Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein : A Ghanaian slave and first African Protestant minister.

Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein was a Ghanaian slave, theologian, missionary, and first African Protestant minister.

He was born in present-day Ghana and sold into slavery during childhood. He was also a black intellectual in eighteenth-century Europe and a former slave who argued in favor of slavery.

At age 7 or 8, he was sold to a ship's captain called Steenhardt.

Steenhardt took him to Middelburg in Zeeland, Holland.

Later brought him back to Elmina Castle then to Shama. Steenhardt presented him to Jacobus van Goch, factor of the Dutch West India Company (DWIC) in Shama who gave him the name Capitein.

Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein (1717-1747) was a man of many firsts-the first black student of theology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

He was the first black minister ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands, the author of the first Fante/Mfantse-Dutch Grammar in Ghana as well as the first translator of the Ten Commandments while in Elmina, Twelve Articles of Faith and parts of the Catechism into Fante/Mfantse.

He is remembered as the first African to argue in writing that slavery was compatible with Christianity in the public lecture that he delivered at Leiden in 1742 on the topic, De Servitute Libertati Christianae Non Contraria.

The Latin original was soon translated into Dutch and became so popular in the Netherlands that it was reprinted five times in the first year of publication.

He died in 1747 in debt, owing large amounts of money to many creditors.