Consul and Gunboat

“He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

— Micah 6:8, ASV

The Coming of the Protectorate

When Mary Slessor arrived in Calabar in 1876, British power on the coast was little more than a consul with no soldiers and no administration. By the time she returned from her furlough in 1892, that had begun to change. In 1884 and 1885, as the European powers carved up Africa among themselves at the Berlin Conference, Britain had declared a protectorate over the coastal districts around the Niger delta and Calabar. In 1891 Sir Claude Macdonald was appointed Commissioner and Consul-General, with instructions to turn a paper claim into a working government. Two years later the territory became the Niger Coast Protectorate.

Livingstone describes this as the extension of civilised rule to a backward country, carried out, he says, “not without an occasional display of force.” That phrase deserves attention. The British did not ask the peoples of the interior whether they wished to be governed. They sent officials to make treaties, and where the treaties were refused or broken, they sent gunboats and soldiers. Villages were burned. People in Okoyong came to associate the Consul, in Livingstone’s own words, “with big guns and burnt towns.” That was the power that now stood behind Mary Slessor.

Ma’s Court

Macdonald was a man Mary liked and respected. He was sympathetic to the missions, and he took her advice seriously. When he proposed to send a British vice-consul to Okoyong, she argued that the people were not ready for strangers imposing new laws, and that there would be trouble. Macdonald accepted her view. Instead of sending an official, he authorised her to do what was necessary herself, and to organise and supervise a native court.

Later writers have usually said that she was made vice-consul for Okoyong in 1892, and that is how most biographies describe it. Livingstone is more careful. He says her position was “akin to that of a consular agent.” In practice she conducted the public business of the district. She presided over the court. Cases were referred to her from Duke Town, and she travelled round Okoyong to hear them, with a government messenger who carried her decisions back to headquarters for official signature. Chiefs and ordinary people came to ask her how their old customs could be fitted to the new laws. She took no salary for any of it. Livingstone says it was work she did not like, and that she accepted it only because she believed it was part of her loyalty to Christ.

The Caning

A British official, T. D. Maxwell, visited her court in these years and left one of the most vivid descriptions of her we have. He expected, he said, he hardly knew what, and found “a little frail old lady” with a lace shawl over her head, rocking in a chair and crooning to a black baby. Years of fever had aged her early. He was struck, he said, by her very strong Scottish accent. She made him rest after his march before any business was done. The court was held below her house, and her yard was full of litigants and onlookers, all treating her with deep respect.

Suddenly she jumped up with an angry growl. Her shawl fell off, the baby was handed to someone else, and she made for the door, where a large, overdressed man was standing. She seized him by the scruff of the neck, boxed his ears, and hustled him out into the yard, telling him plainly what would happen if he came back. Then, as suddenly as the storm had risen, it died away, and she was back in her rocking-chair with the shawl and the baby. The man was a local chief who had been rude to her and had been forbidden to come back until he apologised. He had tried to slip in on the excuse of greeting the visitor.

Maxwell had seen many Nigerian courts, and he said he had never seen one that better deserved to be called a court of justice. The litigants got justice, “sometimes, perhaps, like Shylock, more than they desired.” He gave an example. A man sued another for a small debt. The defendant admitted he owed the money, and Mary ordered him to pay. But she added that the plaintiff was a rascal. He treated his mother shamefully, neglected his children, had lately beaten one of his wives with unnecessary vigour, kept a disgraceful farm, seldom washed, and had looked suspiciously sleek around the time a neighbour’s goat went missing, though he had been acquitted. So before the debt was paid, the plaintiff would receive a good sound caning in front of everyone.

Maxwell told the story with admiration, and it is easy to see why. It is funny, and it shows a judge who knew everyone in the district and cared more about what was right than about technicalities. But a modern reader should see the other side as well. A man who came to court to recover a debt and won his case was beaten on the order of the judge for offences he had not been charged with, including one of which he had been acquitted. There was no appeal. Her justice was the justice of a mother of a large and unruly family, and it depended entirely on her being right. Often she was. Not always.

