EMQ » April–June 2018 » Volume 54 Issue 2
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder”]Mary Slessor was an impressive woman. Born in 1848 near Aberdeen, Scotland, nothing in her early years would have led one to think she would become such a significant person in mission work in Calabar (Nigeria). Her family was poor, her father an alcoholic, and most of her siblings died very young. Yet somehow amidst all the poverty and tragedy of her early years, Slessor developed an unshakeable faith and commitment to the spread of the Gospel. That faith and commitment carried her through years of mission work that would—and did—overwhelm many others.1
Early Years
By the age of 11, Slessor was already working in the woolen mills in Scotland. Her mother was diligent about taking the children to church every week, and Mary did receive enough education to be able to read before she started work. Once employed in the mills, she attended night school to continue learning basic subjects such as reading, writing, math, history, and Bible.
Slessor came to faith as a young person and quickly showed courage, commitment, and the gift of evangelism. As a teenager, she began volunteering to work with neighborhood children as part of her church’s ministry. She would go out into the nearby slums to evangelize and distribute the church newsletter. The neighborhoods were rough and she frequently was harassed by both youth and adult men who didn’t like the church’s work. Although the opposition was scary, Slessor didn’t let it stop her from sharing the Gospel. She trusted God and learned to be strong and not show fear, even though she felt it keenly. Showing fear, she discovered, led to greater harassment, whereas being strong often led others to back down. It was a lesson that would serve her well when she arrived in Calabar years later.
At the age of 25, Slessor responded to a wave of missionary impulse that swept through Scotland at the news of David Livingstone’s death. By this time her father and most of her siblings had died; her mother was in relatively stable condition with her two younger sisters, and the time seemed ripe for her to go overseas. She specifically requested a posting to Calabar through the sending board of the Presbyterian Church. Although she lacked the middle-class upbringing and education that the Board typically required, they were impressed by her commitment and her effective local ministry. They agreed to send her out after she went through a training program in Edinburgh. In 1875, at the age of 27, Slessor sailed for Africa.
Arrival in Africa
The last quarter of the 19th century were the days when missionaries to Africa took their coffins with them. A commitment to work in Africa was for most a life commitment, literally. Still, for Slessor as for many others, the early days were filled with the romance of being in a new place and fulfilling her call to mission work. She was impressed with the existing work in Duke Town, where missionaries and national African workers lived and labored together. She thought the country was beautiful and was fascinated by the friendly women and children who welcomed her there.
Her early months were spent getting to know the people, the region, the existing work, and the local languages. She also struggled to make sense of the way people lived and of some of the local practices which were so utterly foreign to her Scottish customs. Fortunately, some of the more seasoned missionaries were exemplary role models of treating everyone, missionaries and nationals, with dignity and respect, and Slessor was able to observe and then adopt some of their ways.
Over time she acculturated to the lifestyle of her adopted people, living among them in hand-made houses of mud and thatch, eating the same food as they did, and generally following their lifestyle and rhythms. She quickly began to convert to less Victorian, more national ways of doing things: she cut her hair short, climbed trees, and ran in petticoats without her skirt. She also traveled to places where women normally didn’t go. Her fierce commitment to the people and to the Gospel propelled her to flout convention if convention would hamper witness.
Her Activism on Behalf of the Powerless
Slessor’s utter commitment to the people and her willingness to speak of God’s love earned her a very high degree of respect from nationals. Early on, she opposed some of the painful rituals that were commonly used to divine guilt and witchcraft. She argued that they were both counter to the Gospel and useless as a means of determining guilt. Instead she proposed the use of an existing truth ritual, which she believed mirrored the Old Testament oath practice from Numbers 5 of drinking bitter water. Along with the oath she included a hearing. In making these arguments, she was preferring one local ritual over another, the one that was least damaging and yet still trusted by the people. Over time, as she maintained her position and listened carefully to the various disputes, people came to trust her and then to seek her out as an arbiter of quarrels.
A particular focus for her was defending powerless and defenseless people. She often took the side of those who had been accused of causing harm to another through evil spells or malicious thoughts. She also took a stand for children who had been discarded by their parents. A particular area of concern was twins. According to local beliefs, twins were evil and were often left to die; the mothers of twins were similarly cast out. Slessor argued that there was nothing evil about twins or mothers who bore twins, and she frequently rescued abandoned babies, twins or not. She believed in the value of all human life and acted consistently upon that belief. Sadly, many of her “babies” did not live long, but she did raise at least six to adulthood. Her care for the people and her willingness to adopt and raise any abandoned child she found eventually earned her the title “Ma Akamba” or “Great Mother.”
Because of the level of trust and respect accorded her by local people, and her reputation for standing up for the powerless and oppressed, at two points in her life the British government appointed her their representative. Although her role as a British representative raises significant and important questions regarding the practice of colonizing and the role missionaries did or did not play in that effort, it seems clear that in Slessor’s case the choice was good for the people of Calabar. She seemed able to represent them fairly and caringly to the British authorities, and she was sometimes—though not always—able to prevent misunderstandings that could have led to attack by British soldiers.
It seems clear that God was showing her special favor in her work. Perhaps the most well known story was the time she and others of her household were crossing the river in two canoes, with some local boatmen. A female hippo surged up out of the water and attacked her canoe. Slessor grabbed the bamboo pole from one of the boatmen and began hitting the hippo’s back, shouting for it to go away. To everyone’s astonishment, the hippo crossed to the other side of the river and did not return to attack them. Slessor told everyone that it was God who had protected them. Stories and events such as these were common in her life, though not all were quite so dramatic.
