Biography
Rebecca Protten was born around 1718, in the Caribbean, probably on the island of Antigua, to an enslaved African mother and a European father. She was born into slavery. She was taken as a young girl to the island of St. Thomas, in the Danish West Indies, where she was a house slave in the home of a Danish planter. She was a bright and observant girl who learned to speak several languages. In the 1730s, the Moravians began to preach to the slaves on St. Thomas. They were a group of German missionaries who had come from Herrnhut, and they took the gospel to the plantations.
She was drawn to the Moravian message. She listened to their preaching, and she was converted. She was baptized in 1736 and was among the first of the slaves on the island to join the church. She was filled with a desire to share her faith. She became a leader among the slave women and began to hold meetings with them. She was a gifted speaker, and she had a deep knowledge of the Scriptures. She was known for her courage. She was soon recognized by the Moravian missionaries as a helper. She became an assistant to the missionaries and visited the plantations to teach and encourage the believers. Her work was effective. A group of slaves came to faith, and she formed them into a society.
She was also a woman who risked her life. The planters on the island were hostile to the Moravian mission, and they feared that Christianity would make the slaves restless. Several of the missionaries were beaten and imprisoned. She, too, faced persecution. She was arrested more than once. In 1738, she was imprisoned for her work. She was released in the end. She was given her freedom in 1738, when the Moravian Count Zinzendorf, on a visit to the island, arranged for her to be bought and freed. It was a sign of the Moravian opposition to slavery in principle, though they sometimes owned slaves.
She married a Moravian missionary, Matthaeus Freundlich, a German, in 1738. It was a marriage that crossed the lines of race, which was uncommon at the time. They worked together for a time. In 1739, her husband left the island, and she was left alone. She continued her work. She went to Europe in 1738 or 1739, where she met Zinzendorf and others. She had her life told to the Moravian community. She remained a respected figure. She later married again, to a Moravian missionary of mixed race named Christian Jacob Protten, who was born on the Gold Coast, in Africa, and educated in Denmark. He was a gifted man who spoke several languages and became a teacher.
In 1737, she and her husband went to the Gold Coast, now Ghana, to establish a Moravian mission. They settled at Christiansborg, a Danish fort near Accra. They started a school for mulatto children and carried on a mission to the local people. They faced great difficulties. The climate was brutal, and a number of missionaries died of fever. Her husband was a gifted linguist and wrote a grammar of the Fante language. She lived for some years in Africa, and she worked alongside her husband. She was one of the first black women to be a missionary to Africa. She also was one of the first to be a missionary from the Caribbean to the African continent.
She died in 1780, in Christiansborg, in the Gold Coast, at the age of about sixty-two. The record of her life is limited, and the details here should be checked against fuller sources. She is a figure who has attracted new interest from historians in recent years, as a woman of color who was a leader in the early Moravian church. Her life shows the courage of a slave who became a preacher, and the link between the Caribbean and Africa in the story of the gospel.