Catherine Mulgrave

Catherine Mulgrave was born in Luanda, Angola, circa 1827.[1][2][3][6][7][8] Some scholars such as the Swiss German church historian, Hans Werner Debrunner posited that Mulgrave may have been born earlier in around 1825 or in 1826.[6][7][9][10] Other records list 1820 and 1822.[11][12] However, records at the Basel Mission Archives list her exact date of birth as 19 November 1827.[1][6][7] Her father was a prince, the son of an African traditional chief who worked as an assistant to a merchant in their port town.[2][7] Other sources state that her father was a respected African Christian merchant with European influences.[6][7] Her mother, Sophina was a baptised mulatress who belonged to a Christian family of Catholic origin – most likely Euro-African of Portuguese and indigenous African descent.[6][7] Since the 15th century, circa 1450, the Portuguese had a long-established presence on the Angolan coast through commerce and trade with the BaKongo Empire.[6][7] Mulgrave recalled her mother calling her by the Angolan name “Gewe” (pronounced "Geve") as a child.[1][2][6][7] It is said that her European maternal grandfather had his entire family, including his eleven daughters, one son and grandchildren, both Portuguese and African, vaccinated against smallpox.[6][7][12] The port town of Luanda was described as, “A seaside town with a large church, a school, two forts, great European houses. (...) The city itself has a governor, a bishop, monks [with] various cowls, vestments, choirboys, images of saints, holy water." [6][7] When she was about five years old in April 1833, Gewe and her two cousins, while playing and fishing on the beach one early evening, were abducted by Portuguese slave traders on the coast of São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda, now Luanda.[2][6][7][12][13][14] The slave traders arrived in a small boat with some sailors and attempted to lure the three children with sweets.[2][6][7][15] One child managed to run away before she could be captured into the boat.[2][6][7] The sailors paddled their boat to an anchored slave ship nearby, the Heroina where the two girls were greeted by a friendly captain, "Sabin from St. Thomas" who was also a slave trader.[2][6][7] The two girl prisoners were kept in the captain's cabin.[2][6][7][12] Hundreds of captives, estimated to be about 303, were in the ship and the two girls witnessed the brutality visited upon prisoners who tried to break free.[2][6][7][12] That night, the ship sailed from the Angolan coast, heading for Havana, Cuba.[16] After a few weeks, land came into view. British colonial authorities patrolling the high seas inspected the ship but they did not discover the slaves who were hidden in a basement.[2][6][7] Near the southern Jamaican coast, a tropical storm alarmed and distressed everyone aboard the Portuguese schooner - the vessel crushed against a rock and began leaking before it eventually sunk.[2][6][7][16] Some swam to safety on the shore while others clung to the wooden mast as they waited to be rescued.[2][6][7] Gewe and her cousin were among the few survivors rescued from the wreckage and taken to Old Harbour, Saint Catherine Jamaica.[2][6][7][17] The captain of the ship with his crew of kidnappers were arrested by the British authorities in Jamaica and jailed in Kingston as the system of slavery was already in the early phase of abolishment. The "apprenticeship act", granting immediate and full freedom to children six years of age and younger, and an intermediate status for those older, was also enacted 1833, kicking off the step-by-step abolishment of the system of slavery in Jamaica.[1][2][6][7] The surviving captives aboard the Portuguese vessel were set free. Earlier in 1831/32, a bloody slave rebellion on the island had kicked off the struggle towards freedom. The official Act of Emancipation came into full force throughout the West Indies on 1 August 1834.[2][6][7]

The two girls were adopted by the then Governor of Jamaica between 1832 and 1834, Earl of Mulgrave (1797–1863) and his wife, Maria Liddell, Lady Mulgrave Maria Liddell (1798–1882) who later became Lady Normanby and had just returned from Britain on a short trip.[1][2][3][6][7][18] The Earl of Mulgrave was created Marquess of Normanby in 1835 and was styled as Constantine Henry Phipps, 1st Marquess of Normanby.[1] The Mulgraves gave the two girls their surname and Gewe was given her adoptive mother's name.[1][2][3][6][7][19] In the first few months at the Governor's official residence in Spanish Town, they were home-schooled by the Governor's wife who was a devout Christian, most likely of Anglican faith.[1][2][3][6][7] In 1833, the Earl and Lady Mulgrave were on an official visit to inspect the Female Refuge School in Fairfield, Manchester Parish.[1] Between 1831 and 1837, the Moravian Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands increased its general operations in evangelism and educational initiatives in the West Indies.[1] The Moravians sought to educate liberated slaves under the apprenticeship system.[1] The refuge school had been established a year earlier in 1832 by English Moravian women missionaries.[1] The school population had 24 orphan girls, who came from all over the island to attend the institution.[1] Catherine Mulgrave and her cousin were sent to the boarding school. She spent five and a half years at the girls’ school.[1] In January 1834, the Governor and Lady Mulgrave left Jamaica.[1][2] They had wished to take Catherine and her cousin with them, but Lady Mulgrave suffered from sporadic illness and upon medical advice, the Mulgraves decided to leave them in Jamaica.[2][6][7] Furthermore, the Clerk of the Mulgraves advised them against taking Catherine to England due to climatic conditions. They nonetheless maintained correspondence with Catherine and regularly remitted funds for her upkeep in Jamaica.[1][6][7] After separation from her Victorian aristocratic foster family, Catherine Mulgrave was taken in by the Moravian mission in Fairfield, Manchester Parish.[1] Catherine Mulgrave then proceeded to the Mico Institution in Kingston, Jamaica for teacher-training. Persistent illness forced her to leave the normal school after just nine months.[1]

