Learning Calabar

“therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner-stone of sure foundation: he that believeth shall not be in haste.”

— Isaiah 28:16, ASV

Arrival

The voyage was a delight to her in most ways. She had spent her whole life inside the walls of a factory and a tenement, and now there was sunshine, sea, and space. Her one grievance was that no service was held on board on Sundays. “My very heart and flesh cried out for the courts of God’s house,” she wrote. Some of the crew told her not to worry: there was always a Sabbath in Calabar.

In September 1876 the Ethiopia entered the wide, muddy estuary of the Cross and Calabar rivers. Mangrove swamps lined the banks. On the islands she could see the ruins of the barracoons, the pens where enslaved people had once been held to wait for the ships. Some fifty miles from the sea the steamer turned into the Calabar River, and at last anchored off Duke Town. On the hill above the town stood the buildings of the mission. Canoes swarmed out to meet the ship, and she stepped down into the mission boat and went ashore.

The World of the Efik

Calabar in 1876 was not part of any European empire. Britain had a consul on the coast and regarded the region as within its sphere of influence, but it governed nothing. The towns along the river were ruled by their own people, the Efik, who had grown rich for two centuries as middlemen in trade with Europe, first in slaves and then, after the slave trade ended, in palm oil. Duke Town, Creek Town, Old Town, and Henshaw Town were in effect small trading states, each with its ruling families and its great Houses.

Mary quickly learned that these were not lawless people. Their society was ordered by laws and customs as powerful as any in Europe. The basic unit was the House, a large household under a master or chief, with his wives, children, and slaves. Slaves could rise to positions of wealth and trust, but they could also be sold or killed at their master’s will. Anyone outside the protection of a House was at the mercy of Ekpe, called Egbo by Europeans, a powerful men’s society that made and enforced law. Its masked messengers could come out suddenly with whips, and women found in the streets could be flogged and stripped. Livingstone admits that Egbo “had a certain power for good” as well, and was often used to keep order.

She also learned that the people had a religion of their own, far more complex than she had expected. They believed in a high God, but lived in fear of spirits, witchcraft, and the dead. Sickness and death were not thought to be natural. When someone died, someone else was to blame, and the blame was settled by ordeal, especially by making the accused drink a poison made from the Calabar bean. When a great man died, slaves and wives might be killed to go with him into the spirit world.

She saw early what this meant for Christian converts. If a man with several wives became a Christian, what was to happen to the wives? If a slave-owner was converted, what was to happen to the slaves? The missionaries were not simply preaching to individuals. They were asking people to step out of a whole social system that held their lives together. Mary concluded, Livingstone says, that the missionary must help to create “a new set of conditions” in which converts could actually live. It was a thought that shaped the rest of her life.

A Church After Thirty Years

The mission had been at work for thirty years, and the results were modest. There were 174 communicant members in all the congregations, though more than a thousand people attended Sunday services. The staff was small: a handful of Scottish ministers and teachers, one African ordained minister, and eighteen African agents. They worked in five stations along the rivers.

But Mary was impressed. She heard African Christians sing the hymns of her childhood in their own language, and heard one of them preach with eloquence and power. At Creek Town she heard King Eyo Honesty VII speak at a congregational meeting. He was a Christian, who led worship in his own town, and she liked him at once. When she told him that her mother in Dundee followed the mission’s affairs with great interest, he was so pleased that he wrote to Mrs. Slessor, and the two corresponded: an African king and a poor widow in a Scottish tenement, brought together by the gospel.

Her first address in Africa was given under a tree, beside a small spirit-house built for a dead man and stocked with food for his ghost. An African agent of the mission, John Baillie, spoke first in Efik, then turned to her and asked whether she had anything to say. She could hardly speak. She asked him to read the fifth chapter of John, the story of the man who had lain by the pool for thirty-eight years, and as he read, her thoughts cleared. She spoke through him as interpreter about the people’s need of healing, and asked them the question Jesus asked the sick man, which she knew in the words of her King James Bible: “Wilt thou be made whole?” The version used in this book renders it, “Wouldest thou be made whole?” (John 5:6, ASV). It was the question she would put, in one form or another, to everyone she met for the next forty years.

