“Father!”

“Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of good courage; be not affrighted, neither be thou dismayed: for Jehovah thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.”

— Joshua 1:9, ASV

Okoyong

Okoyong was a stretch of forest country lying between the Cross River and the Calabar River, a day’s journey inland from Creek Town. Its people had come down generations before from the hills to the east and taken the land by force. They were farmers and hunters, living in scattered clearings under their own chiefs, and they were feared by everyone around them. With the Efik of Calabar they were in a state of more or less permanent feud. Raids, kidnappings, and killings went back and forth, and heads and captured slaves were counted as trophies. British consuls had sent messages to the Okoyong chiefs, and the messages had been ignored.

Livingstone describes Okoyong in the darkest colours his vocabulary allowed, and some of what he says is plainly the race theory of his day. But the practices that troubled Mary were real, and she described them herself. Sickness and death were not believed to be natural, and when a free man fell ill or died, the witch-doctor would name those responsible. They were chained and made to take the ordeal of the poison bean, or of boiling oil poured over the hands. When a chief died, slaves and wives were killed to accompany him. A few months before she arrived, Livingstone says, a chief of middling rank was buried with eight slave men, eight slave women, ten girls, ten boys, and four of his free wives. After she had lived there some time, she made her own inquiries and estimated that at least a hundred and fifty lives a year were being taken at funerals within twenty miles of her house, and as many again by the ordeal. We cannot check her figures. They were what she believed after careful questioning, and they explain why she went.

There was drink everywhere. Gin, guns, and chains, Livingstone says, were almost the only goods that came into Okoyong. Babies were given gin. Work was paid for in gin. Fines and debts were settled in gin. Quarrels followed the drinking, and then the guns came out, and after the guns the chains.

The mission had tried before. One missionary exploring the district had been seized and held for a ransom of rum, and escaped with difficulty. An African teacher from Calabar had settled there, and had been driven out after a shooting. When the Okoyong heard about the new laws in Calabar, Livingstone says, they were amazed. Killing for witchcraft forbidden? Then what was being done to stop witchcraft from killing? Twins and their mothers taken to Duke Town? Had no disaster followed? To them the reforms of the coast looked like madness.

Three Visits

It took a year of negotiation before Mary could go. Three times she went up with parties from the mission, and each time the people, men, women, and children, came out armed and sullen and promised nothing. She wrote afterwards, “I had often a lump in my throat, and my courage repeatedly threatened to take wings and fly away, though nobody guessed it!”

In June 1888 she went up once more to settle the arrangements. King Eyo lent her the royal canoe, a hollowed tree-trunk twenty feet long with a shelter of palm leaves, a piece of Brussels carpet, and six pillows. The paddlers were Efik, sworn enemies of the people she was going to meet. As they paddled up the river she thought, “Man can do nothing with such a people,” and left the matter with God.

From the landing beach a forest track led four miles inland to a village of mud huts called Ekenge. The people crowded round her and called her “Mother.” The chief, Edem, was sober and welcoming. That night she gathered the paddlers for family worship, and the villagers stood watching in wonder as they heard the Efik boys repeat together the words, “God so loved the world.” The women kept her talking until late. One of them, the chief’s sister, drew her attention. “I think,” Mary said, “she will be my friend, and be an attentive hearer of the Gospel.” The first half of that hope came true. Her name was Eme Ete, and everyone called her Ma Eme.

At Ifako, a neighbouring village, the chiefs promised her ground for a school. She asked whether the school would be a place of refuge, as the mission buildings in Calabar were, for people accused of witchcraft or marked for death at a funeral. They agreed. She asked whether her own house would be a refuge too. They agreed again. She chose two sites at once, one at Ekenge and one at Ifako, so that the promise would cover as many people as possible.

When her friends in Creek Town saw her packing, they looked at her with pity. They said that nothing on earth would subdue Okoyong except a consul and a gunboat. She smiled and went on packing.

4 August 1888

By the evening of Friday 3 August 1888 everything was ready. She lay down, but did not sleep.

The next morning was grey and pouring with rain. The carriers grumbled and quarrelled. She was tired and low, and was glad to see King Eyo, who had come down himself to see the canoe loaded. Few people wished her well. One young man said to her, with a sob in his voice, “I will constantly pray for you, but you are courting death.” Livingstone remarks that it was not great faith for a Christian, but that Mary’s own faith that morning was not strong enough for her to criticise him. At the last moment the senior missionary decided that someone should go with her, and the mission printer, Mr. Bishop, stepped into the canoe. With five children from her household, Mary settled into a corner, and the canoe pushed off into the rain.

It was nearly dark when they reached the landing beach, and there were four miles of forest still to walk. She went ahead with the children, to get them fed and asleep, leaving Mr. Bishop and the carriers to follow with the loads. As she faced the forest, dark and loud with the noises of the night, a feeling of helplessness and fear came over her. What would she find at the end? Would the people be fighting, or drinking, or dancing? Livingstone says that her heart “played the coward,” and she wanted to turn and run. She tried to pray and could not even move her lips. She could only look up and say, inwardly, one word: “Father!”

It was enough. Paul wrote to the Romans, “ye received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15, ASV). The cry of a frightened child to its father is the most basic prayer there is, and it is the one the Spirit teaches. Mary Slessor had learned to pray for an earthly father who did not change. Now, alone in the forest at the start of the great work of her life, the only prayer she had was to her heavenly one.

