The Poison Bean

“Judge the poor and fatherless: Do justice to the afflicted and destitute. Rescue the poor and needy: Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.”

— Psalm 82:3-4, ASV

A Carpenter from Edinburgh

In 1889, as far as can be told, a Scottish carpenter named Charles Ovens arrived at Ekenge. He had been working in Edinburgh and was about to go back to America when an elderly woman of the United Presbyterian Church asked him why he did not go to Calabar instead, where a missionary living alone in the bush wanted a man to put in her doors and windows. He changed the address on his luggage and went. He found Mary, he said, without hat or shoes, eating her dinner in the company of goats and hens. He was given a room eight feet by five, and he set to work building her a proper house.

Ovens was a cheerful man who sang Scottish songs in the evenings until she wept with homesickness, and he became one of the most valuable witnesses of her life at Ekenge. It was Ovens who was with her during the crisis that Livingstone calls her greatest battle.

Etim

One morning, as Ovens worked on the house and Mary sat on the verandah watching him, a strange cry came out of the forest. She stood up, listened, and said, “There is something wrong.” Then she went off into the trees. A little later a boy came back asking Ovens to come at once and bring something to revive an injured man.

He found her sitting beside a young man lying unconscious on the ground. “It is Etim, the eldest son of our chief, Edem,” she told him. Etim was about to be married, and had been building a house for his bride. A log he was carrying had slipped and struck him on the back of the neck, and he was paralysed. Ovens was surprised at how grave she looked. She told him why: “There’s going to be trouble; no death of a violent character comes apart from witchcraft.” Ovens made a stretcher, and they carried Etim to Ekenge.

For two weeks she nursed him in his mother’s house, hoping that he would recover and that the crisis she dreaded might be avoided. He did not. One Sunday morning, hearing the sound of wailing, she ran to the yard and found him dying. People were blowing smoke into his nostrils and rubbing pepper into his eyes, and his uncle Ekpenyong was shouting into his ears to call his spirit back. When he was dead, the chief dropped the body into Mary’s arms and cried, “Sorcerers have killed and they must die. Bring the witch-doctor.”

The Prisoners

The witch-doctor named a neighbouring village as guilty. The free men of Ekenge marched there at once with their guns, sacked the houses, and came back with more than a dozen men and women in chains, the rest having escaped into the forest. The prisoners were fastened to posts in a yard that had only one entrance.

Mary now did something that shows how well she understood the people. To calm the grief and anger of the dead man’s father and uncle, she offered to dress Etim for burial in the style his rank deserved. She wrapped the body in silk and put on it a suit she had made for his father. His head was shaved in patterns and painted yellow, and crowned with a silk turban and a tall black and scarlet hat with bright plumes. The body was seated in an armchair under an umbrella, with a whip and a silver-headed stick tied to the hands and a mirror placed in front so that he could admire himself. On a table beside him were the treasures of the house, including the skulls of enemies killed in war, and some candles Mary had given. When the people saw it they went wild with delight, and the drinking and dancing began.

Some readers may be uneasy at a missionary helping to stage a funeral display with war trophies on the table. Mary did not see it as a compromise of her faith. She saw it as honouring a dead young man and his grieving family in the way they understood, in the hope of turning their grief away from killing. She would do whatever she could within their customs, so long as no one died.

Then she told Ovens that he would have to stop all work. “This is going to be a serious business,” she said. “We can’t leave these prisoners for a moment. I’ll watch beside them all night and you’ll take the day.” For days and nights the two of them took turns sitting opposite the chained prisoners in the filthy yard, while armed men danced and drank around them and one barrel of rum followed another. At one point Ovens lost patience and said he would get a hammer and chisel and free the prisoners himself. “Na, na,” she said. “We’ll have a little more patience.”

The Beans on the Stone

One day she came to Ovens and said they wanted a coffin. When they went into the yard to take the measurements, she saw eséré beans lying on the pounding stone. She shivered. She went back to her hut and prayed, pleading with God for guidance in the struggle that was coming. When she stood up, Livingstone says, her fear had gone.

She went back and took the two chiefs, Edem and his brother Ekpenyong, aside, and told them that there must be no killing. They did not deny that the ordeal was about to take place. Only the guilty would die, they said. She did not argue. She went to the entrance of the yard and sat down, and made it plain that she would not move until the matter was settled.

