Twin-Mothers

“When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up.”

— Psalm 27:10, ASV

A House Full of Babies

Of all her work, Livingstone says, the sweetest and the saddest was the care of the babies of the bush. Her house became a refuge for small children: sick ones left with her to nurse and give back, unwanted ones brought to her, and abandoned ones she rescued from the forest. So many came and went, were named, written about in her letters, and then disappeared from them, that her friends in Scotland could not keep track.

Most came in the last stages of sickness or starvation. She washed them, fed them, and fought for their lives, sitting up night after night with a wasted little face in her lap, or walking up and down singing to a baby who could not sleep. She slung a hammock beside her bed and put the babies in it, so that when one woke in the night she could reach out a foot and rock it back to sleep without getting up. More than once, when the tinned milk ran out, she strapped her latest baby to her body and walked the long miles through the bush to Creek Town, and came back the next day with the child and the tins.

Many of them died. Those who died she dressed, laid among flowers in a box, held a service over, and buried in a small cemetery near her house, which in time, Livingstone says, “became full of tiny graves.” She mourned each of them as if it had been her own flesh and blood. The carpenter Ovens, who saw it, tried to comfort her in his own way: “Never mind, lassie, you’ll get plenty mair.” And there were always more.

It is important to hold both parts of this together. The story of Mary Slessor and the twins is often told as a story of rescue, and it was. But it was also a story of many small deaths, of babies who came to her too late or whom she could not save, and of a woman who kept opening her door knowing that much of the time she would end by digging another grave.

The Child of Wonder

Some did live. One baby girl, whose mother had died soon after her birth, was thrown into the bush beside the road to the market because of a quarrel between the families of her parents. She lay there for five days and six nights. Mary Kingsley, the English traveller, told the story in her book Travels in West Africa. Women from the village passed the spot on the next market day, heard a feeble cry, and mentioned it that evening in Mary’s yard as a curiosity. Mary was off at once, and brought the child home. Ants had eaten into her nose and upper lip. Leopards and snakes had somehow left her alone. She lived, and grew into a healthy girl, and the people who had thrown her away came to pet her and play with her, calling her “the child of wonder.” Mary named her after herself.

This Mary, together with Janie, the twin brought home from Old Town; Alice, another rescued twin; and Annie, a child whose mother had been accused in a case of a stolen dog, became the inner circle of her family. Later others would join them: Maggie, Dan, Whitie, Asuquo, and more. There was also Mana, a girl who had been kidnapped as she walked home from a spring, brought to Okoyong, and sold as a slave to Ma Eme. Mana became one of the most faithful members of the household, and, as we shall see, one of the first Christians of the Cross River.

We know less about most of these children than we would like. They appear in Livingstone’s pages chiefly as they related to Mary, and many of their later lives are hard to trace. But their names should be remembered. The story of “Everybody’s Mother” is also the story of the children who made her one.

Susie

Of all the babies who passed through her hands, none was loved more than Susie, her first Okoyong twin.

Susie’s mother, Iye, was a slave woman from Bende, owned by one of the leading women of the district, who treated her well. Then she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and everything changed. Mary Kingsley happened to arrive at Ekenge that very day to meet Mary Slessor for the first time, and she described what she saw. The date was probably 1895; Livingstone says 1893, but Kingsley’s own account puts the visit later.

Iye was cursed and abused. Her clothes were torn and her treasured china basins smashed, and she was driven out of the village as an unclean thing. Kingsley believed she would have been killed with her children if the people had not feared Mary’s anger. The babies were crammed into an empty gin-case, which was put on Iye’s head, with her brass cooking-pot and her market calabashes on top. Mary heard the news and ran barefoot and bareheaded down the forest path, and four miles out she met Iye staggering towards her with the whole village yelling behind. Mary took the load from her head and carried it herself, since no one else would touch it.

Then she did something that Kingsley thought showed her understanding of the people. She did not take Iye down the village path to her house, because the path would then have been polluted, and the villagers would have had to cut a new one. Instead she stood in the blazing sun, at the height of the hot season, while the people cut a new track through the forest straight to her own grounds. Only then did she take the mother and babies home.

The boy was already dead. The people who had packed the twins into the box had crushed his head. Kingsley’s comment is brief: all the boy needed was burying. The girl lived. For days the villagers would not come near her. If Mary or Kingsley handed the baby to one of the household children, men and women fled off the verandah and over the fence. Iye herself would not hold her. She sat for hours singing a lament over her own fate, and Kingsley recorded the words:

Yesterday I was a woman, now I am a horror, a thing all people ran from. Yesterday they would eat with me, now they spit on me.

Kingsley noticed that Iye did not blame the villagers. She did not think they had done wrong. She only felt that some power beyond her had sent this curse of twins upon her.

“Mem, Mem”

The surviving baby was named Susie, after Mary’s own sister who had died in Edinburgh. She became the darling of the house. When she was fourteen months old, Mary left her for a few minutes with Mana, who put a jug of boiling water on the floor. The baby pulled it over on herself. For thirteen days and nights she was never out of Mary’s hands. A young woman missionary, Miss Murray, who had asked to be posted to Okoyong for a time, helped her; “She was like a sister to me,” Mary wrote. Thinking a doctor might do more, Mary carried Susie through the forest to Creek Town, arriving at midnight, and woke the doctor, who told her there was nothing more he could do. She went back to Ekenge and went on nursing her. In the dark, when everyone else was asleep, she would hear a faint voice saying, “Mem, Mem, Mem,” the child’s name for her, and a little hand would be held up for her to kiss.

