Not by Might

“Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of Jehovah unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith Jehovah of hosts.”

— Zechariah 4:6, ASV

The Aro

For years, from her house in Okoyong, Mary Slessor had looked across the Cross River towards the west. Beyond the river lay the country of the Ibibio and, further north, of the Igbo, millions of people whom no missionary had reached. Over much of that country one people held extraordinary power. They were the Aro, whose home was a cluster of towns called Arochukwu, which Mary knew as Arochuku.

The Aro were traders, and for two centuries they had been the great organisers of the slave trade in south-eastern Nigeria. Their power rested on an oracle, a shrine in a wooded gorge near Arochukwu called Ibini Ukpabi, which Europeans called the Long Juju. People from all over the region brought their disputes to it for judgement. Some of those who consulted it, or who were found guilty by it, never came back: they were said to have been devoured by the oracle, and in fact many were sold into slavery through the Aro trading network. Aro agents lived in towns throughout the region, bound to local people by oaths of blood-brotherhood, and trade routes, marriages, and justice all ran through them. Livingstone says that “all roads in the country led to Aro.”

Livingstone also repeats stories that the Aro and their neighbours sacrificed and ate slaves at their feasts. Such stories were widely told by Europeans at the time, and some of the region’s peoples told them about each other. They were never properly documented, and modern historians treat them with great caution. What is certain is that the Aro system was built on the buying and selling of human beings, that people died by it, and that it resisted the British advance with all its strength.

Mary knew Aro slave-traders personally. Some of them passed through Okoyong with their captives, and she made friends with them and learned how the trade worked. She told them frankly that she meant to come to their country one day. They invited her, and hinted that it might not be safe. She would have gone years before, but she could not leave Okoyong without someone to take her place, and no one was sent. “The test of a real good missionary,” she wrote while she waited, “is this waiting, silent, seemingly useless time.”

The Expedition

In 1900 the Niger Coast Protectorate became the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, with Sir Ralph Moor, the same man who had once found Mary mending her roof, as High Commissioner. The Aro refused to accept British rule. They went on trading in slaves, raided towns that had submitted to the government, and blocked the routes inland. At the end of 1901 the British sent a military force of around sixteen hundred African soldiers under British officers, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel A. F. Montanaro, advancing in several columns. One of them went up from Itu, on the Cross River. Arochukwu was taken at the end of December 1901. The oracle was found and destroyed. The campaign, known as the Aro Expedition, lasted about three months. At its end the Aro chiefs were made to accept disarmament, the suppression of the oracle, and the prohibition of slave-trading. More than two thousand five hundred guns were surrendered.

Livingstone, writing fifteen years later, describes the expedition as the forces of civilisation meeting the warriors of barbarism. He says the government had been “very patient and conciliatory” and that force became “absolutely necessary at last.” He gives no account of the fighting or of those killed. He calls it, in passing, a “punitive expedition.” That is exactly what it was. A foreign army invaded a country that had not attacked Britain, defeated its people, destroyed their central shrine, disarmed them, and imposed a new government on them. The fact that the Aro slave system was cruel does not change what the expedition was.

Exile in Creek Town

Mary took no part in the fighting. When the troops were being gathered, the government, anxious for her safety, asked her to come down to Calabar until the trouble was over. She went, very much against her will. The government sent a special escort for her and offered to build her a house at Creek Town for herself and her family. She refused. She did not wish, Livingstone says, “to become too closely identified with the Government.” She squeezed into part of the mission hospital instead, where she had no privacy, and longed to get away from the crowds and “the bright, the terribly bright sky.”

Okoyong stayed quiet. People came down to see her, brought their disputes for her to settle, and loaded her with food. Her boys kept up the services at Akpap. Twin babies whom she had placed with their own mothers in four different villages were safe. Then one of her oldest friends, the wife of a great chief, gave birth to twins, and Mary wrote at once to the chief telling him to put his wife in a canoe and send her down to Creek Town. She explained herself in words that are among the most revealing she ever wrote:

I am sorry for her, but we cannot make different laws for the rich and for the poor, and yet one may press too far with a chief, and incite rebellion. After all we are foreigners, and they own the country, so I always try to make the law fit in, while we adjust things between us.

