On the Bench

“learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”

— Isaiah 1:17, ASV

“A Voluntary”

By 1905 the British government of Southern Nigeria was setting up a system of native courts across the country. Each court was made up of local chiefs who sat in turn, with the District Commissioner as its president and a permanent vice-president to keep it running. Before Mary left Itu she was asked, informally, whether she would take charge of the court business of her district, as she had done in Okoyong, but this time on an official footing. If she agreed, the court would be moved to Ikot Obong, near where she was living, to spare her strength.

She was pleased, and she agreed. She was already, in practice, the person everyone went to with their disputes. An official position, she thought, would give her more power to protect the poor and the oppressed, and above all women. “It will be a good chance,” she said, “to preach the Gospel, and to create confidence and inspire hope in these poor wretches, who fear white and black man alike; while it will neither hamper my work nor restrict my liberty.”

When she was told that a salary went with the post, she refused it. “I’m born and bred,” she said, “and am in every fibre of my being, a voluntary.” She meant something quite specific. The United Presbyterian Church had been founded on the principle known as Voluntaryism: that the Church should be supported by the free gifts of its members, never by the state. She was not going to take the government’s money for doing what she thought of as Christian service.

The formal offer came in May 1905. The High Commissioner invited her to become a member of the Itu Native Court with the status of permanent vice-president. He proposed to pay her a nominal salary of one pound a year and to give her the rest, forty-seven pounds a year, for her mission work. She thanked him, accepted the post, and declined the money. In October she took over the court’s books, and for years she did much of the clerk’s work herself.

It is often said that she was the first woman magistrate in the British Empire. That may be true, but it has never been properly established, and it is safest to say that she was one of the first women anywhere in the Empire to exercise a magistrate’s powers.

“God Help These Poor Helpless Women!”

The cases that came before her were grim. One of the first was a murder charge in which a woman was involved, and many of the rest concerned marriage, and with it poisoning, sacrifice, debts, oaths, and cruelty. She was often sick with disgust. “God help these poor helpless women!” she wrote one evening. “What a crowd of people I have had to-day, and how debased! They are just like brutes in regard to women. I have had a murder, an eséré case, a suicide, a man for branding his slave-wife all over her face and body; a man with a gun who has shot four persons. It is all horrible!”

Some of her sentences survive in her own handwriting. A man found guilty of brawling in the market and snatching eight brass rods from a woman’s basket: one month’s hard labour. A man who chased a girl into the bush intending to harm her: one month’s hard labour. A man who seized a woman in the market, kept her chained for fourteen days by the neck and wrists, and put a curse on her to kill her if she told the white people: six months’ hard labour, which was the most the court could give.

She used her position above all for women. She fined a whole town three pounds for failing to provide water for twin-mothers. She granted a woman a divorce on the spot from a husband she had good reason to leave, and made her fellow missionary witness it. The government’s report for 1907 recorded that the District Commissioner had summoned a number of husbands who had deserted their wives for bearing twins, and that every one of them had agreed to take his wife back, and that other men in the same position had then done the same without being summoned. It called this “a sign of the civilising influence worked through the Court by that admirable lady, Miss Slessor.”

Her Kind of Justice

She was not a conventional judge. Three chiefs sat beside her on the bench and a jury sat behind, but she ruled the court. An official saw her stand up and box the ears of a chief who had gone on interrupting after being warned, to the great amusement of the other chiefs. She would try a group of men, lecture them, and fine them, and when they had no money she would take them up to her house and set them to work to earn it, feeding them well and talking to them while they worked. Livingstone says that often, instead of administering the law, “she administered justice by giving the prisoner a blow on the side of the head!” He meant it as praise.

People trusted her court because she heard their stories in their own language, without an interpreter. One District Commissioner spent three days on a single case and got nowhere, and she settled it to everyone’s satisfaction with two questions. Once, standing by while a government doctor questioned a chief through an interpreter, she suddenly broke in, and the chief crumpled in front of her. He had told a lie. “To think,” she said afterwards, “he could have expected to deceive me!”

The court also used the oath of the old religion. A witness would promise to tell the truth while a member of the court drew a foul mixture from a bottle across his tongue and face, and touched his arms and legs with it, in the presence of a skull. It was believed that anyone who lied under this oath would die. Soon after Mary joined the court, a witness who had plainly lied collapsed and died on his way out of the building, and the oath was held in great respect for some time afterwards.

