Ma Eme

“A friend loveth at all times; And a brother is born for adversity.”

— Proverbs 17:17, ASV

Life in the Harem

For many weeks after she arrived, Mary Slessor lived in the women’s yard of Chief Edem’s compound at Ekenge. Her room was next to that of the chief and his head wife. Five lesser wives lived close by, and other wives, slaves, visitors, and children came and went all day. Goats, fowls, rats, cockroaches, and centipedes were everywhere. At night the three boys of her household slept behind a barrier of boxes, and the two girls shared her side of the room. Every evening her belongings had to be carried outside to make space for everyone to lie down, and since it was the rainy season they had to be dried in the sun each morning.

There was no privacy at all. The wives and their visitors thought it their duty to keep her company, because in Okoyong, as Livingstone puts it, the idea of being alone was terrible, and good manners required that a guest never be left by herself. Mary longed for silence. She wanted a place where she could pray aloud. When she escaped to the patch of ground set apart for her, the women followed her. So she took a machete and hacked at the bush, praying as she worked, so that the noise of the blade covered her voice.

It is one of the most human pictures in the whole of her story: a small, exhausted Scotswoman chopping at the undergrowth in a forest clearing, talking to God at the top of her voice so that nobody would hear.

Eme Ete

The woman who made those months bearable was the chief’s sister, Eme Ete, whom Mary had noticed on her first visit. Ma Eme was the widow of a powerful chief. She had just come back from the ceremonies after her husband’s death, where all his wives had been under suspicion of having caused it. Each wife had brought a white fowl to the place of trial, and the witch-doctor had cut off its head and judged her guilt or innocence by the way the body fluttered. When Ma Eme was declared innocent, she fainted with the strain.

One day Mary noticed marks on Ma Eme’s arms and, showing her own vaccination scar, said that white people had marks like that too. Ma Eme answered simply, “These are the marks of the teeth of my husband.” In Okoyong a man could do almost what he liked with his wife.

She was a big woman, fattened in the way that was admired in her society, and with the other women she spoke in the rough manner of the yard. But when she spoke to Mary or the children, Livingstone says, her voice softened. She was a mother to everyone in the compound. She scolded, encouraged, and advised, and when her brother was drunk or in a temper she stood between him and his wives. She brought Mary food and looked after her comfort, and did it, Livingstone says, “with the delicacy and reserve of a well-bred lady.” Mary called her “a noble woman, according to her lights and knowledge.”

A Secret Ally

What nobody else knew was that Ma Eme had made herself Mary’s ally. At the risk of her life she kept Mary informed of everything that was planned in secret: who had been accused, who was chained in a farm hut, when an ordeal was to be held, when a war was about to begin. She became, in Livingstone’s phrase, a sort of secret intelligence department.

In later years the two women worked out a signal. If Ma Eme learned that some killing was being planned, she would send a certain bottle to the mission house with a request for medicine. It was a warning that Mary should be ready to act at a moment’s notice. On one occasion, Livingstone says, Mary lay down every night for a month without undressing, ready to go out the moment she was called. The first night she allowed herself to undress and sleep properly, the call came, and she went as she was.

The chiefs came to believe that the white woman could read their minds. Much of what looked like second sight was Ma Eme.

It is worth being clear about what this meant. Ma Eme was the sister of the chief. She belonged to one of the leading families of Okoyong, and she had herself been through the ordeals and the fear. She was not a Christian, and she did not become one. She sacrificed to the spirits every day of her life. And yet, again and again, she risked her own safety to warn a foreign woman about plans to kill people accused of witchcraft. We do not know all her reasons. Perhaps she loved Mary. Perhaps she, too, was weary of the killing. Perhaps she knew what it was to stand before the witch-doctor waiting for the verdict. Whatever her reasons, much of the life-saving for which Mary Slessor became famous would have been impossible without her.

The Women of the Yard

Mary saw terrible things in those months. A young wife gave a hired slave a piece of yam as part of his wages while her husband was away, breaking the law of the harem, and was condemned to the ordeal of boiling oil. As the drinking went on, the cords that bound her were tightened for sport until she screamed. Mary went out, faced the crowd, and carried her off, and kept her chained to her own verandah until the dancing ended at dawn, which was the only way to keep her safe.

She also saw the women of the yard at their best. Once a large number of prisoners lay chained in the heat all day, waiting for the poison ordeal. Among them were mothers with babies. At dusk, when the guards left for a while, some of the older women crept up to them with water for the children and the mothers. Mary had had rice cooked in readiness, and the women smuggled that to the prisoners too. If they had been caught, Livingstone says, their lives would have been forfeit.

She did not idealise Okoyong. Some of the things she saw in the harem, she said, she could never describe, and years later the memory of them would still make her flush. “Had I not felt my Saviour close beside me,” she said, “I would have lost my reason.” She had no patience with people at home who talked about the innocence of those who lived outside civilisation. She told them to go and live for a month in a West African harem. It may have owed as much to a Calvinist’s conviction that sin runs through every human society as to the prejudices of her time. She had, after all, grown up with a drunken father in a Dundee slum.

