Mary did not know it at the time, but this incident would be the first of many in which she would stand up to the spiritual powers of the local Africans. It was also this incident that began a legend in Calabar, the legend of Eka Kpukpru Owo, the Mother of Us All.
The woman Mary rescued was eventually allowed to return to her husband. She had been sentenced to have boiling oil poured on her stomach because she had given a chunk of yam to a man who was not her husband. In Ekenge, it was considered a crime for a woman to share food with anyone other than her husband.
Mary hoped that the incident would be a turning point for the village. She hoped it would help to get rid of many of the harsh laws and cruel superstitions. But change came slowly, with many disappointments and setbacks. One such disappointment occurred only days after Mary had rescued the woman from the hot oil.
Chief Edem became sick and sent for Mary. He was lying facedown in bed. Mary could smell the familiar rotten odor and knew what the problem was before she’d even had a chance to examine him. Sure enough, on Chief Edem’s back was a huge swollen abscess. It was dark and tight around the edges. When Mary reached out and gently touched it, the chief flinched in pain. Mary said a silent prayer. A sick chief was a serious matter. Not just his life but also the lives of the whole village were at stake.
After examining the putrid wound, Mary decided that a warm poultice would be the best thing to put on it. She hoped that the mixture of herbs and lotions would draw out the poison from the abscess. The approach did not work, however. As Chief Edem’s condition grew worse, Mary grew desperate. But she was not a doctor, and she couldn’t think of anything else to do for him.
After two days of agony, King Edem eventually threw Mary out of his hut and called for the village witch doctor. Mary sat outside and prayed while the witch doctor busied himself inside with the chief. The witch doctor emerged an hour or so later with a triumphant look on his face. He grinned toothlessly at Mary and then spat out, “Ha, you know nothing about sickness. It is no wonder the chief is sick. Look at the things I drew out of his body!”
The witch doctor squatted beside Mary and unfolded a filthy piece of cloth. Inside were some crushed eggshells, several nails, a pouch of gunpowder, and some lead shot. Mary would have laughed out loud, except she knew that the witch doctor had the power to convince everyone in the village that the things in the cloth had actually been floating around inside the chief’s body.
“It is the women,” said the witchdoctor slyly. “The women have made spells and put these things inside the chief. So Chief Edem has told me to find the women who are responsible and chain them up in his yard.”
Once again Mary felt helpless against such evil superstitions. The witch doctor could say whatever he liked, accuse any woman he wanted of causing the chief’s sickness, and the women would be put to death by way of the poison bean. This was the standard way of deciding who was guilty of witchcraft in Calabar. The deadly esere bean was ground up, mixed with water, and made into a drink. Anyone suspected of a crime involving witchcraft was forced to swallow the drink. Occasionally someone would vomit the drink up before it hit the person’s stomach and the person would live, but ninety-nine of every one hundred people who were forced to drink the crushed esere bean concoction died. Since the witch doctor told the local people that the bean drink would kill only a person who was guilty of the crime, each death confirmed the person’s guilt.
Mary moved among the thirty or so women chained up in the chief’s yard, praying with them and trying to encourage them. The women needed food, but the punishment for feeding a prisoner was death. Mary sat into the night with the women, hoping that perhaps the guards would go off and get drunk, giving her an opportunity to smuggle some food to the prisoners. But because the situation was too serious, the guards never once left their post. Around 2 a.m., the chief’s condition worsened, and the witch doctor came to dispense some more of his “medicine,” after which he produced a new crop of objects supposedly from Chief Edem’s wound. This time the collection included several feathers and some small rib bones. As a result, more women were rounded up and held in chains in the chief’s yard.
At daybreak, Mary walked into Chief Edem’s hut and begged him to release the women in his yard. The chief, who had not slept a wink all night because of the searing pain of the abscess on his back, became enraged with Mary. How dare she interfere in the ways of the tribe? For all he knew, the gods could be punishing him for ever allowing her into the village. Mary bravely told him once again about God’s love, but this too enraged him until he ordered his guards to move him and all of the women in the yard to one of his outlying farms. The chief ordered Mary not to follow.
By lunch time, the yard was empty and silent. The chief and the women had all left. Mary could do nothing but wait and pray. A day went by, and more women in the village were rounded up and dragged off wailing and sobbing to the chief’s farm. Another day passed, and then Ma Eme slipped into Mary’s hut and whispered the wonderful news—Chief Edem was recovering! There was just one problem. The chief had already condemned many of the women prisoners to death. Mary became frantic. There had to be a way to save the women, and she had to think of one quickly. She sensed that Ma Eme wanted to see the women go free as well. Suddenly it came to her. They had to convince the chief that the greatest thing he could do would be to free all of the women. Mary thought she knew how to do that. She turned to Ma Eme, her eyes bright and urgent. “You must go back to your brother and tell him that many people will respect him if he lets all the women go. It will show everyone that he has greater power than they, and that he is not afraid of what the women could do to him if they are not killed.”
