in 1827. Nicholas Clerk spent his summers helping the German Huppenbauer missionary family household at Aburi. In 1884, Mrs. Huppenbauer gave birth to a baby, Carl. Nicholas, together with others assisted in the care of the baby while Mrs. Huppenbauer underwent emergency surgery to amputate a gangrene-afflicted leg, performed by Dr. Mahly, an ethnologist and a linguist, who used a hand saw, a bread knife and silk thread for the procedure. After a short period of recovery, the Huppenbauer family returned to Germany with Nicholas Clerk who was about to continue his seminary studies in Europe.
Germany and Switzerland Nicholas Clerk spent a year (1884 – 1885) in Schorndorf, about 42 miles (26 km) east of Stuttgart in the Kingdom of Württemberg learning Latin, Biblical Greek and Biblical Hebrew and mastering German while living with and studying under the award-winning German philologist, Johann Gottlieb Christaller who had earlier been influential in the translation of the Bible into the Twi language with the help of Akan linguists and missionaries, David Asante, Theophilus Opoku, Jonathan Palmer Bekoe and Paul Staudt Keteku. Christaller was a two-time recipient (1876; 1882) of the most prestigious linguistics prize, The Prix Volney, awarded since 1822, by the Institut de France "to recognize work in general and comparative linguistics." While living in Germany, Clerk assisted Christaller in completing some of his works in the Twi language. With the aid of a bursary awarded by the Basel Mission, Clerk then pursued further studies at the Basel Mission Seminary (Basler Missionsseminar) between August 1885 and July 1888, where he received advanced instruction in theology, philosophy and linguistics, with special emphasis on philology. His theology courses included dogmatics, homiletics and catechesis. Clerk was the third African to be educated in Europe by the Basel Mission after the Americo-Liberian pastor, George Peter Thompson, an 1842 alumnus and the native Akan missionary, David Asante who had earlier completed his training in 1862. The Basel mission also had a holistic and rigorous skills-based approach to educating its students. This was geared towards teaching them the survival know-how to especially endure harsh terrains during Christian missionary fieldwork. In this regard, in addition to his integrated classical education, N. T. Clerk received practical training in geography and cartography, botany, rudimentary civil engineering as well as basic natural science, medicine, anatomy and surgery. At Basel, Clerk suffered a nervous breakdown halfway through his studies but recovered quickly. He passed his final examinations, was consecrated in the Basel Minster as a missionary on 5 July 1888 and shortly thereafter, ordained a minister at Korntal, situated at the northwestern border of Stuttgart of the now German state of . Briefly transiting in Liverpool in August 1888, he arrived in his homeland, two months later, in October 1888.
Missionary work Clerk's first station was at Anum, on the banks of the Volta River, about 50 miles (80 km) inland, where he arrived in October 1888. In August, 1890 he left Anum to start a mission station in the State of Buem in what is now the Volta Region of Ghana. He chose Worawora, more than 110 miles (176 km) from the coast, as his headquarters. In Worawora, he built a school, a chapel, an administrative office and a house for himself. He also constructed a water well for the Worawora community. In August of the 1891, he left Anum to establish a mission station he worked in at Boradaa in the Buem area and later, became the principal evangelist there. In January 1894, Clerk was a delegate of the Synod of the Basel Mission held on the coast.
As a social reformer, N. T. Clerk preached against harmful practices such as human sacrifice, persecution of albinos, witch-hunt, oppression of widows and orphans, infanticide, specifically, superstitious killing of twins as well as ritual servitude and slavery, child labour and trafficking. He encouraged parents to send their children, including the girl-child, to school. He also tried to persuade adults to join the church, but adherence to the practice of polygamy (which was opposed by the Christian Church) made his work difficult. He had come to Buem at a time when it was still independent of either German or British rule, and when inter-tribal wars were not uncommon. The younger generation wanted him to side with them in community disputes with their elders. However, Clerk remained neutral, infuriating the youth who refused to cooperate with him In spite of many challenges, the Worawora mission station was making modest progress by 1898. In 1899, when the inhabitants moved from the hill to the valley, Clerk followed them, and established a new mission station. Buem had then become a part of the German Togoland, conditions of peace prevailed, and Clerk's work had become easier. Before the forcible German takeover of Buem, the inhabitants had wanted Clerk to persuade the British to annex the area, while the German administration, based in Lomé on the coast, had sent a messenger to him to ask him to persuade the people of Buem to become German subjects, but he had refused to take sides based on his personal conviction and the apolitical code of conduct for a Basel missionary at the time which required that he remained neutral in all issues relating to colonial governance.
With a family to support, Clerk struggled to live on his meagre £10 monthly stipend, and occasionally felt that he should seek a more lucrative post. Dr. Grüner, the German district commissioner at Misahohé, nearly 50 miles (80 km) to the south in what is now the Republic of Togo, had heard of his plight, and in 1893 had written to him, offering him a permanent post in the civil service of the German administration with a starting monthly salary of 500 Deutschmarks. Nonetheless, Clerk once again refused to quit his mission job with the response that he considered the Basel Mission to be his "mother" and he cannot leave her side. Though he disliked the German way of treating Africans, and made them aware of it, he was still highly regarded by the Germans.
Under German rule, parents were obliged to send their children to school, and cleanliness as well as hygiene were strictly enforced. As an educator, Clerk taught his converts to plant cocoa using more modern mechanised methods and his pioneering work in agriculture bore fruit years later. The German administration insisted that Ewe should be taught in the mission's schools instead of the Basel-preferred language of Twi. As a result, Clerk could not continue his work in Buem. In the 1904 (the year he left), the Basel Mission station was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Bremen Mission.
Clerk then moved to Berekum, near Sunyani, about 80 miles (128 km) northwest of Kumasi, in what is now the Brong -Ahafo Region of Ghana, and here he had intended to settle. The paramount chief however refused to grant him accommodation, and the inhabitants would not help him build a house. Nonetheless, N. T. Clerk established the first congregation, in the Brong Ahafo Presbytery, the Berekum Congregation, in 1905 and was its first residential Minister. The Berekum Presbyterian District was founded in 1920. After nearly three lacklustre years and in the face of hostility, intimidation and poor health including a tapeworm infection, he was transferred to Larteh, just south of Akropong, where he found the work more pleasant, staying there as the resident district minister from 1907 to 1918. In an entrepreneurial drive and a practical approach to sustain their work, Clerk and several African Christian missionaries set up cocoa farms. With financial proceeds he received from his personal farm enterprise at Adawso, a few miles to the west, he was able to give his children high-quality education and raise them to become responsible professionals in society: a Protestant minister, an architect, teachers, a nurse, a medical doctor and fashion designers.
An extensive collection of Nicholas Clerk's cartographic manuscripts and ethnographic reports, produced from his missionary work in numerous Ghanaian towns and villages, is housed at the Archives and Library of the Basel Mission / Mission 21 in Basel, Switzerland.
Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church