**Portrait of the Zimmermann-Mulgrave family, circa 1873.** BMArchives

The Basel Mission’s first African female teacher

The life of Catherine Zimmermann-Mulgrave tells a story of human trafficking as part of the slave trade and of Christian missionary work in West Africa in the 19th century. It also shows how an African woman managed to lead an independent and self-determined life despite being kidnapped and marginalised.

Noëmi Crain Merz

Noëmi Crain Merz is a historian at the University of Basel.

When Catherine Zimmermann-Mulgrave walked through Basel in late summer 1876, she was something of an exception, but not a one-off. About two dozen men and some women from Africa lived in the Basel Mission House, in Riehen or at the Pilgrim’s Mission in St. Chrischona on occasion from 1830 to 1880. Zimmermann-Mulgrave was only in Europe for a short time. Her adopted home was the Gold Coast, which is now Ghana. She spent decades teaching children (mainly girls) in missionary schools there. Her everyday life was hardly different from that of any other missionary woman. At the same time it was extraordinary: a mother of seven, she also had a job; a black person, she was also a teacher and missionary; a divorcee, she was still accepted and respected.

**A graphic print by Jakob Theophil Beck showing the Mission House in Basel, at the end of the 19th century.** Wikimedia / Swiss National Library

There was no indication of what fate had in store for young Catherine – who was called Gewe as a child – in April 1833 when she was fishing with two cousins on the beach at Luanda in Angola near a Portuguese ship. The children were used to sailing boats and European sailors, as Portuguese seafarers had been visiting west African coastal towns for centuries. When some men rowed up promising them sweets, the girls followed them. When Gewe boarded the ship, she had no idea that she would never see her home again, or that people were being kept in the ship’s hull. They were kept chained up in the humid stench with hardly any room to move as 'commodities' to be sold in the Caribbean.

**The interior of a slave ship. From “The history of slavery and the slave trade, ancient and modern” by William Blake, 1861.** Wikimedia

The bible says no to slavery

Millions of people had been carried off in this way from Africa to the American continent for over 300 years. In 1807, the United Kingdom abolished the slave trade. Despite heated debate in the British parliament, however, people with slaves were allowed to keep them. The practice continued for decades in the Spanish colonies. The Heroina, the vessel in which the girls were held, headed for the Spanish territory of Cuba. Gewe managed to avoid a life of slavery thanks to a tropical storm, which sank the ship near the British colony of Jamaica. Many of the people in chains below decks drowned, however the girls held on to some masts that were bound together and were saved. Jamaica was still marked by the suppression of the biggest slave uprising in its history, known as the Baptist War. Around the turn of the year 1831/32, enslaved men and women, led by slave and lay preacher Samuel Sharpe, had risen up against the plantation owners.

**The destruction of Roehampton Estate in Jamaica in January 1832. Illustration by Adolphe Duperly, 1833.** Wikimedia

The church of the slaves’ overlords inspired the oppressed to rise up. Religion and politics overlapped in two ways to spark the revolt. Attending church was the only time when slaves could congregate without being supervised by whites. And the teachings of the Christian missionary societies about equality and fraternity opened the slaves’ eyes to the scale of the injustice being inflicted on them. Before he was executed in 1832, Sharpe said he had been treated well by his owners. However, reading the Bible had shown him that people had no right to enslave others. Sharpe declared he would rather die a free man than live as a slave. His campaign played a big part in the abolition of slavery on the British Caribbean islands. Four months after Gewe was taken, the Slavery Abolition Act was signed in London

**Statue of national hero Samuel Sharpe in Montego Bay, Jamaica.** Wikimedia

Christianity also played a defining part in Gewe’s life. She was taken in by the Governor of Jamaica, the Earl of Mulgrave, and his wife Catherine and baptised under their name. She attended school in a missionary community, where she subsequently trained as a teacher. When Catherine was 16, missionaries from Basel visited the island to recruit former slaves for missionary work in Africa. One of these Basel missionaries was an African. George Thompson from Liberia had been trained by the Mission in Basel and was now being sent to the Gold Coast (today's Ghana). Soon after making Catherine’s acquaintance he asked for her hand in marriage, and she accepted. She boarded a ship with her husband and returned to Africa, reaching the continent in April 1843 – 2,000 kilometres north from where she was born and ten years after she was kidnapped.

