Sortavala Teachers’ College Women’s Choir on concert tour in Joensuu

This file contains a photograph of the Sortavala Teachers’ College Women’s Choir. Rosa Emilia Clay, standing at center in the back row, was born in Omaruru, Namibia, in 1875. Her guardians, the Finnish missionaries Karl and Ida Weikkolin, brought her to Finland in 1880, where she remained and as a young woman studied to become a primary school teacher at the Sortavala Teachers’ College. She graduated the year after the photograph was taken, and in 1899 she became the first African woman to receive Finnish citizenship. She emigrated to the United States in 1904, where she remained active in the Finnish immigrant community. She married theatre director Lauri Lemberg and is known in Finnish-American sources as Rosa Lemberg, although she later divorced him. A biography in Finnish, Arvo Lindewall’s Rosalia (Yonkers, NY: Kansallinen Kustannuskomitea, 1942), was published during her own lifetime, and in 2020 a public square in Tampere was officially named after her.