In the footsteps of the Swiss in Africa

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Anna Wuhrmann, from the Basel Mission, with her pupils from the Bamoum ethnic tribe from western Cameroun in 1915 (Basel Mission archives)

Missionary Fritz Ramseyer preaching in front of a village assembly in Côte-de-l’Or (Ghana) in 1890 (Basel Mission archives)

Father Viktor Guldimann leaves the Engelberg convent to travel to Cameroon in 1933 (Engelberg convent archives)

Early 20th century mission collection box. The figure bows his head whenever a coin is dropped in. (Basel Mission archives, Markus Gruber, Basel)

A Benedictine monk from Engelberg with an apprentice in the cobblers-saddlers workshop at the Otélé mission in Cameroon in 1961 (Engelberg Benedictine Abbey photo archives)

Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia awards the Order of the Queen of Sheba to Jeanne Evalet-Roth, most senior member of the Swiss community, in 1961 (Geneva Ethnography Museum, collection André Evalet)

Share certificate of the Mons-Djémila firm, which traded in flour and cereals, in the name of a pastor from Geneva. (© A. & G. Zimmermann, Genève)

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Photographs and documents from the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.

Contacts between Switzerland and Africa were initiated by mercenaries, followed by businesmen, traders, industrialists, bankers, farmers and later missionaries. According to the historian Marc Perrenoud, the Basel surgeon Samuel Braun was probably one of the first Swiss to have explored Africa in the 17th century.