Christiane Emilie Christaller, née Ziegler, (1829 – 13 August 1866) was a German educator and missionary in Akropong in colonial Ghana.

[1] She was the first wife of Johann Gottlieb Christaller (1827–1895), a German missionary, linguist and philologist of the Basel Mission, notable for his leading role in the translation of the entire Holy Bible into the Twi language.

[2][3][4] Christiane Emilie Ziegler was born in 1829 in the town of Waiblingen near Stuttgart in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg.

[1][5] Emilie Ziegler's parents permitted her to go to church, in the company of her close friend, Edith, who was the only child of her family.

[1] In her diaries, she described this period as a "difficult time...as her prayers came back to her unanswered and her family failed to understand feelings".

[1] In 1856, Emilie Ziegler received a marriage proposal from a twenty-nine-year-old German missionary, Johann Gottlieb Christaller who had been working as a philologist at Akropong on the Gold Coast for about three years.

[1][2][3][4] Christaller translated the Bible into the Twi language, with the assistance of the Akan linguists, David Asante, Theophilus Opoku, Jonathan Palmer Bekoe and Paul Keteku.

[1][2][3][4] The Basel Mission required its missionaries to prove themselves in the field for a minimum of two years before the Home Committee could grant the permission to find a spouse.

[1] A delegation consisting of J. G. Christaller, his sister and one Gustave Rapp went to Stuttgart to ask for Emilie Ziegler's hand in marriage.

[1] In retrospect, this short stormy period prepared her for the tribulation she would face in the mission field on the Gold Coast.

[1] When ship arrived in Sierra Leone, there was a letter from her fiancé, Johann Christaller, addressed to "Germans coming to Africa".

[1] Emelie Ziegler finally arrived in Christiansborg (Osu) in Accra, Gold Coast on 22 December 1856 where she was met a Basel missionary, Christoph Wilhelm Löcher, who told her, her husband-to-be would meet her later.

[1] She also noticed that Osu was in ruins from the 1854 bombardment of town by the British colonial authorities after the indigenes refused to pay the unpopular poll tax.

[1] Emilie's Christaller's life on the Gold Coast was captured in a book, "Die mit Tränen säen.

[1] Her husband remained aloof and refused to answer questions relating to her health, language or even her teaching duties at the school.

[1] Nonetheless, when she went on an assignment at Abokobi, she began to miss him and realised that despite all their relationship troubles, differing levels of faith and outlooks in life, she still loved him.

[1] Emilie Christaller felt elated but could not tell her husband because she feared his reaction, knowing that he would disapprove her interactions with a fetish priest.

[1] Johann Christaller, surprisingly wrote loving letters to his wife anytime he travelled outside Akropong, which was in contrast his attitude towards her at home.

[1] On the journey to Europe, Emelie Christaller took along a girl called Anyama, an Akan native and former domestic slave whose freedom the Basel mission had bought from her enslavers.

[1] Emelie Christaller privately questioned the Christian values and beliefs of the leaders in Basel who refused to accept an outsider into their community.

As a result of the hostile atmosphere, Emelie Christaller realised that it was in Anyama's own interest to return to the Gold Coast.

[1] A year later in 1862, Johann Christaller returned to the Gold Coast while his wife, Emelie and the children moved back to her parents' home in Waiblingen.