“I Dare Not Go Back”

“But Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

— Luke 9:62, ASV

A Memorandum

In November 1903 Mary Slessor did something she disliked. She wrote a formal paper for the mission council in Calabar, setting out what she thought the mission ought to do.

She began by saying what many missionaries felt and few said aloud: that the mission’s methods were “very far from adequate” for the size of the field. Churches and schools on the rivers were good, but they reached only the people who lived near them. The villages of the interior were broken up by old enmities and oaths and fears, so that even houses in the same village might keep apart. What was needed, she wrote, was “something more mobile and flexible than ordinary congregational work.” She suggested sending church members out in small bands to travel through the villages for a week at a time, having African teachers spend part of each month in outlying districts, and asking Christian traders to hold services at the trading posts up the river, where Efik traders, she knew, kept Bibles locked in their boxes.

She asked for a minister, with his wife and an African teacher, to take over Okoyong, since she could not build up a church there in the way an ordained man could. She asked for Itu to be made a proper European station. It was, she said, the natural gateway to the whole region. “It was not without reason that it was the slave mart, and that it became the Government base.” She was due for home leave at the start of 1904, after five years in Africa, and she asked instead for six months to travel up and down the Creek with her own canoe and crew. Then she added a sentence that shows her better than any description: “But I am willing to change … any plan of ours in order to let any larger undertaking make way if it should be proposed.”

The council would not take the responsibility. It passed her paper to the women’s committee in Scotland and asked her to wait. It did agree unanimously that Itu should become a medical station.

A Mere Wreck

Then her body gave way. She collapsed, and was, Livingstone says, “again far down in the dark valley.” When she recovered, she wrote, “I rose a mere wreck of what I was, and that was not much at the best. My hair is silvered enough to please any one now, and I am nervous and easily knocked up, and so rheumatic that I cannot get up or down without pain.” The council thought she should go home. Instead it gave her permission to make her tour of the Creek, on one condition: she must not commit the mission to any new work.

She accepted the condition and set off. “It seems strange,” she said, “to be starting with a family on a gipsy life in a canoe, but God will take care of us. Whether I shall find His place for me up-river or whether I shall come back to my own people again, I do not know. He knows, and that is enough.” It is the faith of Abraham, of whom the letter to the Hebrews says that “he went out, not knowing whither he went” (Hebrews 11:8, ASV).

She went at her own expense. Her salary was now a hundred pounds a year, and she spent almost nothing of it on herself. “I have no object on earth,” she wrote, “but to get my food and raiment, which are of the plainest, and to bring up my bairns.” The building was done by herself, her household, and the free labour of the people. The girls and boys who worked with her were paid nothing but their keep. Livingstone says that all the opening of the Enyong Creek to the gospel cost the mission was her salary.

Before she left she went to Duke Town to hand over the business of the Okoyong court. The Commissioner sent her an invitation to dinner, the kind of invitation that was really a command. She declined it, saying that she was not visiting. Livingstone suspects she had nothing fit to wear. The Commissioner came to see her instead.

Itu

She reached Itu in July 1904 with her family, still weak. A government doctor who visited her there found her in an unfinished native hut with almost no furniture, sitting in a chair rocking a tiny baby, while five other babies slept around the room wrapped in pieces of brown paper and old newspapers. The congregation her young teachers had gathered now numbered three hundred and fifty. “To-day,” she wrote, “as the custom is after the lesson, the bairns each took a part in prayer, and before we rose a boy started ‘Come, Holy Spirit, come.’ We sang it through on our knees.”

Calls came every day. A deputation from the Ibibio country begged, “Give us even a boy!” A chief on the Creek sent word, “It is not book that I want; it is God!” Onoyom came from Akani Obio to say that his people had three pounds saved to pay a teacher. And late one night fifteen young men from Okoyong arrived by torchlight to tell her that the women missionaries sent to Akpap had already left, and they had no Ma. She sent them to shelter for the night and spent the rest of it in prayer. “Oh Britain,” she wrote, “surfeited with privilege! tired of Sabbath and Church, would that you could send over to us what you are throwing away!”

Cement

In November 1904 she went to the mission council for the first time in six years, and reported what had been done. At Itu there was a church, a teacher’s house, a day school, and a class of forty people preparing for baptism. At Arochukwu there was a school on land given by the chiefs. There were small congregations beginning in four more places along the Creek. The council gave her permission to continue for another six months, on the same condition as before: no expense to the mission.

She laid the cement floors of her houses herself. Once, when colleagues met her at a landing-place and remarked on how many trunks she was travelling with, she explained that they were full of cement; she had nothing else to carry it in. A lady in Scotland later asked her whether she had ever had lessons in using cement. “No,” she said. “I just stir it like porridge, turn it out, smooth it with a stick, and all the time keep praying, ‘Lord, here’s the cement, if to Thy glory, set it,’ and it has never once gone wrong.”

It is a funny story, and it tells us something about how she prayed. Her prayers were not separate from her work. They were said over the cement bucket.