Her Struggles and Sufferings
Throughout the course of her life, Slessor struggled with many things missionaries today still face: demand for timely, exact reports, orders from “home” that made little sense on the field; differences of opinion with both colleagues and nationals on how to move forward, and what was appropriate for her as a single woman. Perhaps Slessor’s biggest critics over the years were members of the sending board back in Scotland. They wanted regular reports filled with encouraging stories to share with the people back home; they also wanted an account of exactly how she spent her support funds. Slessor was not particularly good at meeting their requirements. She argued that all of her correspondence to the homeland should count as reports of her work, not just the specific forms the board requested.
Regarding the work on the field, the board was reluctant to permit her to venture into the rural areas alone, but she did it anyway because of the great need she saw there. Some of those at home, as well as some of her local colleagues, were appalled by her decisions to dress more like the local people than a city person in Edinburgh, and her willingness to work with men and chiefs just as much as with women and children. In all of these areas, Slessor was far more likely to follow what she perceived as the Holy Spirit leading her into ministry than what she felt were the dictates of the Board who were far away and didn’t understand the situation on the ground.
Still, in one interesting area she did fully submit to the Board’s authority. Several years into her work in the rural areas, a young male missionary named Charles Morrison arrived in Duke Town to teach. The two of them formed a close friendship and he eventually proposed. They requested permission to marry from the Board, which was effectively denied. The Board refused to re-assign Morrison to the rural areas but required him to continue teaching in the city. As Slessor was unwilling to abandon her fruitful rural work, she reluctantly dissolved the engagement though she remained friends with Morrison and his family throughout her lifetime. Even in this instance, it seems that her decision had more to do with following God’s leading than obeying the Board. Had Morrison been assigned to the rural area she would happily have married him; but for her, the calling to rural work superseded even the calling to marriage—a trait that many single women missionaries have demonstrated over the last 200 years and still demonstrate today.
Slessor also suffered greatly for her faith and commitment. Her suffering was obvious through her physical illnesses. She had numerous bouts of malaria, boils, and digestive strains. The work-related suffering was harder to see but just as challenging for her spiritually and emotionally: seeing the local people engage in practices that to her were contrary to the Gospel. From nudity to drinking, to arranged marriages and female genital mutilation to warring and killing, much of what she saw distressed her enormously. Repeatedly over the course of her life, her faith propelled her into action, often action of the kind she had learned as an adolescent in the slums of Dundee. Her first line of action was prayer, and her second line of action was to take a stand for right and for righteousness. The latter did not always make her popular, but it gained her respect and above all, helped others to listen when she proclaimed the Gospel.
The final area of suffering for Slessor could be called the pains of non-response from those at home. Over and over during the course of her life, she begged for more workers to come to Calabar. She wrote letters and she visited churches and mission societies on her trips back to Scotland. She recruited people to come and work directly with her, or in the educational and medical ministries of the Presbyterian mission. A few people came and stayed; a number came and left or died; but to Slessor’s mind, there were never enough workers.
Later in her life she began to castigate the church at home for what she perceived as their attitude of neglect. They were willing to send money, but to Slessor, money was a secondary need. The real demand was for people, dedicated to the spread of the Gospel and committed enough to the cause to accept a different and often challenging way of life. Such people, she lamented, were scarce. On the other hand, colonizing workers with a goal of trade and moneymaking were plentiful. Although she wished for more missionaries, she also evangelized and cared for the single men sent out as engineers and traders.
Her Spirituality
In her final years, Slessor noted two important “life lessons” in her journal. The first, she said, was to live out the Gospel calling by going and preaching—a lesson she clearly had taken seriously all her life. The second was to love the Bible. She had learned to read at a young age, loved reading, and read ceaselessly her whole life. Above all, she read and loved the Bible. And it had served her well as a source of wisdom as she taught and settled disputes among local people. A third “lesson” that she lived out was prayer: personal prayer, prayer with her adopted children, prayer at church, and prayer in work. She lamented that the church at home was not praying enough, otherwise, she was sure, they would be sending more missionaries to the work!
Slessor’s spirituality had her always looking upward, with a heart that yearned for the eternal. She explained:
In Christ, we become new creatures. His life becomes ours. Take that word “life” and turn it over and over and press it and try to measure it, and see what it will yield. Eternal life is a magnificent idea which comprises everything the heart can yearn after. Do not your hearts yearn for this life, this blessed and eternal life, which the Son of God so freely offers?2
Mary Slessor showed her spirituality in many ways, but probably primarily through activism. From her early Christian life in Scotland, through her entire time on mission field in Nigeria, she was characterized by a spirituality reminiscent of an Old Testament prophet. She was not fearless, but she never allowed fear to deter her from following God’s calling on her life. She spoke up and spoke out when she saw behavior contrary to the Gospel. She continued preaching despite open opposition. She took a stand against injustice toward the poor, the powerless, the persecuted, and the discarded of society. And in everything she trusted God to carry her safely through whatever might happen.
Leanne Dzubinski, PhD, is Associate Professor and Chair of the Intercultural Studies Graduate Department at Biola University. Prior to Biola, she was a missionary in Europe for 18 years.
