A Woman Liberated-for What?: Mary Slessor Shed Her Victorian Gloves—And Rolled up Her Sleeves

On her shoulder, Mary Slessor carried her adopted baby. Clinging to her skirt was her five-year-old, and with her right hand she coaxed along her three-year-old. Two older children sloshed behind. Sloshed, because they were trudging through a mangrove swamp in West Africa. It was night, for their boat had reached its destination late. They could not see any snakes that might lie across the path or drape from trees above. But they could hear leopards. To keep the big cats at bay, Mary belted out hymns. The children chimed in. “Our singing would discourage any self-respecting leopard,” Mary wrote to a friend later. On this night, no other adult was within miles.

Because no missionary had the time, or, perhaps the courage, to go, Mary Slessor and her children were moving in to live with the fierce Oyokyong people in what is now Nigeria. The year was 1888.

Today women are faced with multiple role possibilities and struggle with their identities: “What are my priorities?” “How assertive should I be?” “What dare I do?” In this quest, Mary Slessor is a worthy addition to our gallery of role models.

Mary was born in 1848 in Scotland. Population had boomed in the early 1800s. Crops, however, had failed. On the non-agricultural front, the steam engine was squelching cottage industries. Desperate for jobs, families migrated to cities. Many lived, begged, and died on the streets. The Slessor family of nine lived in one room.

Mary’s father was a shoemaker, and her mother a weaver who earned ten shillings a week for 58 hours of labor. Because weaving required nimble fingers more than strength, and because a woman’s wage was nearly half a man’s—and a child’s wage only one-fourth—there was almost no work for men in weaving mills. Boys could work until they became men; then they were sacked. In this grim setting, and after three of the children died, Mary’s father became an alcoholic. On payday Saturday nights he would bluster in, ready for violence or sex, small children notwithstanding. To protect her mother, Mary many times drew his anger to herself.

One wonders what Mother Slessor thought of God’s goodness when—on top of marital loneliness, beatings, the inevitable squabbles of children cooped up in one room, children’s sicknesses that led so quickly to death, and nearly 60 hours of work outside the home every week—she waddled after her fifth, sixth, and seventh pregnancies to the stone-cold communal bucket outhouse located beside the manure heap.

In fact, we know what she thought: A speaker had captured her imagination, and she dreamed that one of her sons would be a missionary to West Africa. So she checked the Missionary Record out of the church library and read missionary stories to her brood. She encouraged them to “play missionary.”

Yet all her sons died.

Was that the end of a dream? No: Mary stepped forward. Her sisters were horrified. “Can’t you volunteer to go to some safer field, like Jamaica or India?” they begged. But Mother Slessor was thrilled.

Out of this background, Mary Slessor went to West Africa to become known among her own countrymen as the first woman vice consul of the British Empire, and to be known among Africans as Eka Kpukpro Owo, “the mother of all the peoples.” As James Buchan observes in his excellent biography, The Expendable Mary Slessor (Seabury, 1981), “The squalor, the poverty, and the hunger of a Scottish slum taught her how to share the squalor, the poverty, and the hunger of the West Africa of her day.”

What did mary find in that new continent? Two centuries earlier, before the slave trade with the West, the people of Calabar had lived in self-governing villages. Economically they had specialized: fishing villages traded with farmers, pottery villages traded with canoe makers, blacksmith communities traded with weavers.

Big-time slave trading exploded this simple lifestyle (Buchan, pp. 35–36):

“The West African tribes soon realized that to trade in human beings was the way to power and wealth and those which did not have an anchorage already migrated to the coast and occupied one. Soon too, by bartering slaves for guns, they had the fire power to keep other tribes back and to set themselves up as middlemen between the tribes of the interior and the Europeans. All along the Guinea Coast the tribes fought to keep their anchorages and the monopoly of the trade.…

“As the trade developed and they needed more warriors and more labour the coastal tribes began to keep back more and more of the captives for their own use. A small House, slave and free, could number up to a thousand. But a large one, like those of the Calabar towns, owned thousands of slaves and hundreds of trading and war canoes.…

“Between 1720 and 1830 about a million slaves were shipped out of Calabar, while thousands more died in the anchorage or were butchered there. The chiefs grew accustomed to looking on human beings simply as merchandise. But because they shared the same human life, the cheapening of the lives of the sold cheapened the lives of the sellers.… By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Calabar life … was a squalid travesty of what it had once been.…”

Life was cheap. Torture was imaginative. Slaves, women, and children especially were expendable. Here Mary stepped in. Besides preaching, teaching, and nursing, she rescued women and hundreds of babies thrown into the jungle. Rarely did she have fewer than a dozen such children living in her makeshift house. Each infant was suspended in a cradle hammock made from a wooden crate. Tying a string to each crate, Mary would lie in bed at night and pull strings as each baby needed soothing. To bathe her babies, Mary put four big milk cans on the stove to warm the water, plopped in four babies, pulled them out and dried them, plopped in four more—all the time discussing points of African law with those who sought an audience with her.

