Johann Gottlieb Christaller (19 November 1827 – 16 December 1895) was a German missionary, clergyman, ethnolinguist, translator and philologist who served with the Basel Mission. He was devoted to the study of the Twi language in what was then the Gold Coast, now Ghana. He was instrumental, together with African colleagues, Akan linguists, David Asante, Theophilus Opoku, Jonathan Palmer Bekoe, and Paul Keteku in the translation of the Bible into the Akuapem dialect of Twi. Christaller was also the first editor of the Christian Messenger, the official news publication of the Basel Mission, serving from 1883 to 1895. He is recognised in some circles as the "founder of scientific linguistic research in West Africa".
Early life and education
Johann Christaller was born in Winnenden, near Stuttgart in Germany. His father was a tailor and a subsistence farmer of modest background, who was keen on books and had a large personal library with more than 2000 books. Johann Christaller had two sisters, Johanna and Christiane. His father died when Christaller was only a year old, throwing the family into extreme poverty. To make ends meet, his mother and sister started a sewing business and lending books from his late father's library. J. G. Christaller spent his childhood days honing his talent in philology and linguistics by reading his father's books. Christaller received basic additional private instruction in Latin and Greek. He was a brilliant student and won a bursary, freeing his family from paying tuition at school. Christaller, influenced by the Pietist movement within the German Lutheran church, decided very early in his life to become a missionary.
Later, from 1841 to 1844, Christaller was an apprentice and an assistant to a town clerk in the mayor's printing office in Winnenden Among his options after his apprenticeship were entering the public service, going to a university to study languages or going to the seminary in Basel. He opted to enroll at the seminary. In May 1847, Christaller applied for admission to the Basel Mission Seminary and Training School in Basel, Switzerland, starting his studies in September 1848 at age of 20. At Basel in 1852, he started learning the Twi language through Hans Nicolaus Riis whose uncle was the first Basel missionary survivor on the Gold Coast, Andreas Riis. He was ordained as a pastor on 7 November 1852. During his studies there, he helped edit the grammar of the Twi language. By the end of his seminary education, in addition to his native German, he had become fluent in English, Greek, Hebrew and Latin.
Literary work on the Gold Coast
According to scholars, Christaller was “deeply influenced by the sociohistorical theories of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), whose views on the life cycle of communities and on the equality of different cultures was opposed to the historical conception of the Enlightenment, which considered Western civilization as superior to other cultures and as the ideal and goal toward which other cultures did or should aspire.”
In 1853, Johann Christaller was posted to Ghana by the Basel Mission Home Committee, stationed at Akropong, about 32 miles (51 km) north of Accra while his classmate August Steinhauser was sent to Christiansborg, Osu. Christaller arrived at Osu, now a suburb of Accra, on 25 January 1853. At the Akropong mission station, he met other missionaries, Widmann, Dieterle and Joseph Mohr. After his arrival on the Gold Coast, he became an instructor at the recently founded Basel Mission Seminary at Akropong-Akuapem, established in 1848. The seminary had ten students at the time. The Basel Mission by that time had also started a boys' school that had forty-one pupils and a girls' school with thirty-two pupils. It became apparent to Christaller that without a written local language, the efforts by the mission to propagate the Gospel would prove futile. His giftedness in linguistics allowed him to transform an oral language into written form. His main assignments included the translation of the Bible and complex Christian literary works for the growing native Christian communities, after quickly mastering the Twi language. Christaller also stayed at Aburi, 20 miles (32 km) north of Accra, from 1862 to 1865. From 1865 to 1867, he was based at Kyebi in Akyem Abuakwa, 50 miles (80 km) north of Accra. He again lived in Akropong from 1867 to 1868.