Introduction: The Legend and the Letters

“He that pleadeth his cause first seemeth just; But his neighbor cometh and searcheth him out.”

— Proverbs 18:17, ASV

A Woman Who Became a Legend

Within a year of her death, Mary Slessor had become a legend. Her first biography was widely read in Scotland and beyond. A version for children appeared the same year under the title The White Queen of Okoyong. Popular lives followed in almost every decade of the twentieth century, some for adults, many for Sunday school prizes. From 1997 until a redesign in 2009, her portrait appeared on the Clydesdale Bank’s ten-pound note, with a map of Calabar and a picture of her with African children. In Calabar a roundabout bears her name, with a statue of her carrying twin babies. Schools, a hospital, a road, and even a small asteroid are named after her.

A legend is a kind of compliment, but it is also a kind of distortion. Popular retellings of her life made her taller than she was, and sometimes less interesting. They invented dialogue for her, and gave names to people who were never named in any record. One popular book has a panther carry a baby out of her tent, a scene with no source at all. Others credit her with ending the killing of twins in Nigeria single-handed, or with being the first woman magistrate in the British Empire. Some put words into her mouth that she never wrote. A saying often quoted as hers, “Why should I fear? I am on a Royal Mission,” is not in Livingstone or any source from her lifetime; the earliest printings found are devotional books published nearly a century after her death.

This book is written in the conviction that the real woman is better than the legend. The verse at the head of this chapter is a proverb about lawsuits: the first person to tell a story always sounds right, until the next person comes and asks questions. This introduction explains which stories this book trusts, and why.

Livingstone’s Biography

The foundation of everything written about Mary Slessor is W. P. Livingstone’s Mary Slessor of Calabar, published in 1916. Livingstone was given access to a great mass of her letters, and he built his book out of them. He also gathered the memories of fellow missionaries, government officials, and friends in Scotland. He tells us in his prefatory note that late in life she was urged to write her own story, and was surprised that anyone thought she had done enough to deserve a book.

Livingstone was an admirer, and in places he writes as one. He calls her “one of the most heroic figures of the age.” He sometimes hints that she was more than human, and he defends both her Church and the colonial government whenever they are criticised. His descriptions of Africans are full of the racial theories of his time, and some of them are painful to read today.

Yet he was also, in important ways, an honest biographer. He admitted that she could be “stern and exacting,” that she was “often depressed and worried,” and that many people “could not see her greatness for what they called her eccentricities.” He printed letters in which she confessed her fears and her failures. He recorded that her first district had no baptisms for fifteen years, that her closest African friend never became a Christian, and that some of her rescues ended in death. He told stories of her temper that a more careful admirer would have left out. The result is a book that often contains the evidence against its own enthusiasm, and that makes it useful.

Letters Burned and Letters Kept

Mary Slessor did not leave a large personal archive. She was a tireless letter-writer, but in her last months she destroyed many of the letters she had received, “in case anything should happen.” A colleague is said to have found her burning her personal papers. What survives is scattered: letters in Dundee, in the National Library of Scotland, and in Edinburgh; two small diaries; her Bibles with their crowded margins; and letters to a colonial official who became her friend. Most of what we know of her inner life comes from the letters her friends in Scotland kept and gave to Livingstone.

That means her own voice reaches us through a selection made by an admirer. It is still her voice, and it is quoted freely in this book. But the reader should remember that we hear what Livingstone chose to print.

The Records and the Historians

Some facts can be checked against records made at the time, and where they can, this book checks them. The Scottish parish and civil registers correct several details of the traditional story. Her father was baptised in Aberdeen, not in Buchan as Livingstone says. Her mother bore eleven children, not seven. The deaths of her brothers were from tuberculosis and croup, not pneumonia, as is often repeated. The census of 1891 finds her on furlough in Devon, described as a teacher of the Church in West Africa, with her adopted daughter Janie in the house.

Modern historians have also examined her life. The fullest scholarly study is Jeanette Hardage’s Mary Slessor, Everybody’s Mother, published in 2008. Asked whether Slessor was an agent of empire or a liberator of the oppressed, Hardage answers, “Both, to some degree.” Esther Breitenbach, a Scottish historian, has studied how her fame was built after her death. She argues that much of it was deliberate invention, and that there was little in Slessor’s actual practice as a missionary that was unique. Nigerian historians have their own views. The church historian Ogbu Kalu praised her vision as “much broader and more activist” than that of her fellow missionaries. Other Nigerian writers have pushed back against the idea that a single Scottish woman saved the twins of Calabar, and have restored the Efik rulers, consuls, and earlier missionaries who acted before her.

This book has learned from all of them. It does not accept every criticism, and it does not repeat every tribute. It tries to put her back into her own world, alongside the African men and women who sheltered her, argued with her, worked beside her, and sometimes resisted her.

Her World and Ours

Mary Slessor went to Calabar in 1876, when no European power ruled the region. She died in 1915, when it was part of the British colony of Nigeria. Her whole working life coincided with the British conquest of the country, and she was caught up in it. She asked British consuls for help, sat in British courts, travelled in government cars, and told African children that the government was, at bottom, Christian. She also refused a house the government offered to build for her, so as not to be too closely identified with it. She said plainly that Europeans were “foreigners, and they own the country.”

This book will not pretend that those tensions are easy to resolve. It will tell the story as it happened. The reader will meet a woman who loved African people deeply, lived among them as few Europeans did, learned their language and laws, and spent her life defending the weakest of them. The reader will also meet a woman who shared many assumptions of her time and race, who could be imperious, and who was sometimes wrong.

What This Book Is For

The purpose of telling her story truthfully is not to diminish her. It is the same reason she herself gave for reading the Bible with a pen in her hand. She wanted to know what was really there. Jesus said, “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32, ASV). A legend can inspire for a while, but it cannot bear much weight. A real life, told with its failures and its unanswered questions, can teach us how God works through ordinary, flawed people. Mary Slessor would have preferred that. She spent her last years insisting that she was “not goody-goody at all,” and that her life was a record of what God had done, not of what she had done.