After wrestling with the question for more than a month, Mary finally concluded that she needed to stay with the African people in Ekenge. The people trusted her, and there was still a lot of work to do among them. So Mary called off the engagement.
With the engagement behind her, she threw herself into her new “project.” From the time Charles Ovens had come to Ekenge, Mary had wondered why the natives couldn’t be trained to be carpenters and other tradesmen. After all, the men were wonderful wood carvers. If the Africans were given the right tools and shown how to use them, they could make things for themselves. The missionaries would no longer need to beg carpenters to come all the way from Scotland to make a few door and window frames. But while it seemed a sensible and straightforward idea to Mary, it was a completely foreign notion to the missions board. As far as the board was concerned, Africans were poor and helpless and needed white people to do things for them. Did Mary really believe that tribal people were capable of learning trades? they questioned. But Mary would not take no for an answer. She spoke out about her plan whenever she could, and she wrote so many letters to the missions board that her hand ached. In the end she won. She convinced the missions board that it should recruit a tradesman with a desire to train Africans and have him set up a training school in Calabar to teach adults carpentry and other new skills.
By February 1892, Mary was ready to return to Africa for the fourth time. She dreaded seeing Charles Morrison again, although she had already written him that she had decided not to marry him.
As it turned out, Mary’s decision to stay in the Okoyong region proved to be the right decision at a crucial time. In the year that Mary was in Scotland, tremendous changes were taking place in Calabar, many of which she had read about in the newspaper. Just after Mary left for Scotland, a new British consul was appointed to the Niger Coast Protectorate, of which Calabar was part. Sir Claude MacDonald, the new consul, had been given the task of bringing British law and order to the area between the Calabar and Cross Rivers. This had never been attempted before—the inland areas had always been too dangerous to enter—and the British had always stayed close to the coast.
What Mary did not know was that while she was away, Sir Claude MacDonald had been trying to decide the best way to introduce British law to the region. Whenever he asked a person for his or her opinion on the matter, the person had always the same response: “You need Mary Slessor.”
“But that’s not possible,” Mary stammered as she stood before Sir Claude MacDonald shortly after arriving back in Calabar. “I mean, thank you for the offer, sir, but there is no way I could be made vice-consul and represent you in Ekenge. I’m a missionary, not a politician. There is already enough work out there for a hundred missionaries, and I am a lone woman. Surely you can see that.”
Mary and Sir Claude talked on through the afternoon, and by early evening, the consul had managed to win Mary over. Mary had finally changed her mind when Sir Claude MacDonald told her that some white person would have to be sent into the Okoyong region to bring law and order, and if Mary would not agree to be that person, he had no choice but to send for a representative from England. The thought of a young man straight out of some English academy with no knowledge of the local language or customs being given charge of enforcing British law in the Okoyong region terrified Mary. The whole area would be in an uproar within weeks, and there would no doubt be massive bloodshed. Since Mary could not let that happen, she agreed to become vice-consul, making her the judge and jury of all matters of law in the Okoyong region. Now she would have more than ever to do.
When Mary finally made her way upriver, crowds of people were waiting to greet her. They had missed their white ma. Ma Eme was especially pleased to see Mary again and to learn of Mary’s new, official title. Ma Eme did more than ever to help Mary bring peace to the area. Often she heard of trouble before Mary, and while she dared not openly warn Mary every time, she would send one of her slaves to her with a particular medicine bottle and a request for it to be filled. This was a signal to alert Mary to trouble. When she received the signal, Mary would gather her provisions and arrange for her children to be taken care of, all before the official request for her help arrived. The people were always amazed at how she “sensed” trouble, never suspecting for a moment that Ma Eme was working with her.
More often than not, Mary was called to resolve arguments between chiefs. Sometimes she had to travel for a day or so to reach them, and she would worry as she traveled that they might kill each other before she arrived. To try to head this off, she would send one of Ma Eme’s slaves running through the jungle ahead of her. In the slave’s hand would be a piece of paper with a blob of red wax and Mary’s official vice-consul seal pressed into it. It didn’t matter much what Mary wrote on the paper, since no one could read it, but the paper itself looked impressive and often kept the parties from fighting until she arrived.
To sit down and talk instead of killing each other was a new thing for the people of the Okoyong region. Mary patiently taught the people how to present their cases to her. She would sit in the shade of a kapok tree and take out her knitting. Then, as she clicked away with her knitting needles, she would ask the group on one side to state the problem and then allow the opposing group to say what it thought. This would go on and on, sometimes for thirty-six hours straight, as the chiefs repeated the same information over and over, hoping to impress Mary. Finally, when she sensed that everyone was worn out from talking, Mary would ask each side to sum up its arguments, and then she would announce her decision.
