First Fruits

“For herein is the saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth.”

— John 4:37, ASV

Akom

Among the first people in Okoyong to become a Christian was a woman who had once been among its fiercest defenders of the old ways. Her name was Akom. She had been betrothed as a baby of one year to a powerful chief and had grown up in his harem. When he died she escaped the poison ordeal herself, and helped to send his wives and slaves into the grave with him. Later she married the elder chief Ekpenyong and ruled his household for twenty years.

After the death of Edem’s son Etim, when Ekpenyong himself fell under suspicion and moved away, a witch-doctor accused Akom and her son of bewitching a sick young chief. He claimed to have seen them in a vision dancing all night and stabbing the sick man with spears. Akom fled with her son to the neighbouring people of Umon, who gave her the protection of their shrine. When Mary came back from Scotland, Ekpenyong begged her to bring his wife home, and she arranged it on condition that Akom swore the most dreaded of the native oaths, which included drinking blood drawn from the wrist.

Akom came to see Mary but would not come through her gate. A twin-mother had once lived in the yard, and anyone who had sworn that oath believed they would die if they touched anything a twin-mother had touched. Mary pretended to be offended: if her house was polluted, Akom had better go home, since she did not receive visitors on the road. After a while Akom came in. Mary gave her an order for mats, which she made beautifully, and Akom began to come regularly and listen.

When twins were brought into the house, Akom mastered her fear and stayed. Then she hurt her foot, and a painful sore developed, and then a skin disease. Everyone, including Akom, believed it was the oath taking its revenge. Her husband ignored her and waited for her to die. Akom wept and despaired, and Mary spoke to her strongly. At last Akom stood up and prayed: “I am a fool; my God, my Father, listen not to my foolishness. Kill me if Thou wilt, but do not leave me.”

The disease was checked by a local remedy. Akom refused to make any sacrifice to the spirits for her recovery. “My Father owns the bush and gives us the knowledge of the medicine,” she said, “and as the Master knows what He has made He knows also how to bless it.” When the man who had accused her of witchcraft came to be friends with her, she said to Mary, “See what God has wrought. The man who demanded my life comes to tell me his affairs! I sometimes wanted to take revenge, but I have got it from God, and His revenge is of a sweeter kind than that of the Consul.”

Akom’s words are worth reading twice. She was an African woman, brought up in the deepest fears of her people, who came to trust a heavenly Father more than the oath she had sworn. She made her own theology of healing: God made the plants and gave the knowledge of medicine, so there was no need to pay the spirits. And she made her own theology of forgiveness, which was better than the Consul’s justice. She was not repeating a missionary’s words. She had found something for herself.

The First Communion

On the fifteenth anniversary of her arrival in Okoyong, in August 1903, the first communion service in the district was held at Akpap. No congregation had ever been formally organised, but the mission sent up the Rev. W. T. Weir from Creek Town to see whether there were people ready to join the Church.

On the Saturday evening, in the hall under the mission house, seven young Christians were baptised in front of the people. Others wanted to come forward, but their families held them back. “Wait and see,” they said, “until we know what the thing is.” Some parents anxiously asked Mary whether baptism was a kind of mbiam, a binding oath that would kill them if they broke it.

On the Sunday a great crowd filled the hall and overflowed into the grounds, sitting on stools and chairs and even on empty gin-boxes. Before the communion Mary presented eleven children for baptism, six of them children she had rescued. Then the first Lord’s Supper in Okoyong was celebrated. Afterwards the people sang the hundred and third psalm, in an Efik version, to the old Scottish tune “Stroudwater.” When they came to the third and fourth verses, Mary seemed lost in thought, with a far-away look and tears in her eyes. In English they run, in the version she knew from childhood:

All thine iniquities who doth most graciously forgive:

Who thy diseases all and pains doth heal, and thee relieve.

Who doth redeem thy life, that thou to death may’st not go down;

Who thee with loving-kindness doth and tender mercies crown.

In the American Standard Version the same words read: “Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; Who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; Who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies” (Psalm 103:3-4, ASV). She had watched lives taken for fifteen years in Okoyong. Now she was hearing Okoyong people sing about a God who redeems life from destruction.

At the end she spoke to those who had been baptised. “Okoyong now looks to you more than to me for proof of the power of the Gospel.” That evening she talked for a long time about what the district had been like fifteen years before, and she was glad, Livingstone says, that after all the work had not been a failure.

Livingstone calls the day the crown of her service, and adds that “alone, she had done in Okoyong what it had taken a whole Mission to do in Calabar.” That is an admirer’s exaggeration. She had not been alone. She had had Ma Eme, and Edem, and the African boys who kept the services going when she was ill, and the carpenter Ovens, and many others. And the numbers were small: seven young people and eleven children after fifteen years. But they were a beginning, and she knew it.

