Ikpe

“And he hath said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my power is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

— 2 Corinthians 12:9, ASV

A Call From the North

The call to her last field came, of all ways, out of a war. During one of the smaller military expeditions that followed the Aro campaign, government troops were attacked by the people of a district at the upper end of the Enyong Creek, who fled, Livingstone says, “at the first experience of disciplined firing.” A young man who had been used by the soldiers as a guide persuaded some of them to go and ask advice of the great white Ma at Use. They came, and talked with her long and earnestly. Later more came, saying they wanted to be “God-men.”

Their home was Ikpe, two days up the Creek by canoe, an old slave-trading town that had been allied with the Aro and had long closed its market to outsiders. When Mary first visited, the older chiefs were sullen. She understood why. “Poor old heathen souls,” she wrote, “they have good reason to be, with all they have to hope from tumbling down about their ears.” But young men were already building a church, with two rooms for her at the back, though none of them could read and their only teacher knew barely more than the alphabet.

She knew she was too old and too ill to start again. She was over sixty. She could not walk far, and was carried to church. But the thought of people worshipping a God they barely knew, with no one to teach them, broke her down. “Why cannot the Church send two ladies there?” she asked. “If the wherewithal should fail at the end of two years, let them take my salary. I shall only be too glad to live on native food with my bairns.” No ladies were sent. So she went herself. “I must go,” she said. “I am in honour bound to go.”

In a short time she was back at Ikpe with fifty sheets of corrugated iron. “I am committed now,” she wrote. “No more idleness for me. I am entering in the dark as to how and where and when. How I am to manage I do not know, but my mind is at perfect peace about it, and I am not afraid. God will carry it through. The Pillar leads.” The pillar was the pillar of cloud that went before Israel in the wilderness. She had used the image for years: she would not move until God moved.

Real Life

She lived in two rooms behind the church, with a camp-bed and a few dishes, and at times had as many as two hundred and fifty people clearing bush for her. Livingstone says the people of Ikpe were hostile to white people as a whole, and wanted neither them nor their religion. But there was nothing warlike about the frail old woman in the camp-bed, and “her very helplessness protected her.”

Her courage had not left her. One Sunday, during the service, a fight broke out in the market with sticks and swords. She went out, seized one man’s wrist, and stopped it. When government agents came with a police escort to vaccinate the people against smallpox, the crowd took the vaccine for the white man’s witchcraft, guns appeared, and there was about to be bloodshed. The people were asked to trust Ma. They said they would be vaccinated if she did it herself, so she sent for vaccine and spent days doing it, joking and coaxing when she was near fainting. “This poor frail woman is the broken reed on which they lean,” she wrote of herself. “Isn’t it strange?”

She described her life at Ikpe in one of her best letters:

It is a real life I am living now, not all preaching and holding meetings, but rather a life and an atmosphere which the people can touch and live in and be made willing to believe in when the higher truths are brought before them. In many things it is a most prosaic life, dirt and dust and noise and silliness and sin in every form, but full, too, of the kindliness and homeliness and dependence of children who are not averse to be disciplined and taught, and who understand and love just as we do.

The journeys between Use and Ikpe were brutal. She was once asked how she could stand them in her state. “Oh,” she said, “I just had to take as big a dose of laudanum as I dared, and wrap myself up in a blanket, and lie in the bottom of the canoe all the time, and managed fine.” Laudanum was opium dissolved in alcohol, the ordinary painkiller of the time, and she used it, as she used sleeping draughts, to get through pain and sleeplessness. It is one of the details Livingstone kept that the legend leaves out.

Once she reached the landing-beach at half past five on Christmas morning after a night in the canoe, carrying, as Livingstone puts it, “the usual motherless baby.” A message was waiting for her: “Ekereki said I was to tell you that his mother is asleep.” It meant that the woman had died. Mary was struck that the Christian way of speaking of death as sleep had already entered the language of a people who had once thought every death the work of a witch. Annie’s little son had been the first Christian buried there. Now this woman was laid beside him, the first adult to receive a Christian burial in that part of the Ibibio country. That New Year’s Eve she was down with fever, and at midnight an army of driver ants poured into the house from every side and dropped from the roof. “My ‘first-feet’ were driver ants,” she wrote, using the Scottish word for the first visitor of the New Year.

The Autocratic Doctor

In 1911 a young doctor named Hitchcock came to the mission hospital at Itu, and began riding over every other day to examine her. He suspected she was not eating enough. Her diary shows that he was right. On 14 June she wrote: “Market Morning. Have only 3d. in cash in the house; sent it with 2 Ikpats (the first Efik schoolbook) and New Testament to buy food, and sold all 3 books for 6d.” There was money for her in Duke Town, but she seldom had cash in hand, and she would not ask.

The doctor forbade her to go to Ikpe, to cycle, or to take services. She laughed, went to church, and held two services, and nearly collapsed. He sent her to bed and sent over a chicken with instructions for cooking it. “I’m not a meat eater, doctor,” she said. When he suggested she go to Duke Town for a rest, she said, “I cannot draw a salary and not do what I can.” A friend told her she had done enough in the past to have no qualms. “I’ve been paid for all I’ve done,” she said. Late in the year she escaped, in her words, from “the dearest and cleverest and most autocratic Mission doctor that ever lived,” and went straight back to Ikpe.

