Everybody’s Mother

“But we were gentle in the midst of you, as when a nurse cherisheth her own children: even so, being affectionately desirous of you, we were well pleased to impart unto you, not the gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye were become very dear to us.”

— 1 Thessalonians 2:7-8, ASV

What She Left

When Mary Slessor died, the churches she had begun along the Enyong Creek were small, poor, and young. Livingstone, writing the next year, counted nearly fifty churches and schools in the district she had opened, with nearly fifteen hundred members and more than two thousand pupils. He printed the accounts of five of the Creek congregations for 1914. Asang had four hundred and twenty-eight members. Onoyom’s town, Obufa Obio, had a hundred and eighteen and more than seven hundred pounds in the bank. Itu, where Mana and two boys had begun the work in 1903, had a hundred and nine. All of them were paying their own way.

By the standards of the Church at home these were modest numbers, and Mary knew it. Livingstone says that at the end of her life she was troubled by how little had been done. After seventy years, the whole Calabar mission had a Christian community of about ten thousand, eight hundred people and a communion roll of three thousand, four hundred, and it had barely touched the interior. The Church at home, she felt, had never risen to the opportunity. It was interested in her, but not in Nigeria.

Livingstone was an admirer, but he was honest enough to record the criticism too. “It was not … the broad policy she originated that was criticised,” he wrote, “so much as matters of detail, and no doubt there was sometimes justification for this. She admitted that she had no gifts as an organiser.” She was a pioneer, and she knew it. She opened doors and left others to build the rooms behind them.

The Legend

Within a year of her death she had become a legend, and the legend grew for the rest of the century. Livingstone’s biography, and his version for children, were followed by dozens of popular lives. Missionary societies used her story to recruit and to raise money. Her face appeared, from 1997 until a redesign in 2009, on the Clydesdale Bank’s ten-pound note. When Queen Elizabeth II visited Nigeria in 1956, she laid a wreath on Mary Slessor’s grave. There is a park named after her in Dundee, and a charity in her name runs a clinic at Akpap, in Okoyong.

In Nigeria, too, she is remembered. In Calabar there is a Mary Slessor roundabout, with a bronze statue of her carrying twin babies. There are schools named after her, including one at Arochukwu, and the mission hospital at Itu bears her name. In 2000 the people of Calabar chose her as one of the city’s people of the millennium. The Presbyterian Church of Nigeria, which grew out of the mission she served, honours her as a mother of the church, and a centenary service was held in Calabar in January 2015. Newspapers there still call her “the woman who stopped the killing of twins.”

Some of this honour is deserved and some of it is legend. Historians have tried to separate the two.

What the Historians Say

The Scottish historian Esther Breitenbach has studied how Mary Slessor became famous. In a 2017 article she argues that the icon owed much to “deliberate acts of invention,” and to the meeting of British expansion in south-eastern Nigeria with missionary enthusiasm and the hopes of Scottish women for careers of their own. She suggests that there was little that was unique in Slessor’s practice as a missionary, and sets out to show the gap between the myth and the historical reality.

There is truth in that. Other missionaries rescued twins before her and alongside her. Other women lived alone on remote stations. The killing of twins had been banned in Calabar before she arrived, and it did not end when she died. Her authority rested in part on British power, and she welcomed that power and sometimes praised it in terms that are hard to read now. The “White Queen of Okoyong” was a title invented in Scotland. The people of Okoyong called her Ma.

But other historians see more. The historian Jeanette Hardage, whose 2008 study is the fullest academic life of Slessor, asked whether she was an agent of imperialism or a liberator of the oppressed, and answered, “Both, to some degree.” She noted that Slessor admired much of British culture and wanted to share it, but that she did not spare colonial officers when she thought them arrogant or cruel, and that she knew local law and custom better than most of them. The Nigerian church historian Ogbu Kalu wrote that her vision was “much broader and more activist” than her fellow missionaries could imagine. She rejected the idea that a missionary should live in a compound apart from the people, and, in the words of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, she was a “catalyst that challenged the mission to change.”