After the decision had been rendered came the part Mary hated. The chiefs of both parties would agree to Mary’s ruling by cutting an oath together. To do this, the two men would clasp hands while a third slashed the back of their hands with a knife. Then this third man would sprinkle salt, pepper, and corn into the bleeding wounds. The two chiefs would then chant an oath agreeing to stick to Mary’s decision, and to make it final, they would take turns licking each other’s wound.
Mary could not stand to watch as the oaths were cut, but she did not forbid the practice, although she had the power to do so. She decided it was better to allow the people some of their old ways, especially ones that did no real harm to anyone.
Bit by bit Mary worked to change the cruel practices of the Okoyong region. Some changes took longer than others, but she never gave up. By 1896, there was basic law and order in place throughout the region. As a result, Mary was able to report to Sir Claude MacDonald that raiding villages to capture slaves had stopped, that there were no more human sacrifices at funerals, that few women were drunkards and many men were sober a lot of the time, too, that twins were hardly ever killed (though many were still neglected until they died), and that more often than not the mother of the twins was allowed to live. With only a Bible and incredible courage, Mary Slessor had changed the cruel customs and culture of a region. She was now forty-eight years old and had survived in Calabar for twenty years, longer than anyone could have hoped or predicted.
Many missionaries began to urge Mary to return to Duke Town to live, especially after she received news that Charles Morrison had died of an unknown disease while visiting America. Her friends also wanted her to take better care of her health and rest more, which she could do comfortably in Duke Town. But Mary had not yet finished her missionary work. The people of Ekenge still needed her, and she would not leave them. Still, even she would have been daunted had she known what lay ahead for her.
Chapter 17
One of a Kind
In 1896, Mary Slessor had to move, not because she wanted to but because just about everyone in the village of Ekenge had moved out. The villagers had come to enjoy growing crops and producing palm oil to trade with the tribes downriver. However, in the process, they exhausted the nutrients in the soil around the village, and the soil no longer produced ample harvests. The people of the village noticed that the small farms about ten miles upriver produced much bigger and healthier crops than theirs. Many of them, including Ma Eme and her household, started a new village called Akpap at a place where the soil had not been overused. The new village was closer to the Cross River, making transporting goods to the canoes for the trip downriver much easier.
Mary moved to the new village, though she kept the mission house in Ekenge and returned to it regularly to help the few families and Chief Edem who had chosen to stay behind.
Not long after she had settled in Akpap, tragedy struck the region. A disease was brought upriver by the traders. Mary groaned when she heard the symptoms: high fever followed by an itchy rash that turned into bright red lumps. It could be only one thing: smallpox. Mary did what she could. A vaccine had been developed for the disease, but it was hard to get in large quantities, and it was capable of killing the person it was given to. Still, Mary sent to Duke Town for as much of the vaccine as the people could spare. She worked harder than ever administering it to as many people as possible.
Mary raced between Akpap, Ekenge, and Ifako trying to help people, but there was little she could do. Despite the vaccine, the bodies kept piling up, first ten at a time, then twenty, then hundreds. There were too many to bury. Mary watched helplessly as some of her oldest and dearest friends died. One of them was Chief Edem, the man who had both frustrated and helped her when she first came to Ekenge. When he died, Mary sat by his body and wept. She could not stand to leave his body to be eaten by rats and other animals. As exhausted as she was, she dragged herself to the doorway of his hut and picked up a digging stick. She dug a shallow grave, which she rolled the chief’s body into. She looked around the chief’s hut for something he would have wanted to be buried with and chose his sword, a gun, his staff, and a whip. Then she covered his body with dirt and left the hut. There was no one left in Ekenge to mourn their dead chief.
As she walked through the abandoned village, Mary could not help but think of what the death of a chief had meant when she first arrived in Ekenge twelve years before. The drunken partying would have been under way by now, the witch doctor would have been called to announce who was responsible for the death, and the drums would be beating the news across the Okoyong region. Mary comforted herself with the fact that such practices no longer occurred. She turned away from the village and onto the path that led to Akpap. Memories of her dead friends flooded through her mind as she wearily made her way home.
Eventually the epidemic ran its course, and even though Mary did not catch smallpox herself, she was left physically and emotionally exhausted by the epidemic, so exhausted, in fact, that she did not put up her usual fiery objections when the missions board ordered her to return to Scotland for a furlough. She took four of her girls with her—fifteen-year-old Janie, five-year-old Mary, three-year-old Alice, and one-year-old Maggie. She would not think of leaving Calabar without them. Although none of them had a single “decent” piece of clothing to wear, a missionary box had recently arrived from Scotland. As a result, Mary and the children traveled to Scotland dressed in secondhand clothes donated for poor, naked Africans! Mary couldn’t have cared less how she looked, which was good, because she found it difficult to wear shoes. Her feet had become wide and tough through going barefoot for so long and did not take kindly to being crammed into dainty shoes.
