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.
Catherine Mulgrave
Catherine Mulgrave died of pneumonia in Christiansborg on 14 January 1891 and her body was buried at the Basel Mission Cemetery in Osu, Accra. Commenting on her pioneering role in women's empowerment through education and evangelisation in a largely patriarchal environment, the Gold Coast historian and Basel Mission pastor, Carl Christian Reindorf described her as "“our spiritual mother.”" Many of her pupils went on to become Christian wives to new African Christians who formed the nucleus of the emerging clergy and catechist class of the Gold Coast. Her second marriage also reflected the successful symbiosis of cultures, in this case, African-Caribbean and European, as well as religious traditions, Pietist and Jamaican Moravian which created a “golden bridge” for intercultural relations, in spite of a rigid or absolute system that separated the living arrangements of the two groups in nineteenth century colonial Ghana.