Not in Haste

She was impatient. She wanted to see results. “It is difficult to wait,” she said. But she wrote in those early months some words that could stand over her whole life:

Christ never was in a hurry. There was no rushing forward, no anticipating, no fretting over what might be. Every day’s duties were done as every day brought them, and the rest was left with God.

She added a verse, and it is the verse at the head of this chapter: “He that believeth shall not make haste,” in the words she knew. In Isaiah it is God’s promise of a foundation stone laid in Zion, a stone that has been tested and will not give way. Those who trust in it do not need to run. The first Christians saw in that stone a picture of Christ. For Mary Slessor, a woman who by nature wanted everything done at once, it became a discipline. She would spend almost forty years in Calabar, and she would see very little of the harvest. She needed to learn early that the work was built on a foundation she had not laid, and that it did not depend on her speed.

Learning Efik

She was determined to learn the language properly. She had already seen how untrustworthy interpretation could be. She was told of an interpreter who, translating a sermon on the rich man and Lazarus, remarked to the audience that for his own part he would rather be the rich man. She learned Efik by ear, from the people, more than from books, and she learned it so well that visitors in later years said she spoke it better than many Efik did. The inspectors who visited the mission in 1881 and 1882 put her influence down largely to “the singular ease with which she spoke the language.”

She lived at first with the senior missionaries on Mission Hill, the Rev. William Anderson and his wife, whom everyone called Daddy and Mammy Anderson. Mammy Anderson was a formidable woman who, as Livingstone puts it, ruled the town from the mission house. One of Mary’s duties was to ring the bell for morning prayers before dawn. Once or twice she overslept and was scolded. Once she woke in a panic to a room flooded with light, rushed out and rang the bell, and discovered it was the moon. She claimed to have climbed every tree worth climbing between Duke Town and Old Town, and she was often late for meals. When she was sent to bed without food, Daddy Anderson smuggled her biscuits and bananas.

Another friend of those days was Mammy Fuller, a Black Jamaican woman who had come to Calabar in 1858 as a nurse with a missionary family and stayed. She could remember the day slavery ended in the West Indies. Someone once said to her, “Mammy, I believe you would say a good word about the devil himself.” “Well,” she replied, “at any rate he minds his own business.” She would outlive Mary and stand at her grave.

The Man Selling Rum

Livingstone reconstructs, in the present tense, a Sunday she spent visiting in Duke Town. She talked with a father whose only child had died, and who was more troubled by the thought that an enemy had bewitched the child than by the death itself. She sat with women in crowded yards, some listening, some mocking, and she met a girl being fattened in seclusion for her marriage. She concluded that the women were “the greatest problem in the Mission Field.”

In the poorest part of the town she came on a group of men selling rum. When she spoke against the drink, one of them answered her in the pidgin of the coast: “What for white man bring them rum suppose them rum no be good? He be god-man bring the rum, then what for god-man talk so?” Why did the white men bring the rum, if it was bad? It was God’s people who brought it. So why did God’s people speak against it?

Livingstone says simply, “She cannot answer the man.” She could not. The trade spirit that poured into West Africa came from Europe, much of it from countries that called themselves Christian, and it did terrible harm. The man had seen straight through the contradiction. It was a lesson she never forgot, and it gave her an anger against the liquor trade that lasted all her life.

An old woman in one of the poorest huts told her, “I have prayed and prayed till there is no breath left in me. God does not answer. He does not care.” Mary asked her whom she prayed to. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I call Him God.” Mary sat with her and spoke to her of the God who did care.

Old Town

The climate soon broke her early confidence. She had fever again and again, and once she came close to death. In one illness, half-conscious, she thought she had lost her faith in God; when she came to herself she realised that she had given herself into his keeping and need not fear. She grew homesick. “I want my home and my mother,” she wrote. In June 1879, after less than three years, she went home on her first furlough. Before she returned she asked the Committee to send her anywhere but Duke Town. In October 1880 she came back to Calabar, and found to her joy that she was to be in charge of Old Town. She was, she felt, a real missionary at last.

