The Time of the Singing of Birds

“For, lo, the winter is past; The rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; The time of the singing of birds is come, And the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land”

— Song of Solomon 2:11-12, ASV

Back to the Old Haunts

In July 1913 she went back to Akpap for the first time in eight years. The station now had two women missionaries and a new church. People came from all over Okoyong to greet her, and she remembered their names and their family histories. The twins she had rescued were now healthy young men and women. Mana and Iye were there. And Ma Eme came, still a devoted follower of the old religion, and the two old women sat together all day and talked about the killing time. More than four hundred people came to a service in the unfinished church, the largest congregation Okoyong had ever seen. She thought of the words of Jesus about one who sows and another who reaps.

At Christmas 1913 a new church was opened at Use, built by the people under her direction without outside help, and more than eighty visitors were fed. “A bonnie kirk it is,” she wrote, “the biggest Christmas I’ve ever had in Calabar.” She added a remark that shows how far she had come from the young woman who ran everything herself: “Jean and Annie do not hesitate to set it aside quietly in their superior way; it often works out better than mine, truth to tell.”

The War

In August 1914, while she was building her house at Odoro Ikpe, rumours began to reach the bush of fighting in the white men’s world. Trade stopped. Canoes that went down to Calabar for rice and kerosene came back with their loads of palm oil unsold. On 13 August letters arrived with the news that Britain was at war with Germany. Nigeria bordered the German colony of Kamerun, and she feared for Calabar. Prices doubled. Her kerosene ran out, and she read the Bible at family prayers by the light of burning sticks.

When her first war mail came, she read why Britain had entered the war and said, “Thank God! our nation is not the aggressor.” Then she read about the invasion of Belgium, and tried to stand up, and could not. The girls carried her to bed, and she lay in a fever for a fortnight. She grew steadily weaker. She was not afraid of death, but she was afraid of dying alone in the bush, because she knew that her skull might be taken and worshipped as a powerful charm.

At last she lay in a stupor, and the church boys at Odoro Ikpe lifted her in her camp-bed and carried her five miles to Ikpe. The next morning they put her in a canoe under a tarpaulin and paddled her down the Creek to the landing-place for Use. She lay in the road in the moonlight, scarcely breathing, while a trader sent for the doctor from Itu. He stayed all night, not expecting her to live. All through the night her mind was on the soldiers in the trenches.

She recovered a little. She sent for her colleague Martha Peacock, and told her it might be the end. “Oh,” she said, “if only the war were over and my children safe in the Kingdom, how gladly would I go!” She called the children together and told them what to do when she died.

The war stirred her in ways that are not easy to read now. When two government officers she counted among her oldest friends were drowned on naval service, she grieved for them deeply. At times she wrote with fierce patriotism: “Oh if I were thirty years younger, and if I were a man! We must not have peace until Germany licks the dust.” Scottish women, she told a nervous friend, were not Belgians; “they would stand up to William the Execrated.” But she also wrote, in calmer moods, “Miss Slessor, why do you worry? Is God not fit to take care of His own universe and purpose?” She rested, Livingstone says, on the words “The Lord reigneth,” as on a soft pillow. She prayed that her nation might be “sent from its pleasures to its knees.” At the Christmas service she did not like having to explain to her African congregation why Christian nations were at war with each other.

She wrote to a friend that Christmas:

There will be few merry Christmasses in Europe this year. But, thank God, there will be a more profound sense of all Christ came to be and do for mankind. He will Himself draw near, and will fill empty chairs in lonely homes and hearts, and make His people … to know that here and now He is the Resurrection and the Life, that he that believeth in Him shall never die.

She was echoing Jesus’ words at the grave of Lazarus: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die” (John 11:25-26, ASV).

Plans

She knew now that only a voyage home might heal her, and she made plans. Mrs. Arnot, who as Miss Young had been one of the missionaries Mary recruited and had since been widowed, offered to take a small house in Scotland where they could live quietly together. Mary accepted, with tears. She would go in the spring. She would visit her mother’s grave in Devon. She wrote to ask a friend to send her a hat and boots, and other things “which civilisation demanded.” Her only regret was Ikpe. “It is ten years since I first took them on, and they have never got a teacher yet. It is bitterly hard!”

Her colleagues noticed that the old power of recovery was gone. One day she told them she had been going through her desk and tearing up letters, “in case anything should happen.”

On New Year’s Day, 1915, Martha Peacock and another missionary, Miss Couper, came to tea. Miss Peacock had made her a plum pudding, and when they arrived it was on the table with a rose from the garden stuck in the top. Mary was, Miss Peacock said, as happy as a girl, and admitted she had had to use great self-control not to taste the pudding before they came. Miss Peacock noticed something else. “A new tenderness seemed to have come into her life, and with regard to those with whom she differed, she seemed to go out of her way to say the kindest things possible.” Mary told her about something harsh she had written and then torn up, and said, “I wonder I could have been so hard.”