The Appeal to the Consul

In 1894 she did something she had never done before. A man had been accused of causing his master’s death by witchcraft, and his accusers, knowing that Mary would stop the ordeal, spirited him away in chains to a village beyond her reach. She decided that the time had come to ask the government for help, not only to save this man but to end killing for witchcraft throughout Okoyong. So that no African would be blamed for it, she carried the letter to the river herself.

The news spread quickly that Ma’s patience was exhausted and she had sent for the Consul. The people who had carried off the prisoner came running to beg her forgiveness, but she had already gone. The prisoner escaped that night and came to her house. His master chained all his other people in fury, then thought better of it, freed them, and sent to ask Mary to go to Duke Town and make the Consul come “in peace and not in war.”

The Vice-Consul, Ralph Moor, came up with a small guard of soldiers, who paraded through the village and made a great impression. He found Mary on the roof of her house mending the mats, and she climbed down and received him without the slightest embarrassment. At the conference that followed, the chiefs promised to stop killing at funerals, and to let Ma save twins and care for them in a special hut. A year later, when twin-killing had not stopped, she brought up Sir Claude Macdonald himself to renew the agreement. He told the chiefs that he had not come to take their country, but to help them govern it justly. After consulting together, the old spokesman explained that when they heard something only once they did not think it worth attending to, but now that they had heard it twice, they would obey. As for twins, he said, “We are not sure that no evil will happen to us if we obey you; we have our fear, but we will try.” When Mary spoke of a time when she would no longer be with them, the chiefs were alarmed. “God cannot take you away from your children,” they said, “until they are able to walk by themselves.”

“You White People”

Some time later Mary wrote an account of her first seven years in Okoyong. It was never published, and Livingstone printed much of it. It is one of the most important documents of her life, and it will appear again in the next chapter. In it she described the death of the most powerful chief in the district. Every drop of European liquor for miles around was bought for his funeral, and she was afraid of what would follow. But no one was killed, except one man, who, blamed by the witch-doctors, hanged himself because the chiefs refused to let him take the poison ordeal to prove his innocence. Afterwards some chiefs, talking about the change, said to her, “Ma, you white people are God Almighty. No other power could have done this.”

Mary recorded that remark without comment, and it is not hard to see why it troubled later readers. The chiefs were not wrong about where power lay. Behind the white woman in the rocking-chair stood the consul, and behind the consul stood the guns. The same report says that the people had “begged me to be their consul, as they neither wished black man nor white man to be their king.” It also says that they still needed “superintendence and watching, for their ideas are not so nicely balanced as ours in regard to the shades and degrees of right and wrong.” That sentence is the voice of her time and her race, and it is not attractive.

Yet there is another side to it. The chiefs had also said, back in 1889, that they were weary of the old customs and could not break them alone. Mary’s authority, backed by the government, gave them a way out. Many lives were saved. Women who would have been strangled at funerals lived. Men who would have died by the poison bean went home to their families. It was a good thing done by means that were not wholly good, in a world where there were few wholly good means available.

What the Lord Requires

A visitor to Okoyong in these years wrote that Mary was really “Queen of the whole of Okoyong district,” and that the High Commissioner left its administration in her hands. The same visitor noticed that she never let an African sit down in her presence, and never shook hands with them, though she would nurse them through the most loathsome diseases. When the visitor asked why, she said simply, “I live alone.” She seems to have meant that a woman living alone among men who had always settled their disputes with guns could not afford to let her authority be questioned. It was a hard, practical decision, and it put a distance between her and the people she loved.

The verse at the head of this chapter was spoken by the prophet Micah to a nation that thought God could be satisfied with sacrifices. What God wanted, Micah said, was simpler and harder: “to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God.” Mary Slessor tried to do all three, and the three do not always sit easily together. Justice in Okoyong sometimes needed a firm hand, and she had one. Kindness was her deepest instinct, and she gave it without limit. Humility before God she practised all her life. Humility before the people she governed was harder, and it grew slowly.

Paul told the Christians in Rome that “rulers are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil” (Romans 13:3, ASV). The psalmist warned, “Put not your trust in princes, Nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3, ASV). Mary Slessor lived between those two verses. She was grateful for rulers who stopped the killing, and she worked with them. But she knew, too, where her own help came from, and she would soon see what the government’s power could do when it was turned on a whole people.