“The Woman’s God”

“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God.”

— Matthew 5:9, ASV

A Walk in the Rain

In the first months at Ekenge, before the crisis over Etim’s death, a message came from a village near the Cross River, eight hours’ walk away. A chief there was dying. His people were waiting outside his house, armed and ready, because when a chief died, members of his household would be killed to go with him. One of the women of the village had told them about the white Ma at Ekenge, who had cured her grandchild. Send for her, she said, and the chief will not die. So they sent a message, with a bottle and four brass rods, worth about a shilling, as her fee.

Edem and Ma Eme told her she could not go. It was too far, the streams were too deep, the rains were too heavy. “I am going to get ready,” she said. She spent a sleepless night wondering whether she was right, and in the morning set out with an escort of women. The rain came down in torrents. First she abandoned her boots, then her stockings, then her broken umbrella, and then, one by one, most of her clothes, which the women carried on their heads in calabashes. She walked on in the lightest of garments through the dripping forest.

After three hours they came to a market-place where hundreds of people were gathering. Mary, soaked and half-dressed, felt humiliated, and hurried through the crowd, wondering whether she had lost their respect. She learned later that nothing she ever did won the hearts of the Okoyong more than that walk in the rain.

She reached the village, dressed herself in whatever odds and ends of clothing the women could find, and went straight to the sick man. Her medicine was not enough, and she persuaded a trader living in his canoe nearby to go across the river to the Scottish missionaries at Ikorofiong for more. He came back with what she needed, and with a letter and some tea from the missionary’s wife. She brewed the tea in a basin and thought it a feast. The chief recovered. No one was killed. The people began to talk about making peace with Calabar and learning to read. From then on, Livingstone says, Okoyong was open to her.

The Woman’s God

That chief did not forget her. At the end of 1890, as she was packing to leave for her furlough, messengers arrived from a distant township. A young freeman had accidentally shot himself in the hand while hunting, and they wanted medicine. She sent it. Then secret word came that the young man had died, that his brother had wounded a chief of a neighbouring town in revenge, and that the chief’s warriors were preparing to attack at dawn.

Everyone told her not to go. She was ill. She would miss the steamer. The men were savage, they said, the forest would be full of armed men firing at anything that moved, and in the dark no one would recognise her. She went anyway, with two armed attendants carrying lanterns, and stopped at the house of a chief eight miles away to ask for a free man to beat the Egbo drum before her, so that the warriors would know a protected person was coming.

The chief sent back a diplomatic answer. He had heard of no war, he said, and would inquire in the morning. And if there was a war, a woman who went into it only proved her ignorance of a people who had always loved fighting and were not likely to be helped by a woman. Mary sent him a reply that has been remembered ever since:

In measuring the woman’s power, you have evidently forgotten to take into account the woman’s God.

She went on without him. At the first village she was surrounded in the dark by armed men, who questioned her and then let her rest until cock-crow, when they would take her with them. At the second cock-crow they were gone before she was on her feet, running down the hillside like wild goats. The women stood at every door crying, “Run, Ma!” She ran as fast as her weakness allowed, lost sight of them, and fell back on prayer.

She found the war-party in the bush a hundred yards from the enemy village, and told them to behave like men and not like fools, as if they were schoolboys. Then she walked on to the village, where a wall of armed men stood silent. As she was about to push through them, an old man stepped out of the line and knelt at her feet. He asked her to help them make peace. It was the chief she had walked through the rain to heal.

What followed took all day. Two chiefs laid down their arms and knelt before the other side, begging them to accept a fine. Mary knelt too, and asked that arbitration might take the place of war. Bands of armed men kept arriving and demanding the old, manly way of settling things. In the end a fine was agreed, heavier than she thought fair, and part of it was paid on the spot in trade gin. As the boxes of gin were brought forward, she saw another fight about to start over the drink, so she took off as many of her outer garments as she decently could and threw them over the bottles, which put them under her protection by Egbo law. She then poured one glass for each of the senior men and kept the rest under her clothes. One band of young men begged to be allowed “a small scrap” on the way home, so as not to go back “like women” without having fought. She walked with them until they were past the danger. That night, too tired to hold a service, she spoke quietly to the people about Christ and walked home alone through the forest.

Knitting

After she came back from her furlough, the palavers grew larger. Ma Eme would send the signal bottle when trouble was brewing, and Mary would go. Sometimes, if she could not get there in time, she used a trick. She would scribble some words, any words, on a large sheet of paper, add a few blobs of red sealing-wax to make it look official, and send it by a fast runner to the chiefs. By the time they had finished puzzling over the mysterious document, which none of them could read, she had arrived.

At the palavers themselves she knitted. She said it kept her from being nervous and from showing fear, and that the sight of the needles going quietly on in the middle of the uproar calmed everyone down. An official told Livingstone that she once sat knitting and listening through a whole day and night, until both sides got hungry and went home without fighting.