The Last Letters

It was the time of year when her mother had died, twenty-nine years before, and she was thinking of her. She wrote to her old friend Miss Adam about the previous Sunday’s service, and how Annie’s little girl had run about the church pointing at her and calling to her. “I can’t say ‘Don’t bring her,’ for there should be room enough for the babies in our Father’s house.” She ended, “God be with you till we meet again.”

On 5 January she wrote to a woman in Edinburgh whose two sons had joined the army:

My heart bleeds for you, my dear, dear friend, but God’s love gave the mother heart its love and its yearning over its treasures, so He will know how to honour and care for the mother, and how to comfort her and keep her treasures for her. Just keep hold on Him, dear one, and put your boys into His hand, as you did when they were babies. … In God’s governance not one precious thing can ever be lost.

On Friday 8 January she sat in a deck-chair in the little garden in the sun and wrote letters. The last was to Mrs. Arnot. She was better, she said, though “a wee shade weaker than usual.” It was never finished. The last words on the page were: “I can’t say definitely whether I shall yet come in March, if I be spared till then …”

“O God, Release Me”

That afternoon the fever came back. Alice nursed her, lying on a mat beside the bed when she needed rest. On Sunday Mary got up, went over to the church, and led the service. On Monday she was violently ill, and one of the girls went to fetch Miss Peacock, who sent for the doctor from Itu. He came with ice and medicine, and the sickness stopped. But she was restless and exhausted, moved from bed to chair and back again, and now and then gave “a great cry of weariness as if she were wearied unto death.”

Once, when Miss Peacock was tending her, Mary said, “Ma, it’s no use.” Once she prayed in Efik, “O Abasi, sana mi yok”: “O God, release me.” Sometimes she only said, “Ma,” the name everyone called her, as she called her friend.

On the night of 12 January the girls, Jean, Annie, Maggie, Alice, and Whitie, gathered with Miss Peacock to keep watch. The room had rough reddish-brown mud walls, a cement floor, and an iron roof. Besides the bed there were a washstand, a chair or two, and a chest of drawers that had belonged to her mother in Dundee. Her breathing grew difficult. It was very dark. Two men were sent running to Itu for the doctor. They had forgotten the clock and did not know the time. A cock crowed, and one of the girls said, “Day must be dawning,” but when Miss Peacock drew back the curtain it was still pitch dark.

At half past three in the morning, on 13 January 1915, Mary Slessor died. She was sixty-six. Miss Peacock wrote that there was no great struggle at the end, and that “Ma Akamba, ‘The Great Mother,’ entered into the presence of the King.” (The government Gazette announced her death “at Itu,” the district in which Use lay.)

She used to say that “the time of the singing of birds” was wherever Christ was. For her, as the Song of Solomon has it, the winter was past, the rain was over and gone, and the time of the singing of birds had come.

“Everybody’s Mother”

When the girls understood that she was gone, they cried out in grief and fear: “My mother is dead, my mother is dead. We shall be counted as slaves now that our mother is dead.” The sound woke the town, and people came to the house and sat on the steps and wept with them. As the news spread, people came from Itu and the whole district to see the one they called Eka kpukpru owo, “Everybody’s Mother.”

A launch came up from Duke Town, and after services in English and Efik at Itu, her body was carried down the river through the night. At dawn it was brought ashore at the government beach at Duke Town. The flags of the town were at half-mast. The coffin, draped in the Union Jack, was carried shoulder-high by the boatmen, in black vests and mourning cloths, through streets lined with the students of the Hope Waddell Institute, policemen, and schoolchildren. Officials, merchants, and missionaries followed. She was buried in the old mission cemetery on the hill above Duke Town, where she had first gone ashore thirty-nine years before.

At the head of the grave sat Mammy Fuller, the Jamaican nurse who had befriended her when she was a young teacher ringing the dawn bell by moonlight. When the procession came near and some women began to wail, the old woman stood up. “Kutua oh, kutua oh,” she said. “Do not cry, do not cry. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Ma was a great blessing.” As the coffin was lowered, she said one word: “Safe.” A slip from the rose bush at Use was planted in the earth. Afterwards Mammy Fuller said, “I have been just near heaven all the time.”

The Governor-General, Sir Frederick Lugard, telegraphed: “Her death is a great loss to Nigeria.” The psalmist puts it another way: “Precious in the sight of Jehovah Is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15, ASV). She would not have used the word “saint” of herself. She had told her friends she was “not goody-goody at all.” But she had lived and died, as the Gazette said, “on the scene of her labours,” as she had wished, among her own people, her daughters around her, and the forest dark outside.