She was recruited as a teacher by a mission school in Bethlehem, Jamaica where she stayed a Moravian missionary couple for three years, until 1842.[1] At the Bethlehem Moravian school she taught at, it is estimated that enrollment was between 50 and 100 pupils.[1] It was fairly customary then to use pupil teachers between 14 and 18 years to teach younger children.[12]

In 1842, she joined 24 missionaries from Antigua and Jamaica recruited by Andreas Riis of the Basel Mission to aid the missionary entreprise on the Gold Coast.[1][3][20][21] There were theological similarities between the Basel Mission and the Moravian Church due to their shared Lutheran heritage.[3][22] The Basel mission group that came to Jamaica also included missionary, Johann Georg Widmann, Americo-Liberian and first African Basel missionary, George Peter Thompson as well as Riis’ wife, Anna Wolters Riis.[5] The recruitment of Afro-descendants had been successfully carried out by other European missionary societies in Anglophone West African countries like Sierra Leone.[3] In the view of the Basel Home Committee, Afro-West Indians were better suited to acclimatise to the West African climate in comparison to their European counterparts who often succumbed to death from tropical diseases.[3] Furthermore, the presence of West Indians from the then British and Danish-controlled Caribbean islands, would prove to native Africans that there were indeed black Christians in the world.[3][5][6]

On arrival in the Gold Coast colony, the Caribbean recruits relocated to Akropong. Riis and Thompson had regular misunderstandings and it was decided by the mission station to transfer George Thompson, together with his young bride, Catherine to Christiansborg to establish and English-language school on the coast.[1][6] On 27 November 1843, a boys’ boarding middle school, the Salem School opened at Christiansborg, the oldest existing school founded by the Basel Mission.[23] The founding schoolteachers were George Thompson, Catherine Mulgrave and young Jamaican teacher, Alexander Worthy Clerk who was part of the same group of 24 Moravian Caribbean emigrants who had earlier arrived in April 1843. Salem's school curriculum was rigorous: It included English and Ga languages, arithmetic, geography, history, religious knowledge, nature study, hygiene, handwriting and music.[23] There was also artisanal training, including pottery, carpentry, basket and mat weaving and practical lessons in agriculture in the school garden.[23] The first batch had 41 pupils: 34 boys and 7 girls and the first classes were held in rented premises.[6][7][23] The school later moved to the mission house originally owned by the Danish governor which stood at the centre of the Osu coastal village and contained ground floor rooms for the school and management. On the upper floor, there were missionary apartments, girls’ school and teachers’ quarters.[6][7]

Around the same time, Mulgrave became the founder, the first principal and director of the Basel Mission-operated girls’ school at the previously Danish-run Christiansborg Castle School in Osu, Accra.[1][3][6][7] The Basel missionary, Andreas Riis initially opposed the handover of the castle school to the Basel mission as he claimed the school's alumnae would become “future concubines” for educated civil servants in the colonial administration.[6][7][24] The Danes sold their forts to the British in 1850.[1] The Christiansborg Castle School, as well as the British-owned Cape Coast Castle school, established in the eighteenth century by the Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) largely served the mulatto population in both jurisdictions. The castle schools were approved by the European Governors to primarily educate the Euro-African children of European men and Gold Coast African women. The children often went on to become administrative assistants in the colonial civil service. Furthermore, a girls’ school had been founded in Cape Coast in 1821 and later on, Wesleyan Methodist missionaries set another female-only school in 1836 which is now the Wesley Girls’ High School.[1]

In around March 1847, the Committee of the Basel Women’s Association which had no previous contact with Mulgrave, contacted her first husband, George Peter Thompson - an acknowledgement of her singular effort, initiative and ingenuity to establish a thriving girls’ school in difficult circumstances.[1] The school flourished academically and as school administrator, Mulgrave ran the school efficiently.[1] It is apparent Mulgrave did not face prejudice in her leadership role which provided stability for the mission station at Christiansborg.[1]

