Catherine Mulgrave
Catherine Elisabeth Mulgrave also Gewe (19 November 1827 ─ 14 January 1891) was an Angolan-born Jamaican Moravian pioneer educator, administrator and missionary who accompanied a group of 24 Caribbean mission recruits from Jamaica and Antigua and arrived in the Danish Protectorate of Christiansborg, now Osu, Accra in Ghana in 1843. Mulgrave was a leading figure in pedagogy and the education programme for girls in both Jamaica and on the Gold Coast. She was the Basel Mission’s first female teacher active on the Gold Coast. Under the auspices of the society, she played a pioneering role in the Christian women ministry of the Protestant movement in colonial Ghana. Catherine Mulgrave was also one of the first African woman teachers in the missionary educationalist system in Africa.
Harriet, the Woman Called Moses
According to Musgrave, she first had the idea of composing an opera for black singers in 1980 when her husband, Peter Mark, the general director of Virginia Opera, was auditioning singers for a production of "Porgy and Bess". She said that she chose Tubman as her subject because "Harriet is every woman who dared to defy injustice and tyranny—she is Joan of Arc, she is Susan B. Anthony, she is Anne Frank, she is Mother Teresa." As with her previous operas "Mary, Queen of Scots" (1977), "A Christmas Carol" (1979), and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1981), Musgrave also wrote the libretto.