Church-initiated contacts with West African blacks started in 1959 when LaMar S. Williams was assigned to correspond with interested people from West Africa. He made contacts in Nigeria, corresponded with groups in Ghana, and send literature, but he never visited that country. With the cessation of official Church-initiated contacts in 1965, certain Church members unofficially but vigorously pursued the West African links. Betwween 1966 and 1969, Virginia Cutler of Brigham Young University's School of Education was a visiting professor at the University of Ghana. Before she left, LaMar Williams asked her to get acquainted with Dr. Mensah and teach him and his group all that she could. She gladly did so and, in the process, encouraged them, wrote to Williams about them, and helped arrange for Church magazines and other literature to be sent to them. She is fondly remembered in Ghana as the first American Latter-day Saint individual to visit personally.

In the 1970s, a professor of communications at the University of Utah and visiting Ford Foundation Professor in Nigeria, Mr. Neff Smart, found time to meet with and teach Ghanaians who were interested in the Church. Between 1969 and 1977, Merrill J. Bateman, a BYU business professor, made several visits to Ghana, making unofficial contacts with the Mensah and Johnson groups during 1969 and 1971. Lynn M. Hilton, who had worked in the Missionary Department while attending the University of Utah and who had helped Williams send materials to Africa, was in Ghana on business from 1969 to 1971. He, too, visited some of the groups, became acquainted with Mensah, provided leaders of the Ghanaian Latter-day Saints with personalized triple combinations, and sent a hundred copies of the Book of Mormon to the groups for distribution. Ending all these unofficial contacts was the revelation in June 1978, which brought about the possibility of "legalised" contacts.