“Ifehe!”

“Rescue the poor and needy: Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.” — Psalm 82:4 (ASV)

In about 1889 a cheerful Scottish carpenter named Charles Ovens came to Ekenge to build Mary a proper house. He was with her for the hardest fight of her early years.

One morning a strange cry came from the forest. Mary said, “There is something wrong,” and went. Etim, the eldest son of Chief Edem, about to be married, had been struck on the neck by a log and paralysed. She knew what that could mean. “There's going to be trouble,” she told Ovens; “no death of a violent character comes apart from witchcraft.” For two weeks she nursed him. He died. The chief dropped the body into her arms and cried, “Sorcerers have killed and they must die. Bring the witch-doctor.”

The witch-doctor blamed a nearby village. Armed men raided it and brought back more than a dozen men and women in chains.

Mary did something clever. To calm the grieving family, she dressed Etim for burial in silk, in the grand style his rank deserved, and the people were delighted. Then she told Ovens to stop all work. For days and nights they took turns sitting opposite the chained prisoners while men drank and danced around them. Ovens once said he'd get a hammer and chisel and free them himself. “Na, na,” she said. “We'll have a little more patience.”

Then she saw poison beans lying on the pounding stone. She went to her hut and prayed. When she got up, her fear was gone. She told the chiefs there must be no killing, then sat down at the entrance of the yard and would not move. The drunken crowd waved guns and shouted, “Raise our master from the dead, and you shall have the prisoners.”

That night men unchained one woman, a mother, and led her to the body to drink. She was lifting the glass when Mary touched her shoulder and whispered, “Ifehe!” It means “Run.” They ran into the bush together.

The chiefs began releasing prisoners, two, then five, then two more, and stopped. “We have done more for you than we have ever done for any one,” they said, “and we will die before we go further.” Then Ma Eme knelt before her brother and begged him to let Mary keep one of the last women, chained, at her own hut. He agreed. Another woman, Inyam, later crawled to Mary's door in the night, still in chains, having escaped over a roof. Mary guessed someone had helped her, and said nothing. When Etim was buried, the coffin held a cow, not people. For the first time anyone could remember, a man of a chief's family in Okoyong was buried without human sacrifice.

It didn't end cleanly. Fighting followed, and a feud led to a demand of blood for blood. Mary refused to judge that case because she could not bear to sentence a man to death. It went elsewhere, and a young man of twenty, the killer's brother, was put to death in his place. She was in anguish.

Then Edem came to her alone, knelt, and thanked her for forbidding them to take life when his son died. And he said something that changed how she saw everything:

“We are all weary of the old customs, but no single person or House among us has power to break them off, because they are part of the Egbo system.”

Many people in Okoyong wanted out and couldn't break free alone. Mary gave them someone to blame: they could say that Ma would not let them.

Some systems trap everyone in them: bullying in a school, a group chat where everyone joins in because no one dares not to. Sometimes what's needed is one person who sits at the gate and won't move, which lets everyone else stop too.

One thing to do this week: notice one situation this week where people are being treated badly because “that's just how it is.” Be the one who says no, or quietly stands with the person on the receiving end.