Livingstone describes one of these meetings. Two sections of the Okoyong people had been quarrelling for some time, and she called them together in a forest clearing. Three years earlier, she said, such a meeting would have been impossible. She was frightened, and after a sleepless night she set out alone with her knitting and walked through the armed guards. Every chief was there under a great silk umbrella of blue, red, and yellow, with twenty to fifty armed men around him. A chair had been set for her in the middle, beside the oldest chief. She went round both groups first, joking, to ease the tension, then sat down, took out her knitting, and let them talk. She spoke only now and then, to draw out a fact or clear up a point. Night fell, torches were lit, voices rose, and when she sensed that things were getting out of hand she brought the matter to a head. An old chief summed up, she gave her verdict, and it was accepted with cheers.

Under Protest

Then came the oath to seal the agreement. A razor, corn, salt, pepper, and rum were brought. A free man from each side knelt at her feet and clasped the other’s fingers. Cuts were made on the backs of their hands, and when the blood flowed, salt, pepper, and corn were laid on the wounds. The two men then sucked up the blood-soaked mixture and swallowed it, and the covenant was made.

Out of courtesy, the chiefs asked her to pray. She refused. Livingstone says that she always witnessed such oaths “under protest, recognising that they knew no better way.” She did not object when one of the chiefs prayed instead.

It is a telling moment. She was willing to sit through the oath, because it was the only way the people knew of making an agreement binding, and because the agreement meant peace. But she would not lend her prayers to a rite she believed belonged to another religion. She drew a line, and she drew it gently. Then, after a ten-hour sitting, she walked four miles home in the dark, tired and hungry and happy.

Run, Ma, Run

Her letters from these years are full of interruptions. A letter will begin with household news, break off, and start again with “It is many days since I had to leave off here,” followed by the account of some sudden journey. The cry that sent her out of the house was always the same: “Run, Ma! Run!” She called this her “commonplace” work. “So, you see,” she wrote, “life here, as at home, is just a record of small duties which occupy the time, and task the strength without much to show for it.”

Livingstone collected some of the episodes. A chief had died, and the people had moved the poison ordeal to a hidden place deep in the forest to keep it from her. She found them, and sat there for four days and four nights, never taking off her clothes, sleeping in snatches on plantain leaves, afraid not of the armed men but of the eyes of wild animals shining at the edge of the firelight. In the end the people gave up and the accused lived. Another time an Egbo band from a far-off town came to seize the goods of a widow for a debt. Mary locked one of them in her yard, ordered the rest out, and made them give back what they had taken.

Once a slave couple came to her door with their child left behind. Their master had driven the wife from her cooking with a sword, fired a gun at the husband, and carried off the baby, threatening to kill it. “What does it matter?” the husband had said. “We are his; he can kill us if he likes; we have nothing to live for.” Mary sent word to the master. He came the next day, drunk, and lay down at her feet. During a palaver of several hours he shook his fist in the slave’s face and shouted, “If it wasn’t for the reign of the white woman I would cut you in two! The white woman is your salvation.” Mary calmed them both, scolded and pleaded and joked, and in the end sent them home together, the master told to control himself and the slaves told to work faithfully and not provoke him. The baby was returned.

That story should give us pause. Mary Slessor did not free the slaves who came to her. She sent them back to their master, after getting a promise that he would treat them better. Slavery was the foundation of Okoyong society, and she had no power to abolish it. She wrote in the margin of her Bible years later, “Slavery never pays; the slave is spoiled as a man, and the master not less so.” But in the forest of the 1890s, the best she could often do was to stand between the master and his sword.

Once a free man watched her prevent the killing of anyone at a funeral, and complained: “Ma, you have spoiled our fashions. Before you came, a person took his people with him: now one must go alone like this poor girl; you have confused Okoyong too much.”

And once, when a visiting missionary watched her clear a crowded yard in a moment by shouting at it in Efik, driving out men, women, children, and the old chief himself like sheep before a dog, he saw what it cost her. When it was over she came and sat down beside him, trembling from head to foot, and said, “I am done for this day.”

Children of God

The verse at the head of this chapter is one of the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God.” It does not say that peacemakers will be successful, or thanked, or safe. It says that they will be recognised as belonging to God’s family, because making peace is what God himself does. Paul says of Christ, “he is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle wall of partition” (Ephesians 2:14, ASV).

Mary Slessor spent much of her life in Okoyong breaking down walls between enemies. She did it with prayer and patience and jokes and knitting, with sealing-wax and borrowed authority, and sometimes by throwing her own clothes over the gin. She did not always succeed, and she did not always get justice. But Paul’s instruction, “If it be possible, as much as in you lieth, be at peace with all men” (Romans 12:18, ASV), describes her very well. She did as much as lay in her, and a good deal more than anyone expected of a woman on her own.