Mary Slessor: The Girl Who Feared Nothing

Mary Slessor grew up poor in the grey city of Dundee, in Scotland. Her family had so little money that Mary went to work in a jute mill when she was only eleven, tending the great clattering machines from early morning, and going to school for just half the day. She had red hair and bright blue eyes and a temper she had to learn to tame.

In the mill, someone gave Mary stories about a missionary named David Livingstone, who had travelled across Africa. Mary read them until she could almost see the rivers and the forests. She made up her mind: one day she would go too.

And she did. When she was grown, Mary sailed to Calabar, in what is now Nigeria, to tell people about Jesus. But Mary did not want to live apart from the people in a comfortable house. She wanted to live with them. She learned their language, Efik, until she could laugh and argue and pray in it. She ate their food and slept in their villages and walked barefoot through the forest. The people stopped seeing her as a stranger. They called her “Ma.”

In that place there was a cruel and frightening custom. When twins were born, people believed the babies were cursed and that one of them must be a child of an evil spirit. So the twins were taken out to the forest and left to die, and their mother was driven away.

Mary thought this was a lie, and a wicked one. So whenever she heard of twins, she ran — into the forest, into the dark, into the middle of angry crowds — and she scooped up the babies and carried them home. She raised many of them as her own. Little by little, because one small red-haired woman would not be afraid, the killing of twins began to stop.

Chiefs came to trust her so much that they asked her to settle their quarrels. A woman who had once been too poor to finish school now sat as a judge of peace between whole villages.

People said Mary Slessor feared nothing. That was not quite true. Mary was often afraid. But she had decided long before that she would rather be afraid and go, than be safe and stay — because she believed God was going with her.