Planting at Itu

Earlier that year she had begun something new. With no help from the mission, and against the doubts of some of her colleagues, she had decided to plant a base at Itu, a market town on the Cross River at the mouth of the Enyong Creek. Itu had been a slave market for centuries. Now, since the Aro Expedition, it was a government station, and the Creek behind it led into the heart of Aro country. She saw that whoever held Itu could reach the Ibibio, the Igbo, and the Efik.

In January 1903 she canoed to Itu with three of her young people: two boys named Esien and Effiom, and Mana, the girl who had been kidnapped as a child and sold as a slave to Ma Eme. She left them there. Esien was to hold services, Effiom to lead the singing, and Mana to teach the girls. When she went back a few weeks later, the results had exceeded all her dreams. The old chief told her he was too old to change his ways, but the young could learn them, and that God had made him and was therefore bound to look after him whatever he did. But the children were eager, and the services were so crowded that there was no room. She built a school on the hill with her own hands, and the people began building a church, with two rooms at the end for her. A fellow missionary, Dr. Rattray, wrote when he heard, “Bravo! Uganda was evangelised by this means, and the teachers there could only read the gospels.”

By August the congregation at Itu numbered more than three hundred, meeting in a church they had built themselves. And that month, Livingstone says, Jean, Mana, Iye the mother of Susie, Akom, and Esien the teacher at Itu were baptised and sat down at the communion table. Jean’s adopted son Dan was baptised too, and Mary watched with deep joy as her oldest daughter presented him to God. Esien’s mother, who had resisted her son’s faith, sat at the service beside two twin-mothers. (Livingstone tells of these baptisms in a different chapter from the Okoyong communion, and does not say whether they took place on the same occasion.)

A Slave Girl’s Triumph

In October Mary was at Itu, watching the building of a house for herself and the teachers, and was delighted to see the men and women working together, joking and laughing. In Okoyong the sexes were kept strictly apart, she wrote, but here “they were daffin’ and lauchin’ as in Scotland.” When she worried aloud that six rooms was too much to ask of them, they said, “It’s not too much, Ma; nothing can be too much.”

One woman insisted on washing Mary’s feet in hot water, and told her, “Ma, I’ve been so frightened you would take our teacher away because we are so unworthy. I think I could not live again in darkness. I pray all the time. I lay my basket down and just pray on the road.” This woman prayed in the meetings, electrifying everyone, and had begun family prayers in her home, though her husband laughed at her. There were many others like her.

Livingstone tells us who was behind it all. It was Mana, “a black slave-girl,” who had taught and nursed and trained the women of Itu, quietly and modestly, “as a mother might.” The church at Itu owed its first life not to a Scottish missionary but to an African girl who had once been bought and sold. Paul wrote, “There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye all are one man in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28, ASV). At Itu that verse was not an idea. It was a slave girl teaching free women to pray.

Onoyom

On one of her journeys up the Creek, a small canoe shot out from the bushes and bumped into hers. The man in it held out a letter. His master at Akani Obio had sent him to wait for her and bring her to his house. She turned aside, up a quiet creek full of water-lilies, and was received by a well-dressed young couple in a house with a concrete floor and a European bed with mosquito curtains. The man was Onoyom Iya Nya, a chief so trusted by the government that he was the only man in the district who had not been disarmed.

He told her his story. In 1875, as a boy, he had guided a Scottish missionary, Dr. Robb, through his town, and had been punished for it. He grew up in the old religion, went to the feasts at Arochukwu, and when his father died, saw ten little girls killed and buried with him. Later his house burned down and his child died, and he went looking for the sorcerer he believed was responsible, meaning to kill him. On the way he met a former mission teacher, a man who had fallen into drink and was homeless. The man asked him how he knew it was not the white man’s God who was angry with him. “Where can I find this God?” Onoyom asked. “I am not worthy to say,” the old teacher replied, “but go to the white Ma at Itu, and she will tell you.” Onoyom had the fallen teacher read him the Bible while he waited for Mary to pass. Now he asked her, “And now, will you show me what to do?”

It is one of the loveliest stories in her life, and Mary was only its last link. A missionary sowed in 1875 and never knew what came of it. A drunken, homeless man who had lost his way still pointed a chief to God. And a slave girl and two boys had made the name of the white Ma at Itu known up and down the Creek. “For herein is the saying true,” Jesus said, “One soweth, and another reapeth.” Mary Slessor had spent fifteen years sowing in Okoyong with little to show for it. Now, in a place where she had barely begun, she found herself reaping what others had sown.

She went home that night through a storm, singing and praying all the way. But she was tired, and often afraid of what lay ahead, and there were nights when she woke in the dark and cried, “Calm me, O God, and keep me calm.” Then she would go and look at the sleeping children, and say to herself, “Surely I have more reason to trust God than childhood has, after all the way He has led me.”