A Box on Wheels

In 1912 the mission council offered to send two women to Ikpe, but first asked for a medical report on the site. It was bad: the house stood on land that flooded. Mary refused to accept the verdict and stayed. She was growing deaf, and said she felt like “a spluttering candle.” She hated being carried in a hammock. “I feel a brute in it,” she wrote, “it seems so selfish to be lying there, while four boys sweat like beasts of burden. To push a little carriage is like skilled labour and no degradation.” The women of a Glasgow church sent her a basket-chair on wheels, a kind of cart, and her boys pushed her through the bush in it. It was the “box on wheels” she had written about in 1906.

In September 1912 she completed thirty-six years as a missionary, and took stock of herself: “I’m lame and feeble and foolish; the wrinkles are wonderful, no concertina is so wonderfully folded and convulated. I’m a wee, wee wifie, verra little buikit, but I grip on well, none the less.” An old doctor told her that by ordinary rule she should have been dead long ago.

That winter a friend in the women’s committee paid for her to take the first real holiday of her life, a few weeks in the Canary Islands with Jean. She protested that it was selfish and extravagant, and then enjoyed it. “I sat and knitted and crocheted and sewed and worked through the Bible all the day long,” she wrote. “He is so near and so dear.” A woman who met her at the hotel said that of all the people she had ever met, Mary Slessor impressed her most as “the perfect embodiment of the Christian life.”

The Ikpe Twin

Back at Ikpe, the chiefs turned against the church. They did not mind schools, they said, but they wanted no interference with their customs, and if houses of God were built, everyone would die. “I shall never give you teachers without the Gospel,” she told them. “If you don’t take the one, you won’t have the other.” When they announced, with an air of great generosity, that they would allow some worship but would not themselves join in “the confusions of the church,” she replied, “God will doubtless be immensely pleased and benefited by your wondrous condescension.” Livingstone says they laughed.

Then twins were born in Ikpe. Mary slept with the babies in her own bed, while people watched outside in the dark. The father wanted to kill the surviving boy and throw the mother into a swamp. Mary made him swear an oath not to harm the child, and when he grandly agreed to let it live, she bowed ironically to the ground, which unnerved him completely. By now, Livingstone says, “she had come to realise that it was not good to take twins from their mother,” and she insisted that the child stay at home. Jean went to live with the mother, and then the mother and baby were brought to a lean-to under Mary’s verandah, with Jean sleeping beside them. “It is really far braver and kinder of her to live with that heathen woman with her fretting habits,” Mary wrote, “than it is for her to go out in the dark and fight with snakes.”

One Sunday, while they were at church, the mother broke the baby’s thigh and gave him poison. With care he recovered. For weeks they watched over him, hoping that when his parents saw how healthy and handsome he was they would keep him. At last the parents agreed to take him home. Four days later they sent for Jean, who came back carrying “a weak, pinched form that had death written on its face.” He died soon afterwards. Livingstone ends the story with a single sentence: “that was the end of ‘Ma’s’ strenuous fight and Jean’s ten weeks’ toil by night and day.”

It is one of the saddest stories in her life, and it is right that it is told. Near the end, after nearly forty years, she could still lose. Belief is not changed by argument or by a single act of love. It changes, if it changes at all, over generations.

Odoro Ikpe

In 1914 she pushed on once more, to a government rest-house on a hill five miles from Ikpe called Odoro Ikpe. It had no door and a mud floor. She borrowed a camp-bed, and the girls slept on the floor among the lizards. When an old chief offered her a place to build and told his young men to build “a house for book,” she said, “No! We don’t begin or end either with a house. We begin and end with God in our hearts.” A young man in a hat, who had not taken it off to speak to her, told her they could not accept God’s word if she brought twins and twin-mothers into their town. She looked at him, Livingstone says, “as witheringly as she could,” and said, “I speak with men and people worthy of me, and not with a puny bush-boy such as you have shown by your manners you are.” The hat came off, and the crowd cried, “Ma, forgive! forgive! he does not know any better.”

Her tongue could still wound, and she knew it. She was also, in these last years, a woman of her time in ways that are hard to admire. When the government began taking batches of men from each village, with the chiefs’ consent, to work in the coalfields and on the railway, Livingstone records that she approved. When her own workmen were lazy, she resorted to what she called “muscular Christianity,” which amused everyone, and which seems to have meant cuffing them. She was in debt to her carpenter and labourers, and once borrowed five shillings from a government doctor. She was a very old, very ill woman, in debt, supervising a building site from a chair in the sun, and still, some nights, writing by candlelight that she was “the happiest and most grateful woman in the world.”

Strength in Weakness

“I begin every day,” she said in these years, “almost every journey in pain, and in such tiredness that I am sure I can’t go on, and whenever I begin, the strength comes, and it increases.” That is almost a paraphrase of the verse at the head of this chapter. Paul had asked three times for his “thorn in the flesh” to be taken away, and was told, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Isaiah says, “He giveth power to the faint; and to him that hath no might he increaseth strength” (Isaiah 40:29, ASV). Mary Slessor was not healed. She was not made strong. She was given, each morning, enough strength to begin.