School by Lamplight

She began teaching almost at once, before she had any buildings. At Ifako the school was held on the verandah of a house by the roadside, with lengths of firewood for seats and an alphabet card hung on a post. At Ekenge it was held in the evening, in the chief’s outer yard, when the wives and slaves had finished their work. Men and women, old and young, slave and free, crowded in to learn the alphabet and the multiplication table. Then she held worship, standing bareheaded and barefoot beside a small table with a lamp and a Bible on it, while the people sat on the ground in the dark. She taught them to sing the gospel to their own tunes. One day, passing the school, she heard them singing to the melody of an Okoyong war-song:

Jesus the Son of God came down to earth,

He came to save us from our sins.

He was born poor that He might feel for us.

The Chief’s Abscess

Chief Edem had been kind to her from the beginning, and when he fell ill with an abscess on his back she nursed him. One morning she came in with his tea and found a live fowl impaled on a stick, charms hung all round him, and the chief holding out a parcel of shot, powder, teeth, bones, and eggshells that he said had been taken out of his back. Someone had bewitched him. Before her eyes, men and women were named, seized, and chained to posts in the yard.

She argued and pleaded, and the chief grew so irritated that he had himself carried off to one of his farms with the prisoners, and forbade her to follow. But she had her own ways of knowing what was happening, and she heard that more people were being chained. On New Year’s Eve, lying awake homesick with tears in her eyes, she was roused by a deputation from the farm. They had heard that an African minister in Calabar, the Rev. Esien Ukpabio, the first convert of the Calabar mission, knew how to treat such illnesses. Would she write to ask him to come? She wrote at once. Ukpabio refused, because he was told that the trouble was a soul troubling the chief, and he could do nothing about that. But his sister went, and under her care the abscess broke and the chief recovered.

All the prisoners were released except one woman, who was put to death. The chief sent his son to Mary to tell her, before anyone else could, that nobody had been hurt. Only one worthless slave woman, he said, had been sold away. Mary knew it was a lie. She knew the woman had been killed, and she thought of the faces of the three children the woman left behind. But she pretended to believe it. If she had shown that she knew the truth, the chief would have wanted to know how she knew, and scores of people might have been put to the poison ordeal to find her informant. Livingstone does not name the informant. It is hard not to think of Ma Eme.

That was the price of friendship in Okoyong. Mary’s knowledge saved lives, but only as long as it was secret. There were times when protecting the one who had told her meant keeping silent about a murder. She did not like it, and she did it.

A Foolish Choice?

The friendship lasted for twenty-five years. Ma Eme’s people built the boathouse at the river where Mary kept her canoe. Ma Eme stood beside her in the worst crisis of her early years, as the next chapter will tell. When the population of Okoyong moved inland in the 1890s, Ma Eme moved away to a distant farm, but they stayed in touch.

In July 1913, near the end of her life, Mary went back to Okoyong for a visit, and Ma Eme came to see her. She was still a devout follower of the old religion. She sacrificed daily to the spirits with food and blood, and she would not touch the twins who had grown up in Mary’s house, though she admitted it was a marvel that they had lived. The two old women sat together all day and talked about the past. “Do you remember this?” “Do you remember that?” They talked, Livingstone says, about “the killing time when they worked hand in hand in secret for the preservation of life.” Nothing Mary could say would move her friend. At the end of the day Ma Eme went away, as Livingstone puts it, “the same kind, high-bred, mysterious heathen woman that she had always been.” She died not long afterwards.

Mary said:

My dear old friend and almost sister, she made the saving of life so often possible in the early days. It is sad that she did not come out for Christ. She could have been the honoured leader of God’s work had she risen to it. I cannot fancy Okoyong without her. She made a foolish choice, and yet God cannot forget all she was to me, and all she helped me to do in those dark and bloody days.

Mary Slessor did not pretend that her friend was a Christian. She believed that Christ was the only way to God, and she grieved that Ma Eme had not come to him. She called her choice foolish. But she would not stop there. She knew what Ma Eme had done, and she trusted that God knew it too.

A lawyer once asked Jesus who his neighbour was, and Jesus answered with a story in which the one who stopped to help a wounded man was a Samaritan, a man the lawyer would have regarded as outside the true faith. Then Jesus asked, “Which of these three, thinkest thou, proved neighbor unto him that fell among the robbers? And he said, He that showed mercy on him. And Jesus said unto him, Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:36-37, ASV). Jesus did not say that the Samaritan’s religion was right. He said that his mercy was real, and that it put the religious people to shame.

There is a proper humility for Christians in a friendship like this one. It does not mean pretending that all faiths are the same, which Mary would never have done. It means recognising mercy when we see it, being grateful for it, and leaving to God the things that only God can judge. When Abraham pleaded for the people of Sodom, he asked, “shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25, ASV). Mary Slessor left her dearest African friend in the hands of that Judge. That is where she belongs in this book too: honoured, grieved over, and left with God.