Nicholas Timothy Clerk
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The Reverend Nicholas Timothy Clerk |
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Portrait of Nicholas Timothy Clerk
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| Born |
28 October 1862 Aburi, Gold Coast |
| Died | 16 August 1961 (aged 98) Accra, Ghana |
| Nationality |
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| Education | Basel Mission Seminary, Basel, Switzerland |
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| Spouse(s) | Anna Alice Meyer (m. 1891) |
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| Relatives | Clerk family |
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| Ordained | Basel Minster, 1888 |
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Offices held
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First Synod Clerk, Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast (1918 -1932) |
Nicholas Timothy Clerk (28 October 1862 - †16 August 1961) was a Gold Coast-born theologian, clergyman and pioneering missionary of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society who worked extensively in southeast colonial Ghana (Gold Coast). His father was the Jamaican Moravian missionary Alexander Worthy Clerk (1820 - 1906), who worked in the Gold Coast with the Basel Mission and co-founded The Salem School at Osu, a Presbyterian boarding middle school for boys in 1843. N. T. Clerk was elected the First Synod Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast, a position he held from 1918 to 1932. A staunch advocate of secondary education, Nicholas Timothy Clerk, became the founding father of the all boys’ Presbyterian boarding school in Ghana, Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School, established in 1938. As Synod Clerk, he pushed vigorously for and turned the “original idea of a church mission high school" into reality.
Clerk was born on 28 October 1862 at Aburi, about forty-five minutes north-east of the Ghanaian capital, 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, the Reverend Andreas Riis of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society in 1843. Riis lived in the Gold Coast from 1832 to 1845. His mother, Pauline Hesse was from the Gold Coast, and was of German and Ga-Dangme descent. He studied at Basel Mission primary and middle schools in Aburi, followed by pedagogy and theology training at the Basel Mission seminary (now Presbyterian Training College of Education) at Akropong, in the state of Akuapem, 32 miles (51 km) north-north-east of Accra, where he showed strong interest in Christian missionary work. The Basel missionaries founded the Akropong seminary in 1848 as the second oldest higher educational institution in West Africa after Fourah Bay College, established in 1827. With the aid of a bursary awarded by the Basel Mission, Clerk pursued further studies at the Basel Mission Seminary in Basel, Switzerland () between 1884 and 1888, where he received advanced training in theology, philosophy and linguistics, with special emphasis on philology. 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, N. T. Clerk received additional practical training in geography and cartography, botany, as well as basic medicine, anatomy and surgery. During this period, he spent a year (1884 -1885) in Schorndorf, about 42 miles (26 km) east of Stuttgart, Germany, living with and studying under the award-winning , who had earlier been influential in the translation of the Bible into the Twi language with the help of two Akan linguists and missionaries, David Asante and Theophilus Opoku. Christaller was a two-time recipeint (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." 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 and in July 1888 ordained a minister at Korntal, situated at the northwestern border of Stuttgart of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. He returned to his homeland, Gold Coast in October 1888.
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