ALLEN TIMILEHIN OLATUNDE
APRIL 2011
THE LIFE OF MARY SLESSOR
Sixty-six-year-old Mary Mitchell Slessor from the slums of Dundee, Scotland lay dying in the village of Use Ikot Oku, Nigeria. Feverish, weak, and going in and out of consciousness, she prayed, "O Abasi, sana mi yak" (O God, let me go). Her prayer was granted just before dawn on January 13, 1915. Mary Slessor lasted over forty years in the malaria-ridden Calabar region of Nigeria, where she was especially active in promoting the dignity of African women.
Hardage, Jeanette (2002) records that Mary Slessor was born on December 2, 1848, near Aberdeen, the second of seven children, Mary's mother was a deeply religious woman, her father a drunken shoemaker. She was just twenty-eight years of age, with red hair and bright blue eyes, when in 1876 she arrived in Nigeria as a missionary for the United Presbyterian Church. The slave trade had been abolished, but local society had been disrupted by it and by the influx of commerce. Britain had seized Lagos in 1861 and was gradually extending its presence to the interior. Issues that Mary confronted as a young missionary included widespread human sacrifice at the death of a village elder, who, it was believed, required servants and retainers to accompany him in the next world, and the lack of education or any status for women.
Mary soon learned the Efik language and showed an intense interest in local people and their customs. The greatest dangers she faced came from the disease-ridden climate. Malaria was rampant, as was smallpox and numerous undiagnosed tropical fevers. She set about establishing hospitals, dispensaries, and schools and through a constant flow of letters badgered colonial governors and mission headquarters for the means to expand her activities.
MISSION STRATEGY OF MARY SLESSOR IN CALABAR
David Livingstone, missionary hero of the day, had urged fellow Christians not to let die the fire of opening Africa to Christianity. Slessor responded to this call to go when news reached Britain of Livingstone's death in 1874. James Buchan (1981) remarks that the Foreign Mission Board agreed to send Slessor to Calabar as a teacher upon completion of a three-month training course in Edinburgh. She wrote in later years that the training would have been more beneficial had it been "more practical." She came to exemplify the truth set forth by mission’s historian Andrew Walls (1996) that missionaries "set themselves to intellectual effort and acquired learning skills far beyond anything which would have been required of them in their ordinary run of life." Slessor embarked for Calabar on August 6, 1876, as she learned the business of being a "female agent"--teaching, dispensing medications, and making the rounds of the women's yards surrounding Duke Town, mission headquarters in the greater Calabar region. She made the study of the Efik language her highest priority. Hardage, Jeanette (2002) writes that during her first years in Calabar, Slessor began to understand the religious beliefs of the people, their social relationships, their laws and customs (especially as represented by the governing Ekpe fraternity), and the problems presented by polygamy, slavery, and drunkenness. She abhorred the practices of twin-murder and the sacrifice of wives and slaves upon the death of a chief. She began to make elevating the status of women one of her priorities.
Within three years Slessor, now thirty years old, was ill and homesick. Frequent attacks of fever sidelined her, and she suffered from the harmattan, the dusty Saharan wind that blew during the dry season and consumed her energy. She went home to Scotland, but after a stay of a little over a year, she returned to Calabar. She found that by living like an African (tea was the only European nicety she allowed herself), she could now live more cheaply and send more of her small salary home to care for her mother and sisters. Responsible for several outstations, she trekked miles through the jungle to conduct Sunday services, telling everyone she met about the Savior of the world sent by the one true and loving God.
For years missionaries had rushed to rescue twins or orphaned babies before they could be killed. Slessor herself became a champion baby-saver. Eventually, she raised six girls and two boys as her own. As early as 1882 Slessor began to explore along the river. She sometimes stayed away for days at a time, visiting different villages, meeting the people, listening to their stories of hardship and sorrow, carrying medicine to treat their illnesses, and preaching informally. The people responded with affection to her open acceptance of them and her mastery of their language. She began to travel further a field in response to appeals from village chiefs. She dispensed medicines, worked with the women, and held morning and evening services daily for two weeks. W. P. Livingstone records that when both her mother and her remaining sister died by early 1886, she had no more family ties to Scotland. She mourned--then looked toward the move she felt God called her to. She said, "I am ready to go anywhere, provided it be forward."
Hardage, Jeanette (2002) explains the radicality of Mary Slessor. He says that in Okoyong territory, fearsome reports of guns and drunkenness, trial by ordeal with poison beans, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and skulls on display circulated about the people and the territory, the mission committee in Calabar was not enthusiastic about sending a lone woman into such danger, but finally at the end of 1886 they approved her request. Then she ensued more than a year of negotiations with Okoyong she worked with an indigene woman in rescuing babies, women, and slaves, though she did not become a Christian through the years, as Slessor had so hoped. Mary considered Okoyong territory home. Many of these evil customs in the territory she has stamped out.
For Slessor there was never any thought that she would leave the ministry to which God had called her or abandon her assurance that she was to keep moving forward, so the engagement with Charles Morrison, a co-missionary was off. She left no written record of her relationship with Morrison or her disappointment at being denied marriage. She also served as native court official in 1905 and became well known for her quick and fair, though often unconventional, judgments. Slessor's last letter was written on Christmas Eve 1914. She confided that she did not much care whether or not she survived her "long illness." She was depressed by the deaths of two friends and by the news of the war in Europe. Less than a month later, she died.
Mary Slessor's stubborn drive to open new territory to education and the presentation of the gospel message stands as a prime example of what Ogbu Kalu, Nigerian church historian and professor of world Christianity and mission at McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, refers to as "a broader view of the style and vision of the [missionary] enterprise." He states, "Her vision was much broader and more activist than her compatriots could imagine." Slessor demonstrated her social activism in a number of ways: her persistent rescue of twins and orphans, in some cases adopting and raising the children as her own. In Calabar she was a catalyst that challenged the mission to change emphasis, to become a sending body rather than a mostly stationary body, a practice the mission's converts had been urging for some years.
WORKS CITED
Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith, Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996. 172.
Buchan, James. The Expendable Mary Slessor. New York: Seabury Press, 1981. 25.
Hardage, Jeanette. The Legacy of Mary Slessor, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Oct. 2002, vol. 6, No. 24, www.OMSC.org, 2002
Kingsley, Mary H. Travels in West Africa, Boston: Beacon Press, 1988; originally published 1897. 74.
Livingstone, W. P., Mary Slessor of Calabar, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916. 55.
Ogbu Kalu, Personal Correspondence, [E-mail to Jeanette Hardage], February 25, 2002.
No comments:
Post a Comment