A smile spread across Ma Eme’s face. “You are very shrewd,” she told Mary. “No chief wants to look like a coward. I will go.”
Mary waited anxiously for Ma Eme to return. When Ma Eme did return, the women of the village were with her. The chief had let them go! Ma Eme was very proud of her achievement, though she did add that the witch doctor had insisted that one slave woman be held responsible for the chief’s sickness. But, Ma Eme hastened to add with great pride, even the slave woman had not been given the poison esere bean. What Ma Eme did not add was that the woman had been sold to the Inokon tribe, known for its cannibalism, especially of slaves bought from other tribes.
Each new day at Ekenge seemed to bring some new crisis or challenge for Mary, whose fame spread throughout the district. This meant that envoys from other tribes were constantly arriving to ask her help in a medical matter or to settle some dispute. There were also times when Mary was too exhausted to continue in her work, especially after she’d spent a sleepless night in her hut. Living in chief Edem’s yard with his many wives and female slaves meant that she was awakened at all hours by the chief and his drunken guests. After five months of little sleep, Mary needed a quiet place to call her own, a place where she could pray out of view of prying eyes, raise her children in peace, and permanently set up her school and little church.
A hut of her own did not seem too much to ask for, but Mary knew that the chief would not allow a place to be built for her until he was willing to welcome her permanently into the tribe. Right now she was still on trial, and after her failure to cure the chief’s abscess, she wondered whether her days of living at Ekenge were numbered.
Thankfully, Chief Edem did not hold a grudge, and in January 1889, Mary awoke to the distant sound of hacking knives and axes. For some reason that she would never find out, the chief had declared it building season. At long last, Mary was about to get her own home.
Chapter 15
A Wee Bit of Help
Mary woke the children and hurried to the site on the edge of the village that was to be her new home. The area was crowded with people who tripped over each other in their eagerness to work. Mary smiled and shook her head. Would she ever understand the African mind? Yesterday she had not been able to rouse a single person to help carry water to a woman who had gone into labor and was about to give birth. Today, the whole village was united in work, whacking at tree limbs with knives and axes and digging up roots with sharpened sticks.
The people laughed and cheered when they saw Mary. As she surveyed the site, Mary realized she needed to act fast to have any say in how her new home should look. She quickly thought about what would be the most practical arrangement for her and settled on a kitchen and living hut, a girls’ hut, a boys’ hut, and a hut for herself. Each hut would be about thirty feet long and ten feet wide and would be laid out on the site in such a way as to form three sides of a square. This would allow her to one day build a larger house in the middle and use the huts as storage areas.
Work progressed noisily, and despite the general level of disorganization, huts began to take shape on the property. First a trench was dug where the walls of each hut were to be placed, then the men hacked down huge branches with forks in them. The branches were positioned one at each corner of the hut with the fork facing up. They were the main supports for the roof. Smaller branches were laid in the forks and lashed down with dried grasses to form a frame. More branches were laid across this frame and lashed down, and then woven mats were finally tied down on top of it all.
The walls of the huts were made in a similar way to the roof, except that instead of having woven mats lashed to the outside, the branches were plastered with thick red clay. Before the walls were mudded, a smoky fire was lit inside each new hut. Chief Edem left several of his slaves there to make sure the fire burned all night and did not get out of control and burn down the wooden frames. The chief explained that the purpose of the fire was to smoke out any insects living in the wood or thatch and to dry out the wood.
The next day the women’s work of plastering the huts with clay began. Mary joined in with great enthusiasm. After they finished mudding the walls, the women began furnishing the inside of the huts. They made a clay fireplace in the kitchen. Someone was inspired to fashion a counter out of clay. The counter had special hollows in it where Mary could keep her china. Inspired by Mary’s appreciation, the women made a table for Mary’s sewing machine, and even a clay couch to sit on.
By the time the huts were completed, Mary was amazed at all the people of Ekenge had done for her. She had no idea it was possible to make a hut so comfortable from sticks and mud. There were even holes in the walls for windows and doors. In a letter back to her home church in Scotland, Mary asked whether anyone would be willing to come to Ekenge and install window frames and a door in the holes for her. She never really expected anyone to come all the way from Scotland to do such a thing, but she felt that it did no harm to ask.
One hot July evening in 1889, Mary sat cross-legged on the sandy ground at her new compound eating corn stew with her hands. She was surrounded by her five children and an assortment of scrawny goats and chickens that darted forward whenever one of the children dropped a scrap of food. As she ate, she thought she heard an unfamiliar sound in the jungle. She stood up and listened carefully. There it was again; it was singing—but not just any singing. It was singing with a strong Scottish accent!
Mary brushed down her skirt and smoothed back her short cropped hair. She was getting a European visitor, her first in nearly a year. A minute later, Mary heard yelling along the path and saw several Ekenge men reach for their guns. “No, no, don’t shoot,” she called. “It’s my friend.”