Early one Sunday morning Susie died in her arms. They dressed her in a pinafore, with her beads and a sash and a flower in her hand, and Mary said she looked “like an angel child.”

The whole district was moved. While Susie was dying, none of the villagers went to their farms or to market, and when she died they came to mourn with Mary. Mary could not bring herself to lead the burial, and sat at the window while Miss Murray took the service. The villagers gathered round the grave of a twin, the very thing they had once fled from. One of the women, a leader in the old religion, stood up and praised the white mother’s God for the child, and prayed that they might all share her hope. “Surely,” Mary wrote afterwards, “they all felt the vast difference between their burials with all their drink and madness, and ours so full of quiet hope and expectant faith.”

Her own grief was terrible. “My heart aches for my darling,” she wrote. “Oh the empty place, and the silence and the vain longing for the sweet voice and the soft caress and the funny ways. Oh, Susie, Susie!”

Buying Iye

Iye had come to love the child she would not touch at first, and when Susie died she was broken. “Ma, don’t cry,” she said. “I have done this. God hates me. I shall go away and not bring any more evil on you.” And she went back to her hut in the bush.

Mary had always refused to buy slaves, even to set them free, because she thought the people would misunderstand it and think she was taking part in the trade. But she made an exception for Iye. She paid ten pounds for her freedom and brought her into the mission house. Iye stayed with her for years. In 1903, when the first baptisms took place in the district, Iye was among those baptised.

It is worth noticing the honesty of that detail. Mary Slessor did, at least once, buy a human being. She knew the arguments against it and had used them herself. She did it anyway, for one grieving woman whom everyone else regarded as cursed. It was not a policy. It was love, doing what it could.

Mary Kingsley

Mary Kingsley was one of the most remarkable travellers of her age, a clever, witty, independent Englishwoman who explored the rivers of West Africa alone and wrote brilliantly about what she saw. She was no friend of missions. She thought most missionaries misunderstood Africa and did more harm than good. But she and Mary Slessor became friends. They sat up late into the night arguing about religion and the immortality of the soul. “I would give anything to possess your beliefs,” Kingsley said, “but I can’t, I can’t; when God made me He must have left out the part that one believes with.”

Mary, for her part, said that Kingsley was one of the most truly Christian women she had ever met, whatever she believed or did not believe. She gave the traveller a great deal of what she knew about the religion and customs of the people, and much of it went into Kingsley’s books. When Kingsley died in South Africa in 1900, nursing prisoners of war, Mary grieved. “The world held not many so brave and so noble,” she wrote. “Life feels very cold and seems grey and sunless.” She sent a guinea towards a memorial.

Kingsley’s published verdict on Mary Slessor is one of the most valuable we have, because it came from someone who had no reason to flatter a missionary. She wrote that Slessor had been eighteen years in Calabar, that for the last six or seven she had lived alone in the forest at Okoyong, and that her knowledge of the people, their language, their thought, their diseases, and their difficulties was extraordinary. Okoyong, she wrote, had been given to killing at funerals, ordeal by poison, and constant warfare. “Many of these evil customs she has stamped out.”

What She Did and Did Not Do

It is often said that Mary Slessor ended the killing of twins in Nigeria. She did not, and she would not have claimed it. The practice had been banned in the Efik towns of Calabar decades before she arrived, and other missionaries had been rescuing twins since the 1850s. It persisted in the interior long after her death. When a news agency interviewed her in Liverpool in 1898, she said that she had saved fifty-one twins. Many more passed through her hands in the years that followed, and many of them died.

What she did was to carry the protection of twins and their mothers into places where the old agreements meant nothing, to take the babies and, increasingly, the mothers into her own household, and to wear down the fear by living with it year after year. Over time her approach began to change. For most of her life she took the twins into her own house, as the missionaries had always done; in 1895 the Okoyong chiefs still refused to let twins be kept in their homes. By 1901 some twins were being cared for by their own mothers in their villages, and late in life, at Ikpe, Livingstone says she “had come to realise that it was not good to take twins from their mother,” and insisted that a baby stay at home with its mother while she and Jean stood guard. That case ended in tragedy, as a later chapter tells. But the direction of her thinking, from rescuing children out of their families towards helping families keep them, was a sign of a deepening wisdom.

Taken Up

The verse at the head of this chapter is from David’s psalm of trust: “When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up.” It is an extraordinary thing for a psalmist to say. A parent’s love is the strongest human love there is, and David imagines a day when even that might fail, and declares that God’s love will not.

For the twin babies of Okoyong, that was not an imagined day. Their fathers and mothers did forsake them, not out of wickedness but out of fear, bound by a belief that told them their children were a curse. Mary Slessor went out into the bush and took them up. She could not save them all. She could not always save their mothers from their grief or their villages from their fear. But she showed, in her own tired arms, what the psalm says of God. The prophet wrote of the Lord as a shepherd who “will gather the lambs in his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and will gently lead those that have their young” (Isaiah 40:11, ASV). Mary Slessor carried a great many lambs, and led a great many mothers. She believed that she was only doing, poorly and partially, what God had first done for her.