At the entrance to Old Town a human skull hung on a pole. She lived in a house of wattle and mud with a mat roof, with a young woman and several boys and girls in her household. On Sundays she walked a circuit of the villages of Qua, Akim, and Ikot Ansa, holding services under trees and in chiefs’ yards, and came back for Sunday school and an evening service in the chief’s yard at Old Town, where a white cloth was spread on a table with a lamp and a Bible.

It was at Old Town that she began to live on local food, and her colleagues thought it was because she preferred to live like the people. Livingstone tells us the real reason. Boarding with the other missionaries was expensive, and she was sending a large part of her salary home to her mother and sisters. She could not afford to live as the other women did, so she ate what the people ate. She was, Livingstone says, “too loyal to her home and too proud of spirit to reveal the reason.” The simple way of life that later became part of her legend began as poverty, kept secret out of pride.

Twins

At Old Town she came face to face with the custom that would become the great cause of her life. Among the Efik, as among many peoples of the region, the birth of twins was a disaster. It was believed that one of the children must have been fathered by an evil spirit, and that the mother had committed some terrible sin. The babies were killed, often by being crushed into a pot and carried out through a hole broken in the back wall of the house, and left in the bush. The mother was driven out to live alone.

It is important to be accurate about what Mary Slessor found. She was not the first to oppose the custom. The Efik rulers of Calabar, working with the British consul, had agreed to ban the killing of twins as early as 1849 and 1851, and the agreements had been renewed since. The missionaries had been rescuing twins since 1852, and some mission houses, Livingstone says, “were alive with babies.” But laws do not change beliefs. The killing went on secretly in the towns and openly in the countryside. Livingstone adds that Mary “could even see how, from the native point of view, it was essential for the safety of the House, but her heart was hot against it.”

She understood, too, why the babies of slave mothers who died were thrown away. No slave woman could afford to raise another woman’s child, who would belong to the master once grown. She wrote to the Committee asking that one woman missionary be set aside just to care for rescued children. “If such a crowd of twins should come to her as I have to manage,” she said, “she would require to devote her whole time to them.” An old chief, watching the women missionaries at work, gave his verdict: “them women be the best man for the Mission.”

A Storm and a Flogging

She began to travel. A chief named Okon, living in exile across the estuary, begged her to visit his people, and she went in a state canoe with thirty-three paddlers, who sang songs in her honour through the night. She spent two weeks in his compound, sleeping in a room that opened onto the women’s yard, treating the sick and holding services morning and evening.

While she was there, two young wives of a chief were caught having gone at night into a yard where a young man was sleeping, and two other girls who had known and said nothing were accused with them. The men decided that each should receive a hundred lashes. Mary went to Okon, who said that if she forbade it they would listen to her, but people would say that God’s word destroyed the power of the law. So she did something characteristic. At a public meeting she first told the girls that they had done wrong and that she could not shelter them from punishment. Then she turned on the men. “It is your system of polygamy,” she said, “which is a disgrace to you and a cruel injustice to these helpless women. Girls like these, sixteen years old, are not beyond the age of fun and frolic.” After long argument, the punishment was reduced to ten strokes each, with none of the salt and mutilation that normally followed. Mary nursed the girls afterwards and gave them an opiate for the pain.

It is not a comfortable story. She did not stop the flogging; she bargained it down. She had gone, Livingstone says, “as far as she dared.” But it shows the way she would work for the rest of her life: respecting the people’s sense of law, confronting its injustice to the weak, and settling for the best that could actually be won.

On the way home a storm struck the canoe. The crew panicked and the chief was helpless, and she took command, got the canoe into the shelter of the bush, and sat with water up to her knees and the children tied to her under a waterproof sheet. She reached Old Town shaking with fever.

Towards the end of 1882 a tornado wrecked her house at Old Town. She was brought to Duke Town so ill that she was sent home, and in the spring of 1883 she was carried on board the ship, too weak to walk. With her she took a baby girl, one of a pair of twins. She had rescued both, but while she was out of the house the relatives had come, taken the boy by a trick, and killed him. She was determined that the girl would live. The child’s name was Atim Eso. In Scotland she would be baptised Janie.