The Procession

Livingstone describes the little procession that walked into Okoyong that night. First came a boy of about eleven with a box of tea, sugar, and bread on his head, his wet clothes clinging to him, his feet slipping in the mud. Behind him was a boy of eight, crying, carrying a kettle and pots. Then a little boy of three, crying loudly, trying to keep up, and a girl of five, sobbing. Last came Mary, with a bundle on one arm and a baby girl riding on her shoulders, pulling herself along by the branches. She was singing nonsense songs to cheer the children, with tears close to her own eyes.

It is hard to imagine a less impressive invasion. Livingstone could not resist the obvious comment, and it is the verse at the head of the preface of this book: God often chooses the weak things of the world to confound the strong.

When they reached Ekenge, the village was silent. Two slaves came out and explained that the chief’s mother had died that morning at Ifako, and everyone had gone to the funeral. Mary knew what that might mean: a death in a chief’s family was exactly the occasion for killing. She undressed the children, got them to sleep, and sat in her wet clothes to wait.

When Mr. Bishop arrived, it was with bad news. The carriers were exhausted and refused to bring anything up that night. There was no food. The children had nothing dry to wear, and the next day was Sunday. So she sent a boy with a lantern to the beach, asked Mr. Bishop to gather some slaves from the farms as carriers, and went back into the forest herself, without boots or hat. One of the other boys ran after her so that she would not be alone. It was so dark that she kept losing sight of his white clothes, and she fell again and again. When she reached the river she waded out to the canoe, pulled back the cover under which the paddlers were sleeping, and roused them. By midnight the loads were at Ekenge. Her feet were so badly cut that for six weeks she could not wear boots.

The Saddest Sunday

Her first Sunday in Okoyong, she told friends later, was one of the saddest days she ever spent. She ached all over. It rained without stopping. The village was squalid, the people were at a funeral that might end in killing, and she was more than once close to tears. Livingstone wonders whether her faith had weakened. Perhaps it had. What is certain is that she did not go home. A few women came back from Ifako with fretful babies or to fetch food, and she gathered them together and told them, as simply as she could, about Jesus. Livingstone calls it “the first faint gleam of a better day for Okoyong.”

The verse at the head of this chapter was spoken to Joshua at the edge of a land he had to enter. “Be strong and of good courage; be not affrighted, neither be thou dismayed.” It is often read as if it describes a brave man. It does not. God does not tell people not to be afraid unless they are afraid. The command came with a reason: “for Jehovah thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” Joshua’s courage was not a feeling. It was trust in a presence. Mary Slessor walked into Okoyong afraid, and she stayed there afraid, on and off, for fifteen years. What kept her there was not that the fear went away, but that she was not alone.

A Room in the Women’s Yard

She was given a room in the women’s yard of Chief Edem’s compound, which had belonged to one of his wives. With her own hands she fitted a door and a window frame, and filled the gaps in the walls with mud. For many weeks this was her home, shared with the three boys and two girls of her household, next to the rooms of the chief and his wives, with two cows on the other side of the partition.

Her work began with a child. In a fight between Okoyong and Calabar, a man from Ekenge had been killed and beheaded. His wife died of the shock, and their baby girl was brought to Mary, starved and weak. People laughed to see the white woman carrying the child about. But the grandmother came and blessed her. For a few days the baby seemed to rally, and then she died. It was the custom to bury infants anywhere near the huts. Mary dressed the little body in white, laid it in a wooden box, covered it with flowers, and buried it in her own ground with prayer, while the grandmother knelt sobbing at her feet. People from Ifako came to watch the white woman’s “witchcraft,” and said, in effect, “Why this waste?” The words are the ones the disciples used when a woman poured her precious ointment over Jesus. The work in Okoyong began, Livingstone says, with the Christian burial of a little child.

A First Victory, and Its Price

When the people came back from the funeral, they turned on a young man who had stayed behind in the village and been attentive to Mary. They accused him of deserting their customs, and made him take the ordeal of boiling oil. She saw what was happening too late to stop it, and watched the oil poured over his hands.

Soon afterwards a young slave woman, newly bought as a wife by a local master, went into the hut of a male slave at one of the farms and refused to leave, and then walked into the forest and hanged herself. The male slave was brought in chained. The master and his family decided that he must die, since he must have used sorcery to put the thought into her mind, and the witch-doctor had said so. Mary argued that he had done nothing wrong. The crowd grew angry, and people shouted that a stranger who was there only on sufferance had no right to interfere with the dignity of the free-born. Guns and swords were waved in her face. She stood her ground, quiet and patient, and in the end they agreed to spare his life. It was, says Livingstone, her first victory.

But Livingstone, to his credit, does not stop there. The man’s life was spared, but he was loaded with chains, starved, flogged, and his body was cut to drive out the sorcery they believed was in him. When Mary went to find him, he was lying unconscious, a bleeding heap, tied to a post, while the women of the yard sat by and took no notice.

That was what victory looked like in Okoyong in 1888. It was real, and it was partial. A life had been saved that would otherwise have been taken, and the price of saving it had been paid in the man’s own body. Mary Slessor would win many such victories over the next fifteen years, and very few of them would be clean. She had not come to a place where one brave act would change everything. She had come to a place where the old customs were woven into every part of life, and where the people themselves, as she would later discover, were often as weary of them as she was, and as unable to break free.