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.

[13] The first Moravian missionaries in Jamaica were Zecharias Georg Caries, Thomas Shallcross and Gottlieb Haberecht, who evangelised to slaves on the Bogue Estate and later, to surrounding plantations.

The training institute was established by Zorn at the behest of the Moravian mission leadership to prepare young Jamaican men for Christian evangelism, catechism and the propagation of the Gospel in the West Indies after the abolishment of slavery in the British Empire in 1834[10][24] followed by the full emancipation of slaves in Jamaica on 1 August 1838, a little over a year after Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne.

[10][30][31] Early accounts indicate that the Moravian Church in Herrnhut in Saxony, Germany, recruited an inhabitant of the Gold Coast in 1735 and trained him in the arts and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen.

[41] In Christiansborg, Accra, they also started the Basel Mission Trading Factory to export palm oil and other local products to fund the mission work and also set up an artisan workshop to train local entrepreneurs in advanced methods of tradesmanship in order to serve their communities on the Gold Coast and in West Africa, which in the view of the Basel committee, was a way of atoning for the horror and devastating effects of the slave trade brought on by European colonialism.

[41] According to church history, their priorities were "to become acclimatised, to take time over the selection of a permanent site for the mission, to master the local language at all costs, to begin actual mission activity by founding a school, and lastly to present the Gospel with love and patience...to show to the people an inexhaustible forbearance and an excess of beneficent love, even though only a few of the thousand bleeding wounds may be healed which greed of gain and the cruel craftiness of the European have caused.

Riis lived like the locals at the time, residing in the forested hinterlands, using palm branches as sleeping mats and eating regional delicacies like peppersoup, snails and wormfish by some accounts.

[10] At the valedictory durbar organised in honour of Riis, the paramount chief, Omanhene of Akuapem, is purported to have remarked, "If you could show us some Africans who could read the Bible, then we would surely follow you".

[35] Morally, they were well-equipped to handle missionary work due to their strong sense of social mission, gleaned from the abolitionist and emancipation movements, and an imbibing of the Moravian Christian educational ethos in the West Indies.

[13] In an allegory of the Biblical Joseph narrative, a team of 24 Jamaicans and one Antiguan (6 distinct families and 3 bachelors) sailed from the port at Kingston on 8 February 1843 aboard the Irish brigantine, The Joseph Anderson, rented for £600, and according to varying historical accounts, arrived in Christiansborg, Gold Coast on Easter Sunday, 16 April or Easter Monday, 17 April 1843 at about 8 p.m. local time (GMT) after sixty-eight days and nights of voyage, enduring a five-day tropical storm on the Caribbean sea, shortage of fresh water and an oppressive heat aboard the vessel.

[10][11] The West Indians rested for a while on the coast before leaving for Frederikgave on 10 May 1843, the old villa and royal plantation of the Danish Governor at modern day Sesemi village near the Akwapim hills.

[10][48][50][49] Other tropical seedlings brought by the West Indian missionaries include cocoa, coffee, breadnut, breadfruit, guava, yam, cassava, plantains, cocoyam, variety of banana species and pear.

[10] Nonetheless, they settled in and wholly "trusted the Akuapem people" and formed close friendships with the natives who became their interpreters as they could not originally communicate in the local Twi language; they later incorporated Akan vocabulary into their Jamaican Patois.

[10] As per historical literature, they built the first brick and stone houses in Akropong and the area of West Indian settlement became known as Hanover, a connection to the parish (region) in northwest Jamaica.

[11][13] Hermann Halleur was the mission station manager responsible for all economic activities while J. G. Widmann was appointed the school inspector and Basel minister-in-charge of the Christ Presbyterian Church, Akropong.

Riis and another Basel missionary, Simon Süss were forced by the situation to trade and barter in order to get money to buy food and other needs of his expanding mission staff and local workers.

Upon the opening of the seminary, the Sierra Leonean Pan-Africanist, James Africanus Beale Horton noted that, "it is indeed an academic achievement which can very well hold its own in comparison with European Training Colleges of the period.

"[13] The school produced teacher-catechists whose roles were pivotal in Christian evangelism as the curriculum grounded students in the theory and practice of general education and pedagogy as well as a classic seminary training.

[13] Clerk and his fellow Caribbean missionaries were self-motivated and adapted quickly despite the initial homesickness and learnt the indigenous languages of Akan and Ga.[10][57][58] The missionaries composed new local language hymns, translated church hymns into Ga and Akan from English and German, built stone houses, water wells and schools, set up large farms and taught the local people to read and write vastly improving literacy in the region.

[13] Clerk's students in the pioneer class included John Powell Rochester, David Asante, Paul Staudt Keteku, William Yirenkyi and Jonathan Bekoe Palmer.

[1] Between 1843 and 1891, Mulgrave also established various boarding schools for girls at Osu, Abokobi and Odumase, with curricula that emphasised arithmetic, reading, writing, needlework, gardening and household chores.

[13] The West Indians introduced English as the preferred medium of instruction in school and this gained wide acceptance after the Danes sold their forts and castles on the eastern board of the Gold Coast, including Osu, to the British in 1850.

[13] The school curriculum was rigorous: It included English and Ga languages, arithmetic, geography, history, religious knowledge, nature study, hygiene, handwriting and music.

[15] In 1854, the British authorities, aided by the colonial forces, bombarded the town of Osu for two days using the warship, "H.M. Scourge" after the indigenes refused to pay the newly imposed poll-tax.

[15] Many of the school's alumni later became administrators, accountants, bankers, civil servants, dentists, diplomats, engineers, judges, lawyers, medical doctors, political leaders, professors and teachers in the colonial era.

[1] As a result of the 1854 bombardment of Osu and the ensuing forced displacement of its residents, a brother-in-law of Clerk, John Hesse, relocated to Akropong as a domestic refugee and engaged in petty trading together with other Ga-Dangme traders who had also fled the bombing.

[10] Sometime after the war ended, the Germans sought to renew their dominant influence but the Gold Coast Christians declared a strong preference for the Presbyterian Church brought there by the Scots.

[17] While propagation of the Gospel was the main objective of the West Indians and the Basel Mission, the domestic socioeconomic and dire educational environment motivated them to establish the first formal schools and colleges in the country, open to pupils from all walks of life.

[36] Moreover, the missionaries provided alternative sources of employment to rural inhabitants through the establishment of mechanized agriculture and commerce-driven small-scale artisanal industries such as construction and craftsmanship including printing, book-binding, tile manufacturing, brick-making and weaving in order to create self-sufficiency among the natives.

[39] Today, the church maintains schools, colleges and health centres in many cities and towns in Ghana including Abetifi, Aburi, Agogo, Bawku, Donkorkrom, Dormaa Ahenkro and Enchi.