**Map of the areas in which the Basel Mission operated on the Gold Coast, beginning of the 20th century.** Wikimedia

Divorced and a single parent

Catherine and George Thompson set up a school and taught children, first in English, then in the local language Ga, which Catherine quickly learnt. She found the work fulfilling, but her marriage was an unhappy one despite having two children. George Thompson had many affairs, allegedly even with schoolgirls. Catherine had just turned 20 when she was “legally” divorced at her own request. She was granted custody of their children and took back her old name of Mulgrave. The Basel Mission gave her their blessing to marry again. She was able to keep working as a teacher, and her ex-husband left the Mission. The Basel Mission took a hard line with George Thompson, who had become increasingly dependent on alcohol. His behaviour was explicitly at odds with Christian ethics, which the missionaries considered the only “civilised” way to behave.

Thompson had to be let go from the Mission after a short time due to serious cases of misconduct. He fell deeper into sin and his sinful ways caused a judicial divorce from his God-fearing wife for reasons according to which by the teachings of Christ (Matth. 5 vs 32) divorce is also justified in the eyes of God.

Extract from an obituary of Mulgrave-Zimmermann written in 1891 by Paul Steiner.

A few years after her divorce, the young teacher fell in love with German-born Basel missionary Johannes Zimmermann, who had arrived in West Africa not long before. Missionaries had to spend two years in the mission area living as bachelors and obtain permission from the Committee in Basel prior to marrying. Johannes Zimmermann and Catherine Mulgrave ignored these rules and were wed in June 1851. They accepted the risk of expulsion from the Mission. The Committee in Basel was not only indignant that they had acted without its authorisation, it was also opposed to a mixed-race marriage. It sent Europeans to Africa and brought people from Africa to Europe to show them how people lived there and teach them pietistic attitudes to morality. However, it took a dim view of 'mixed unions', as they crossed established boundaries. Support from his fellow missionaries allowed Zimmermann to stay with the Mission, although he was reprimanded: he was deemed to have “gone against proper civil standards” and was henceforth to be “considered as definitively stationed in Africa”. His annual leave in his homeland of Germany was cancelled. The German hardly considered this punishment, as he called the Gold Coast his “second home”. He learned Ga, translated the Bible and compiled dictionaries and a grammar guide in the local language.

**Johannes (second from left) and Catherine (third from left) Zimmermann-Mulgrave had a 'mixed marriage', which was frowned upon at the time. The couple were married for 20 years.** BMArchives

Catherine Zimmermann-Mulgrave continued her teaching work in different girls’ schools and gave birth to five children over the ensuing years. Unlike most missionary couples’ children, they were not sent to the missionary school in Basel due to their parents’ contravention of the rules relating to marriage. They grew up with Catherine’s son and daughter from her first marriage, cheek by jowl with the local population. Every so often, the sons of the local royal family stayed in their house, which was in the middle of the settlement where the locals lived. They spoke a mixture of Ga as well as German, English and Zimmermann’s Swabian dialect in the household, recalled a visitor.

The husband passes away in Europe

Not everyone in missionary circles approved of the mixture of African and European ways of living. Zimmermann was criticised for being “too acclimatised”. His wife was blamed for that, as it was through her that he had immersed himself “more than practically anyone else in the African way of living and being”. Nonetheless, Johannes Zimmermann not only saw Christianity as the one true religion but also considered its associated culture superior to all others. Africa, he wrote, needed “the leaven of Christian culture”. He approved of German colonisation efforts. When they had been married for 20 years, Catherine and her husband, who was now struggling to cope with the West African climate, went to Europe with some of their children. On his second visit to his hometown of Gerlingen in south Germany, where they had travelled via Basel, Johannes Zimmermann died of a tropical disease at the end of 1876, aged just 51. The widowed Catherine returned to her chosen home of Accra on the Gold Coast. She lived there until 1891 as the “oldest member of the Basel mission family”. After her death, the Basel Mission said she was “loved by Christians and heathens alike”.

More of: 20th / 21st century Religion Colonialism Education Women in history Article

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