This is uncomfortable material for a Christian biography, and it should not be hidden. A missionary who had refused to pray at a blood covenant presided over a court that swore witnesses on an oath believed to kill, and a man appears to have died of his fear of it. Her court combined a fierce care for the weak with procedures no modern court would allow: summary blows, fines worked off as labour at the judge’s house, and verdicts that depended on her knowing, or thinking she knew, who was lying. It was, as she knew, justice by a strong personality, and it was only as good as she was.

When two ministers from Scotland visited her court at the end of her time there, they watched her hear a case in which a man, drunk on trade gin, had attacked his wife with a machete because she had stumbled against him. Mary wanted a severe sentence. The jury did not. The headman laid down the principle that men had a perfect right to do whatever they liked with their wives, or wives would become unmanageable. Out of deference to what he called the white woman’s peculiar views, the jury agreed to send the man to prison for a short term. It was a reminder of how far she had to push against the settled convictions of the men she sat with. She told the visiting minister that she did not care for the work at all. “The moral atmosphere of a native court is so bad,” she said, “that I would never go near one were it not that I want the people to get justice.”

As her health failed, she began to sit in her room reading or writing while the girls of her household questioned the people who came to her, reported the facts, and carried her answers back. Sometimes she simply called her ruling out of the window. People sent her letters addressed, to be on the safe side, to “Madam, Mr., Miss, Slessor.” In November 1909, or possibly a year later, worn out, she resigned. The Commissioner of the Eastern Province wrote to thank her for her services to the country. Livingstone says she was glad to be free of it.

“Failed, Failed”

One episode from these years has been quoted in almost every popular life of Mary Slessor, and it needs to be handled with care.

In 1908, while she was at Duke Town, the High Commissioner invited her to dinner at Government House to meet a visiting woman writer. She did not want to go. She had nothing to wear and did not want to be put on show. The Macgregors, with whom she was staying, persuaded her. As she set off in the hammock the government sent for her, Mr. Macgregor noticed “the light of battle in her eyes,” and laughed, because he knew she loved a prank. She came back with her face full of mischief. “Ay,” she said, “I met your lady writer, and I made her greet four times and she gied me half a sovereign for my bairns!” To “greet,” in Scots, is to weep.

The writer published an account of the meeting in the London Morning Post under the title “But yet the pity of it.” She described a woman close on sixty in a skimpy tweed skirt and a broken green picture-hat with a knot of red ribbon, holding out hands scraped raw from work and saying, “Ye’ll excuse my hands.” She reported Mary telling, in broad Scots, how she had put the death-oath on a man accused of stealing plantains, and how he had died on his way to Calabar: “I put mbiam on him, an’ he knew he had stolen them and died.” And she ended with Mary looking out into the sunshine and saying of her whole life’s work, “My time’s been wasted. The puir bairns. They’d be better dead. Failed, failed.”

Livingstone says flatly that the article “excited laughter and derision in the Calabar bush,” and that Mary had been deliberately “mystifying” a writer she did not take to, spinning her a tale of gloom and getting half a sovereign out of it for the children. That is quite possible. Her own report of the evening sounds like a woman pleased with a joke. But it is also possible that Livingstone, who wanted to protect her reputation, explained away something real. She did have dark moods, as we have seen and will see again. She was exhausted and ill that year. She was quite capable of saying “Failed, failed” in a black moment and laughing about it afterwards. We cannot know. What we can say is that the most famous despairing quotation attributed to her comes from a stranger’s newspaper article that her friends thought was a leg-pull, and it should not be quoted as her settled judgement on her life.

Seeking Justice

The verse at the head of this chapter was addressed by Isaiah to the rulers of Jerusalem, who were very religious and very unjust. God told them he was sick of their sacrifices. What he wanted was that they should “seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” The law of Moses put it more starkly still: “That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live” (Deuteronomy 16:20, ASV).

Mary Slessor’s court was not altogether just, and she knew it. But she sat in it, unpaid, for four years, because she believed that without her the women who came before it would get no justice at all. Twin-mothers were taken back into their homes. Women who had been chained and branded saw the men who did it sent to prison. A woman who wanted to leave a brutal husband was set free. It was an imperfect instrument in imperfect hands, used for the people Isaiah named: the oppressed, the fatherless, and the widow.