Nigerian writers themselves have taken different views. Some honour her as the mother of the church and the saviour of the twins. Others point out that the Efik rulers, the consuls, and earlier missionaries had acted before her, and that the story of a lone Scotswoman rescuing Africa from itself leaves out the Africans who made change possible. Both are right to speak.

What This Book Has Found

This book has tried to tell her story with the Africans left in. It has found that the real woman was more interesting than the legend, and in some ways more admirable.

She was a factory girl with almost no schooling, afraid of crowds, of public speaking, of cows in fields, who walked alone into the most feared district of Calabar and stayed there fifteen years. She was not fearless. She was afraid and went anyway.

She did not work alone. Ma Eme warned her, again and again, of killings that were planned, at the risk of her own life, and never became a Christian. Edem took her into his compound and protected her, and she buried him with her own hands. Mana, a former slave girl, began the church at Itu with two boys, and taught its women to pray. Onoyom built a church with his own savings and cut down his town’s sacred tree. Jean ran her house, rescued twins, preached to two hundred people, and was paid a shilling a week. The story of Mary Slessor is also theirs.

She did not always win. The man whose life she saved was flogged and cut. The young man who died for his brother died after a verdict she had declined to give, and she grieved over it. The Ikpe twin was poisoned by his own mother. Many of the babies she carried home were buried in the little cemetery full of tiny graves. Her first district saw no baptisms for fifteen years.

She was not always right. She could be imperious and harsh. She boxed ears, caned a man who had won his case, and spoke with withering contempt to those who crossed her. She approved of the government’s drafts of village men for the coalfields and railway, she shared the racial assumptions of her age, and she told African children that the British government was Christian at bottom. She was bitter about Roman Catholics, though she counted Catholic officials among her friends. She knew many of her faults, and grieved over her “hasty words.”

And she was loved. When she died, the girls she had raised were terrified of what would become of them, and the whole district came to mourn. The people of Okoyong, who had once been ready to kill any stranger, had called her Mother. The people of the Creek, whom she had described in her worst moments as “untamed, unwashed, unlovely,” built churches with their own hands and paid for them with their own money. An old Muslim kissed her hand and said only God could make someone such a mother to everybody. The chief whose household she saved from slaughter stepped out of a line of warriors and knelt at her feet.

The Alabaster Box

Livingstone ended his biography with the story of the woman who broke an alabaster box of precious ointment over the head of Jesus, a few days before his death. The disciples complained about the waste. Jesus defended her: “She hath done what she could; she hath anointed my body beforehand for the burying” (Mark 14:8, ASV). Livingstone thought Mary Slessor had done the same with her life: broken it open, and poured it out for Christ, and let people call it a waste.

It is a good image. But the verse at the head of this chapter may fit her better still. Paul was writing to a young church in Thessalonica, a church he had founded and had been forced to leave. He reminded them how he had lived among them: “we were gentle in the midst of you, as when a nurse cherisheth her own children: even so, being affectionately desirous of you, we were well pleased to impart unto you, not the gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye were become very dear to us.”

Not the gospel only, but our own souls. That is what Mary Slessor gave the people of the Cross River. She preached the gospel to them in their own language for nearly forty years, and she also gave them herself: her salary, her health, her nights, her home, her chance of marriage, and in the end her life. They had become very dear to her. It was not a perfect gift. It came mixed with the prejudices of her age and the flaws of her temper, and it was carried into their country on the tide of an empire. But it was a real gift, and they knew it, and they called her “Everybody’s Mother.”

Paul wrote to another church that when everything else has passed away, three things remain: “faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13, ASV). Mary Slessor’s faith was often weak, by her own account. Her hope was sometimes dark. But her love was the one thing that no one who knew her ever doubted.