“We are foreigners, and they own the country.” At the very moment when a British army was marching through the country to the west, Mary Slessor said plainly that the land belonged to its people and that she and her kind were guests in it. She did not say that the expedition was wrong. As far as we know, she never said that. She believed that God used governments to restrain evil, and she hated the slave trade with her whole heart. But her instinct as a missionary was not the instinct of a conqueror. She tried to make the law fit the people, not the people fit the law.

When the campaign was over, she asked the Commissioner for permission to go home. He asked her to wait until a certain movement of troops was finished. She smiled and said she would go at the first opportunity, and she did.

Advice to the Young

Her months in Creek Town had one good result. She met a new generation of missionaries, and some of them became her close friends. The Rev. A. W. Wilkie and his wife, and later the Rev. J. K. Macgregor, head of the Hope Waddell Institute, and his wife, gave her homes to go to when she was ill and exhausted for the rest of her life. The young missionaries found her fascinating. Her talk, one of them said, was “better than medicine.”

One young woman told her how hard it was, in a busy station like Duke Town, to know exactly what to do. Mary answered, “Do? lassie, do? You’ve not got to do, you’ve just got to be, and the doing will follow.” She told another, “Make a bold stand for purity of speech and charity of judgment.” These are the sayings of a woman who had learned, through years of exhaustion, that the work flowed from the life, and not the other way round.

Under Escort

In June 1903 Mary set out from Akpap to visit the new stations she was planting on the Cross River. She missed the government launch at Ikunetu and tramped home, saying that God had not meant her to travel that day. The next week she caught it, and found on board Colonel Montanaro himself, the commander of the expedition, on his way up to Arochukwu. He invited her to come with him, under his escort. She had no change of clothes and no food, and she thought and prayed about it all the way up the river. Livingstone records what she was thinking:

Here is the challenge to enter that region of unbroken gloom and despair. If it is not entered now, the Roman Catholics will come in, and the key position to the whole territory will be taken out of our hands.

She went. At Arochukwu, eighteen months after the expedition, she walked roads that had been trodden for centuries by captives on their way to the coast, and saw the gorge where the oracle had stood. The chiefs and traders, many of whom she already knew, welcomed her and promised to help her. A little later she came back with two boys and opened a school in the palaver shed of one of the towns. A hundred children crowded in, along with men and women and some of the old slave-dealers themselves. When she left, the people followed her to the landing-beach and called after her, “Don’t be long in coming back, Ma! If you don’t care for us, who will care for us?”

It must be said plainly. Mary Slessor entered Aro country in the company of the soldier who had conquered it, and she went partly to get there before the Catholics. Her letters from these years contain harsh words about the Roman Catholic Church, which she called “that corrupt body,” though she also counted Catholic officials among her friends. She did not create the opening the expedition made, but she walked through it gladly, and she saw the hand of God in it. Historians who see her as a servant of empire have fair evidence on their side.

Not by Might

And yet there is another side, and her friend Mr. Wilkie saw it. He wrote that if she had been settled in the Aro country before the expedition, “it is doubtful whether an armed expedition would have been necessary, and it is at least possible that the suppression of the slave-trade would have been achieved by the peaceable means of the Gospel.” Livingstone agreed: primitive peoples, he said in the language of his time, “often bend more quickly before Christ than break before might of arms.” Wilkie could not prove it, of course. But Okoyong, which had been as feared as Arochukwu, had changed without a single soldier, through fifteen years of one woman’s patience, backed by the distant threat of the consul. One official told Livingstone that her influence with the Aro chiefs after the war did more to settle the country than all the government’s force.

The verse at the head of this chapter was spoken to Zerubbabel, a governor of Judah trying to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem with few resources, against the opposition of powerful neighbours. The prophet told him that the work would not be done by armies or by political power, but by God’s Spirit. The psalmist says the same thing: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; But we will make mention of the name of Jehovah our God” (Psalm 20:7, ASV).

Mary Slessor lived in a time when the chariots and horses of Britain were conquering Africa, and she did not refuse their help. But what changed Okoyong was not the consul’s guns. It was a woman sitting at the entrance of a yard, refusing to move while a glass of poison stood on a table. What would change the Creek country, as the next chapter tells, was not the Aro Expedition either. It was a slave girl named Mana, teaching the women of Itu to pray.