The chiefs were furious. A white woman among them was a good thing, but she had no right to interfere with their laws. The dead man’s mother became violent. Even the slaves threatened her. The drunken crowd ran about waving guns and swords and shouting, “Raise our master from the dead, and you shall have the prisoners.”

That night Mary wrote a note to the mission in Duke Town and sent it secretly down the river with two African carpenters who were working with Ovens. Three of the women prisoners had babies who cried all night from hunger and fear. Another, a woman named Inyam, had a daughter of about fifteen, who clung to her mother and came again and again to clasp Mary’s feet, and offered herself as a slave for life if only her mother could go free. The girl was a cousin of the dead man, and she was betrothed to his father, the chief.

“Run”

Later that night, while Mary was keeping watch, several men came and unlocked the chains of one of the women, a mother, and led her out to the body to take the poison. Mary did not know whether it was a trick to lure her out of the yard, so that the others could be killed while she was gone. The prisoners begged her not to leave them. But she could not watch a woman walk to her death.

She followed. The woman was standing at a table covered with a white cloth, with a glass of water holding the poison in front of her, and was lifting the glass when Mary touched her on the shoulder and whispered, “Ifehe!” It means “Run.” The woman looked into her eyes, understood, and the two of them ran into the bush before anyone realised what had happened. They reached Mary’s hut, and she told Ovens to hide the woman, and he pulled her inside and locked the door. Mary went straight back to the yard. “Where is she?” the prisoners asked. “Safe in my house,” she said.

She wondered afterwards why no one had stopped her or harmed her. Perhaps the men were too drunk to react quickly. But she thought of her prayer.

One by One

Finding that she would not give way, the chiefs tried persuasion. “God will not let anybody die of the bean if they are not guilty,” they said. It was their own theology, and it is worth noticing that it was a theology of divine justice: the poison was believed to be God’s verdict. They released two prisoners, letting them swear the native oath instead of taking the ordeal. Later they released five more, and then two more. Then they 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.”

Three prisoners were left. One was a woman with a baby, whose chief, Akpo, had fled into the forest, which in their eyes proved his guilt. The other two, a free man and Inyam, the mother of the fifteen-year-old girl, were taken away. Mary had to choose whom to stay with, and she stayed with the woman and her baby.

The next day visitors warned her that Egbo was coming and that she should flee to Calabar. She said Egbo could come and play the fool as much as he liked, but she would not leave her post. The chief threatened to burn down her house. “You are welcome,” she said. “It is not mine.” He said the woman would die. The prisoner herself was so terrified and exhausted that she begged Mary to give in.

It was Ma Eme who broke the deadlock. She knelt before her brother, the chief, and begged him to let Mary keep the woman for the time being, chained to the verandah of her hut, where she could not possibly escape with such a weight of iron. To Mary’s astonishment, the chiefs agreed, on condition that if the woman were sent away to Calabar, Mary would pay a heavy fine and leave Okoyong for ever. The slaves pretended they could not find the keys. Mary waited, patiently and firmly, until the keys appeared. Then she and Ma Eme gathered up the long chain between them and hurried the woman and her baby through the scrub to Mary’s hut, where they hid them in a large packing-case behind a barricade.

Two missionaries arrived from Calabar that afternoon and gave a magic-lantern show to the crowd, which, Livingstone says, was meant to add dignity to the funeral and make up for the lack of human sacrifice. The next day the chief released the free man as a further act of mercy, but insisted that Inyam must take the poison. Mary followed him about all day, pleading. He looked at her at times, Livingstone says, as if he thought she were mad. That night she heard that the burial would take place in the chief’s house, and she was sick with dread.

Late in the evening she heard a faint voice at the barricade: “Ma, Ma, make haste, let me in.” She pulled the planks aside, and Inyam crawled in on her hands and knees, still heavily chained. She said she had rubbed through a link of the chain and escaped over a roof. Mary looked at the thick chain and guessed, Livingstone says, “whose were the kindly black hands that had given her aid,” but she kept the thought to herself. The funeral took place that night. In the coffin, instead of human companions for the dead man, was a cow.

What Followed

For the first time anyone could remember, a man of a chief’s family in Okoyong had been buried without human sacrifice. Livingstone calls it her greatest victory, and in one sense it was. But the story did not end cleanly, and Livingstone, to his credit, tells what followed.

