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The first protestant missionaries to Africa were former slaves who had been freed and were then sent to West Africa by European and American mission societies. Philip Quaque, Jacobus Capitein, Pederson Svane and Christian Proteen were all men of African ancestry serving as chaplains in the European forts along the coastline early in the 18th century. Their efforts met with only marginal success, since they were fully identified with the European community -- all of them had European wives, sometimes at the insistence of the mission agency that sent them.
Late in the 18th century a group of "boisterously Christian" freed slaves who had originally settled in Nova Scotia Canada, came to the West Coast of Africa to found the free colony of Sierra Leone. 1100 of them disembarked and established Freetown as a Christian city. The community flourished and, when the slave trade was abolished in 1807, became the place where persons rescued from slave ships would be landed. The Sierra Leone Christians spread the gospel over much of West Africa. One of the most remarkable of these missionaries was Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a liberated slave educated by the Anglican Church Missionary Society and ordained first as a priest and then as the first black bishop in Africa.
The European missionary movement was begun by the Moravians, a group of central European communitarian pietists who became convinced of the need to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth by the 1780s. They scattered throughout the world, including southern Africa, to spread the gospel. The Moravians were followed by the Baptist Missionary society, founded by William Carey in 1792 and the London Missionary society, founded in 1795. Both of these missionary societies were British and working class. They in turn were followed by the Church Missionary Society founded in 1799 by upper class evangelical Anglicans linked to William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. The CMS was, however, to find Anglicans considerably more reluctant to leave the comforts of England than the working class Baptists, so they hired German Lutherans to do their evangelizing for them. Alongside these mission societies, and in the long run perhaps more important for the Christianization of Africa was the British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804, which focussed on the work of translating and disseminating the Bible. Within another decade the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was founded in the USA, while the Wesleyan Methodists founded a mission society, and several German mission societies were formed as well. They all sent missionaries to Africa. By the 1840s the Protestant missionary enterprise was in full swing. As Adrian Hastings phrased it: "What in 1780 existed in the Protestant world at most the rather idiosyncratic concern of a handful of Moravians was by 1840 almost the very raison dÕetre of the all the mainline churches as understood by their more lively and enthusiastic membership." [Hastings, The Church in Africa, p 245]
These early missionaries shared a number of common characteristics. Most of them were working class, otherworldly in their social and political orientation, individualistic in their views of salvation and society and firmly non-denominational; cheerfully crossing denominational lines to further the cause of evangelism and co-operating heartily with fellow missionaries of whatever denomination or nationality they might be. They were the pioneer missionaries.
Perhaps the most important protestant missionary and model in the mid 19th century was David Livingstone, who stressed the benefits of Civilization, Commerce and Christianity against the slave trade. England had banned slavery in 1807, with the active assistance of West African Christians and former slaves like Olaudah Equiano, and much her attitude towards Africa was shaped by her new-found abhorrence of slavery and the slave trade.
This page was based on the following sources, which you can consult for more detailed information:
Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa: 1450-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Ch 5, 7, 8, 9
Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa from Antiquity to the Present. London: SPCK, 1995. Ch 6, 7
John Bauer, 2000 Years of Christianity in Africa (Nairobi: Paulines, 1994) pp. 110-24
Lamin Sanneh, West African Christianity: The Religious Impact. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983. Ch. 4