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.

[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.

[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] 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] 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][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] 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.

[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.

[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.

[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] This women's fellowship was a model borrowed from the Moravian Church in Jamaica as believers of the denomination there referred to one another as brethren, which encompassed the sisterhood.

[3] In 1842, when the Basel Mission recruitment team visited Jamaica, Americo-Liberian, George Peter Thompson fell in love with the then 16-year old Catherine Mulgrave.

The Inspector of the Basel Mission, Wilhelm Hoffmann wrote to Mulgrave in 1847 to inquire about Thompson's lapses, to which she elicited sympathy for her husband, in spite of his infidelity.

[1][6][7][9][28][29] In the legal documentation for separation, it was recorded that she first filed for divorce and as stipulated by the mission won full custody of the children and could remarry if she desired.

[1] As a single mother with young children to feed, she found it difficult to live on her meagre teacher's salary as her ex-husband had been expelled from the mission and had left the Gold Coast.

[1] The Basel missionaries on the Gold Coast petitioned the Home Committee on her behalf, detailing her financial difficulties and requesting for debt forgiveness for unpaid loans from the mission, relating to essential needs for her children.

[1] She wrote to the newly appointed Basel Inspector, Joseph Josenhans on 28 February 1850 asking him to intercede on her behalf, as the dissolution of her marriage had caused pain and distress in her heart.

[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] 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] 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.

[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] Catherine Mulgrave died of pneumonia in Christiansborg on 14 January 1891 and her body was buried at the Basel Mission Cemetery in Osu, Accra.

[1][2][3] 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.