Rose Ann Miller (16 March 1836 – 1930) was a Jamaican-born educator pioneer who worked extensively on the Gold Coast in both Basel Mission and government-run schools.
[1] As a child in 1843, Miller relocated to the Gold Coast with her parents and siblings, as part of a group of 24 West Indian settlers recruited by the Danish minister, Andreas Riis and the Basel Mission to augment evangelism efforts in Ghana.
[1] In spring 1843, a seven-year old Rose Ann Miller joined her parents, siblings and twenty other Moravian Christian compatriots to sail to the Gold Coast under the aegis of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society.
[1] The Cape Coast offer was on par with a Wesleyan mission and a government-employed teacher's salary of £25 and £24 respectively in 1875 while a government headmistress in the same city made £72.
[1] Though she did not seek permission from the Aburi mission station head, the Basel missionary, Johann Dieterle, she was left unpunished as her initiative showed a sense of purpose–a summation of Jon Miller's concept of “strategic deviant.”[1][9] In another entrepreneurial move, she donated sixty coffee seedlings to the Aburi girls’ boarding school farm.
In 1864, she received a letter of commendation from the St. Petersburg Women’s Association, recognising her as an exemplar of economic independence who pursued filial piety for her ageing parents.
[1] However, Rose Ann's father, Joseph viewed the Euro-African mulatto men as philanderers who were unfit for long-term stable marriage.
[1] The final group of potential future spouses was the European Basel missionaries, including Johann Gottlieb Christaller.
[1] A series of related events which Widmann reported to the Home Committee as provocative led to the suspension of Rose Ann Miller from her teaching post in 1856.
[1] In 1858, J. G. Christaller and the Home Committee discouraged another potential Basel missionary suitor, Johann Ludwig Haas from marrying Miller as they considered it a “not really desirable development”.
[1] She acted as a spiritual figurehead in social motherhood and economic independence – both key aspects of the modern day concept of Presbyterian womanhood – a philosophy that can be linked directly to Rose Ann Miller's life and work on the Gold Coast.