As we have noted, Mary’s knowledge of indigenous law eventually propelled her into being the first woman vice consul of the British Empire. This knowledge was gleaned as she lived “not only like an African, but like a poor African”—in native houses, sleeping beside big, sweating native bodies, eating native food, going barefoot, suffering local diseases—but awake, aware, curious, asking questions, categorizing information, applying it.

Mary’s participation in local councils could be feisty. One day, a British government officer remembers, when an African showed up who had been forbidden to come to court because he had been rude (Buchan, p. 146):

“Suddenly she jumped up with an angry growl, her shawl fell off, the baby (which had been on her lap) was hurriedly transferred to somebody qualified to hold it, and with a few trenchant words she made for the doors where a hulking overdressed native stood. In a moment she seized him by the scruff of the neck, boxed his ears, and hustled him out into the yard, telling him quite explicitly what would happen to him if he came back again without her consent.… Then as suddenly as it had arisen the tornado subsided, and (lace shawl, baby and all) she was gently swaying in her [rocking] chair again.”

In spite of unorthodox methods, Mary’s genuineness, courage, and true concern made her welcome at councils.

Mary slessor was not the only tough Anglo-Saxon Mary in the West African jungle in those years, however. Mary Kingsley, intrepid explorer, journalist, naturalist, amateur anthropologist, and society’s darling, also trekked through. When she recounted her perilous exploits in Travels in West Africa and other books, and in articles such as those that appeared in The Spectator, she became an acknowledged African authority.

Kingsley came in velvet hat, buttoned-up jacket, and knee-high boots. Slessor had long since discarded the Victorian missionary’s hat, gloves, boots, bustle, long curls—and sometimes even her dress. Kingsley secreted a revolver and dagger in her clothes. Slessor went unarmed. Kingsley was glamorous. Slessor, due to malaria, looked scrawny and washed-out. Nevertheless, when Kingsley came to visit Slessor, the two took an immediate liking to each other, and they continued to correspond for the rest of their lives.

Both Marys modeled strong, creative women. Fashionable Kingsley, however, was subordinated to the scientific philosophy of the day. Slessor was subordinated to the Word and Spirit of God. Because of this, poorly educated Mary Slessor was liberated to have broader views and a much wider impact for justice and wholeness than Mary Kingsley.

Social Darwinism was widely believed in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. Races were ranked on an evolutionary scale. Mary Kingsley swallowed this, according to Jon Bonk in his article “All Things to All Persons: The Missionary as Racist-Imperialist 1860–1918” (Missiology, July 1980). Therefore Kingsley could write, “The difference between the African race and the white [is not] … a difference in degree, but a difference in kind.… The African is analogous to the [dodo] bird in being, like him, a very early type, whom Nature, in her short-sighted way, has adapted to the local environments, with no eye on [the] future.” As well, according to Bonk, Kingsley was “irked by [missionaries’] willful ignorance as to the true nature of the African mind, which manifested itself in the ‘difficulty [they experience] in regarding the African as anything but a Man and a Brother’ and in the misguidedly dogmatic conviction of ‘the spiritual equality of all colors of Christians’ ” (p. 300).

Mary Slessor, however, was not bound by contemporary scientific philosophy. She took her marching orders from the gospel. For her, every slack-mouthed slave was made in God’s image, and was someone for whom Christ died. It was never inconvenient, then, to go rushing off in the middle of the night, or of a full agenda, or of a malaria attack, to rescue one more insignificant, threatened person.

Of Mary Slessor, Mary Kingsley said, “This very wonderful lady[’s] … abilities, both physical and intellectual, have given her among the savage tribes a unique position and won her among many, white and black, a profound esteem. Her knowledge of the native, his language, his ways of thought, his diseases, his difficulties, and all that is his, is extraordinary, and the amount of good she has done no man can fully estimate.… This instance of what one white can do would give many lessons in West Coast administration and development. Only the type of man Miss Slessor represents is rare … Miss Slessor stands alone” (Buchan, p. 148).

For women today, what are the priorities? How assertive dare we be? Let us be strong, creative, goal-oriented women. But not only that, let us also be liberated beyond the confines of the philosophies of our day, liberated as was Mary Slessor to the Word and the Spirit.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

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