Between 1843 and 1891, Mulgrave also established various specialist boarding schools for girls at Osu (1843), Abokobi (1855) and Odumase (1859) in spite of a scarcity of resources, with curricula that emphasised Christian training, arithmetic, reading, writing, needlework, gardening and household chores.[1][3][25] Pupils were trained in practical skills such as vinegar making, soap making, starch and flour production.[6][7]

Catherine Mulgrave was an inspiration to and mentored several pioneering women educators such as Regina Hesse and Rose Ann Miller. As the matriarch of the mission station at Christiansborg, she also mentored numerous young single women in her school entreprise. Catherine Mulgrave mastered the Ga language, German and the southern German dialect, Swabian German or Schwäbisch, spoken in her second husband, Johannes Zimmermann’s hometown, Gerlingen.[2][6][7]

Mulgrave's second husband, Johannes Zimmermann

Mulgrave continued to manage the girls’ at Christiansborg she founded.[1] She was later transferred to be a housemistress of a new girls’ boarding school in the same town.[1] Upon the suggestion of Basel missionaries in Christiansborg, Mulgrave started a prayer meeting for women in Christiansborg in 1854.[1] She also ran the missionary household which included her mentee, a Euro-African teacher, Regina Hesse and Zimmermann's Euro-African linguist assistant as well as their children.[1] As the household matriarch, she was lauded for her culinary skills, specialising in cuisine from the Gold Coast, Germany and Jamaica. They often invited their neighbours to their home to share her freshly baked pancakes.[2][6][7]

After the 1854 bombardment of Christiansborg by the H. M. S. Scourge, following the riots against the British poll tax ordinance, Zimmermann sought refuge at the Methodist mission house in Accra.[1][30][31] Together with his family and students, he was evacuated to Abokobi, 15 miles (24 kilometres) inland from Accra where, with the assistance of another missionary, August Steinhauser, he set up a small Christian village community.[1][31] At Abokobi, Catherine Mulgrave established a girls’ boarding school before staying briefly at Akropong.[1][31] In 1858, the Zimmermann-Mulgrave household returned to Christiansborg and Catherine became a missionary wife again and resumed leading the weekly women's prayer meetings, usually held on Tuesday evening.[1] Catherine Mulgrave gained respect from other missionary wives like Amalie Steinhauser who was on friendly terms with her.[1][2][3] Mrs. Steinhauser had within that period lost her husband, the Basel missionary, August Steinhauser.[1] Catherine and Amalie jointly paid regular house visits to women congregants of the church in Christiansborg.[1]

Mulgrave challenged the edict of two European unmarried teachers who were co-heads at the girls’ boarding school, Wilhelmine Maurer and Katharina Ruedi who wanted to abolish the social system where pupils helped their teachers in doing household chores.[1] In 1860, Mulgrave and her husband were posted to Odumase, where once again she started a girls’ boarding school.[1] At Odumase, they lived in the heart of the town as they wanted to be closer to the indigenous people.[1]

In 1871, the wife of missionary Klaiber died suddenly and Catherine Mulgrave was accused by the missionary of poisoning his wife.[1] Another missionary, Weber also accused Zimmerman of financial irregularities, pertaining to disbursement of mission funds.[1] Senior missionaries appointed by the Basel board exonerated them.[1] From 1860s onwards, the Home Committee softened its stance and attempted to recall him for furlough in order to be re-socialised into European culture but like Jon Miller's “strategic deviant” concept, he rebuffed these calls.[24] The Basel board felt he had become ‘too Africanised’ due to his marriage to Mulgrave and long stay on the Gold Coast.[24]

In 1870s, Catherine's husband began to have bouts of exhaustion and illness.[1][6][7][30][31] In the spring of 1872, he went to Gerlingen with his whole family to recuperate for a year.[1][6][7][30][31] On their return to the Gold Coast in 1873, they lived and worked at Abokobi until 1876, when they moved to Christiansborg.[1][6][7][30][31] Shortly thereafter, Zimmermann fell ill again, and returned to Gerlingen, Germany with Catherine Mulgrave via Basel, Switzerland in September 1876, where he died at the end of the same year, on 13 December 1876, at the age of fifty-one.[1][6][7][30][31] Accompanied by her three younger children, Mulgrave then returned to the Gold Coast in the spring of 1877 as a missionary widow and lived at Christiansborg, her longtime adopted home, until her death, fourteen years later, in 1891.[1][6][7][30][31]

She then permanently settled in Christiansborg where she continued to be active in women's evangelism and the women's class, visiting its members in their homes to share the Gospel.[1] As a missionary, she witnessed the death-bed conversion and baptism of a former houseboy of Andreas Riis.[1]