On the way to the funeral, one party met another coming back drunk, remembered an old quarrel, killed a man and carried off his head. Fighting broke out. A few days later the village was seized by panic at the sound of an Egbo band approaching. Women and children and unarmed men poured into Mary’s yard, and she packed as many as she could into her room and sent the rest into the bush behind. The Egbo band stayed only a short time and no shot hit anyone there. But they burned every house in the village from which the prisoners had come, and burned the livestock alive. Then Edem’s village took its own revenge, and for more than a week armed men roamed the forest, shooting anyone they met.

The elder chief, Ekpenyong, was accused of having killed his nephew by witchcraft so that his own son could inherit, and in his fury he demanded to take the poison ordeal himself and to make his brother take it too. Mary scolded him, got his promise to give up the idea, and searched his house with the help of his wives, finding eleven beans at the bottom of a basket. That night he was found drunk, fighting with his women over a bag. She demanded it, and found palm-nuts and cartridges, and under them forty more beans. “I’ll take the liberty of keeping these,” she said, and walked out between the lines of armed men with her heart pounding. In the night he slipped away to take the ordeal anyway. Another chief held him by force until she arrived, and in the end he took the native oath instead and moved away to found a new settlement.

Blood for Blood

The hardest part of the aftermath was a case she refused to judge. The man who had killed and beheaded the mourner on the funeral road was the eldest son of a family known for violence, and he had killed before. War threatened between his family and the family of the dead man. Mary pressed for arbitration, and both sides asked her to preside. She knew that he was a triple murderer and that the penalty would be death, and she shrank from it. She asked them to take the case to a Calabar chief instead.

The verdict was blood for blood. Fines were offered and refused. Slaves were offered to die in his place and refused. His youngest son, a baby, was sent as an atonement and rejected. Then his second son, a young man of twenty, was sent, and it was agreed that his death would redeem his brother. Mary was in anguish, all the more because she had refused to act as judge. She was relieved to hear that the young man had escaped and was being hidden by a slave-trader across the river. But one morning she heard firing, and learned that he had been betrayed, brought back, filled with gin, and strangled and hanged in front of his mother and sister. Only those two mourned him.

Livingstone does not say that Mary blamed herself, but he says her distress was acute “especially as she had declined to act as judge.” It is not hard to see why. She had refused to sit in judgement because she could not bear to sentence a man to death, and the case had gone to a court where an innocent man died instead. Perhaps it taught her something. In later years, when the British asked her to preside over a court, she accepted.

Weary of the Old Customs

Some weeks later she went to find Akpo, the chief who had fled, and asked Edem whether he could come home safely. Edem said he could, and that all thought of vengeance was gone. Akpo did not believe it. Mary went to him three times before he would come back. When he stood again in his ruined village, with his house, farm, and animals all gone, he knelt and held her feet and vowed that he and his household would be under her yoke for ever.

Edem gave the returning men land and seed. That evening he came to Mary alone. He knelt, took her feet, and thanked her again and again for her love and courage, and for forbidding them to take life when his son died. Then he said something that changed how she understood the whole struggle:

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.

One by one, Livingstone says, secretly and without each other’s knowledge, free people came to her to thank her for the safety she was bringing, and urged her to keep going and do away with all the old customs, “the end of which was always death.”

That is perhaps the most important thing in this chapter. Mary Slessor has often been pictured as a lone Scotswoman imposing her will on a savage tribe. The truth Livingstone preserves is more interesting. The people of Okoyong were caught in a system that no single family could escape. If one chief refused to kill at a funeral, his dead would go unhonoured and his House would be shamed. Many of them wanted a way out, and could not find it alone. What Mary offered them was an outside authority strong enough to take the blame for breaking the custom. They could say that Ma would not let them.

The psalm at the head of this chapter is addressed to judges. God stands in their assembly and rebukes them for judging unjustly, and commands them: “Rescue the poor and needy: Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.” The wise man of Proverbs puts it simply: “Open thy mouth for the dumb, In the cause of all such as are left desolate” (Proverbs 31:8, ASV). The prisoners chained in Edem’s yard had no voice. The girl clasping Mary’s feet had nothing to offer but herself. Mary Slessor spoke for them. She could not save everyone, and she knew it. One woman had died after the chief’s illness, and a young man of twenty had died for his brother’s crime. But on the night the cow was buried, a whole yard of prisoners walked free.