God Is Stronger Than Juju

Meanwhile Chief Onoyom was building a church at Akani Obio with eight hundred pounds of his own savings. At first he planned a building of mud and thatch, but then he reflected that if he were building a house for himself it would have iron walls, and he could not do less for God. So he built it with iron walls, a cement floor, and a bell-tower. For the seats and pulpit he chose a huge tree that the town regarded as its chief shrine. The story was told that the people said the spirit would never let it be cut down. “God is stronger than juju,” said Onoyom, and went out with his men to fell it. They failed the first day, and the town rejoiced. The next morning they knelt and prayed that God would show himself stronger than the spirit, and then went back to work and brought the tree down. At the dedication, Onoyom provided food for everyone but allowed nothing stronger than palm wine. Then he came shyly up to Mary and pressed a handful of money into her hand, asking her to buy food for herself, because he did not know what kind she liked.

Later Onoyom sent away his other wives, providing for them, and took back as his only wife a woman he had once rejected because she had borne twins. Some time afterwards, the chief, his wife and their baby, a score of his people, and sixteen young men and women were baptised at Akani Obio. Mary was ill and had to be carried to the service, and she hid her face on the communion table. “Over forty sat down in the afternoon to remember our Lord’s death ‘till He come,’” she wrote. “It cannot go back this work of His. Akani Obio is now linked on to Calvary.” And then, thinking of her mother, who had first told her about Calabar: “I am sure our Lord will never keep it from my mother.”

“I Dare Not Go Back”

The mission’s rules said that she was to go back to Akpap in April 1906. When she was reminded of it, Livingstone says, she was “inclined to be mutinous.”

“There is an impelling power behind me, and I dare not look backward,” she said. “Even if it cost me my connection with the Church of my heart’s love, I feel I must go forward.” And again: “I am not enthusiastic over Church methods. I would not mind cutting the rope and going adrift with my bairns, and I can earn our bite and something more.” She thought seriously of taking a government post, or of opening a shop with her girls, so that she could support herself and stay where she was.

She wrote to the secretary of the women’s committee in Scotland. The government was building roads into the country around her faster than anyone had imagined, she said, and God had led her step by step to exactly the right place. “And the minutes says ‘I am to return to Akpap in April!’” Okoyong was very dear to her, she wrote, “but to leave these hordes of untamed, unwashed, unlovely savages and withdraw the little sunlight that has begun to flicker out over its darkness! I dare not think of it. Whether the Church permits it or not, I feel I must stay here and even go on farther as the roads are made.” She could no longer walk far, she admitted, but if the roads were good she could have four wheels made and a box put on them, and the children could pull her about. “With such facts pressing on me at every point you will understand my saying I dare not go back.” At the end she added, “This is not for publication; it is for digestion.”

The phrase about “untamed, unwashed, unlovely savages” is painful to read, and it is her own. It was the language of her time, and she used it even about the people she was risking everything to serve. But it is worth noticing why she used it. She was not arguing that the people were unworthy. She was arguing that they were in greater need than the people of Okoyong, and that she could not abandon them.

Set Free

Livingstone, who worked for the Church, is at pains to defend the committees. They were stewards of limited money, he says, and had to be sure of every step, while she, “all afire with energy and enthusiasm, would have gone on in faith.” Both sides had a point. A mission cannot be run on one woman’s impulses, and the committees were right to worry about who would pay for the new work when she was gone. But the Church had also left her alone in Okoyong for years, and she was right that the chance in the Creek would not wait for committees.

In the end the Church gave way. It decided to free her from the ordinary rules and let her work as a pioneer missionary, going where she thought right. Livingstone calls it a remarkable position, and so it was. The committee in Scotland passed a resolution recognising that it was the Church’s duty to occupy the region, regretting that its funds were too stretched to send new staff at once, and thanking Miss Slessor for her generosity and her brave pioneer work. A minister, the Rev. John Rankin, was sent to survey the country, and came back full of enthusiasm. Within three miles of Arochukwu, he reported, there were nineteen large towns. Some of the chiefs were persecuting the young Christians, and when the teachers asked the converts what they had said to the chiefs’ threats, they answered, “You can put us out of our country, but you cannot put us away from God.” The women said they would die for Jesus Christ. The head chief of the Aro, who had once controlled the oracle itself, offered to build a house for any missionary who would come. Rankin was appointed to Arochukwu, and it became a regular station of the mission. The work Mary had begun alone had been taken up by the Church.

No Looking Back

The verse at the head of this chapter is one of the hardest sayings of Jesus. A man offered to follow him, but first wanted to go home and say goodbye to his family. Jesus answered that no one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. A ploughman who looks over his shoulder cuts a crooked furrow.

Mary Slessor was often tempted to look back. She loved Okoyong more than anywhere on earth. She loved her Church and was afraid of losing it. She was ill and tired and nearly sixty. But she had heard, as she believed, a voice behind her saying, as Isaiah put it, “This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21, ASV), and she would not turn round. It made her difficult to manage. It made her, at times, “mutinous.” It also opened the Enyong Creek to the gospel.