By Kevin Lambert

A series of memorials to the people who suffered the slave trade is being planned as part of what the Akwa Ibom government describes as a "tourism continuum." It will be one of the great ironies of history that the area, where the lives of so many Africans were ruined, will be economically revitalized and revisited by their descendants.
Mary Slessor, a 19th century Scottish missionary, fought the slave trade, as well as several other cruelties common in her time. Her house in Ikot Offiong is already a tourist attraction.

Mary Mitchell Slessor, born in 1848, grew up in absolute poverty in Dundee, Scotland. At 12, Mary became the family’s breadwinner. Like the man who would become her hero, David Livingstone, she got a job at a cotton mill. She began a life of 16 hour days, starting at 5 am.

Into the tedium and penny pinching of Scottish slum life, the exotic was filtered in through the issues of the Missionary Record, a publication that electrified households of the faithful. It brought what author Jeanette Hardage called, "the scent and color of the Orient and the tropics… and the din of the bazaar and harem." The famous missionary explorer David Livingstone was the closest thing to a rock star that Mary’s tight little world could provide, and his exploits fascinated the young girl to the end of her life. When he died in 1874, she vowed to carry on his work.

She applied to the Foreign Mission Board of the United Presbyterian Church, effectively offering her life to the people of the old Calabar region. After a brief period of training in Edinburgh, Mary arrived at her destination in West Africa – known to all as "The White Man’s Grave" – in September, 1876.

Living in the slums of Dundee was frightful, but it was Switzerland compared to West Africa. The missionaries came to a country of sudden violence, stultifying heat and ravenous parasites, and they died like slaves working on the pyramids. Their average life expectancy was just a few years, and those who survived generally suffered fevers and pain for the rest of their lives.

Slessor immediately made the study of the Efik language her highest priority. She learned the language with such thoroughness that she spoke her last words "O Abasi, sana mi yak" (O God, let me go) in that tongue.

Her primary fuel was the muscular Christianity of the era, the variety that took stands against social ills and nurtured a great hope in mankind. She preached incessantly, and believed it all, but her other mandate was practical: building houses, making concrete, visiting out-of-the-way villages, listening to stories of hardship and sorrow, and bringing medicine.

In response to appeals from village chiefs, she began to travel further afield. They loved her, wherever she went. People came from miles around to see the "White Ma" (an honorific term similar to Madam) She brought a new meaning to the word "Godsend."

Dr. Lawrence Mitchell, another Scot, has been working in West Africa since 1981. He is also the (unpaid) trustee and director of the Nigerian branch of the Mary Slessor foundation. He describes her as an example to many people, both in Scotland and Nigeria. "Even today she has a lot of relevance. She promoted women in society with her social work. She transcended all social boundaries. The other missionaries are forgotten."

Some of her ideas were just as foreign to the Scots as the Africans; for example, elevating the status of women was one of her priorities. In a society of missionaries that insisted upon wearing Victorian petticoats and starched shirts in equatorial weather, she was one of the few sensible enough to wear functional clothing. She climbed trees. She marched bareheaded and barefoot through the jungle. She didn’t even filter her water.

Twins

She gave the impractical African customs the same dismissive slash as any other. Twins were regarded as evil and routinely strangled at birth, sometimes along with their mother. Some tribes thought twins possessed divine and deadly powers. Others believed twins were evil portents and that the mother had to have been with two men to have two children at once. She vowed to do all she could to end practices like that.

Mary’s method was cunning. On her first "save" she took a set of twins that were about to be killed. The twins’s family tricked one of Mary’s helpers into allowing them to "borrow" the boy. Promptly, in accordance with their beliefs, they strangled him. The girl, however, lived and became Mary’s adopted daughter. The girl was named Janie, after Mary’s younger sister. She became a sensation in Scotland and lived devotedly with her mother for the rest of Mary’s life.

Mary Mitchell Slessor was five feet tall, red-headed, and described herself as a "wee little thing." She stood up to warriors, chiefs, witch doctors, and murderers. She healed hundreds of people, rescued prisoners, slaves and wives from being murdered, saved and cared for countless children and babies, and settled disputes among tribes and neighbors. She lived in West Africa, including Akwa Ibom, for 39 years.

Concerned people in Scotland and in Akwa Ibom are trying to keep her name alive. "We have so many lessons to learn from this woman," Dr. Mitchell says. "She tapped the spirit of the people in a very spiritual place, which most people cannot do."

Lytton Strachey, writing about Florence Nightengale, who Mary resembled in more than a few ways, said that she "moved under the stress of an impetus which finds no place in the popular imagination." Both women spent their lives in ill health, and both still managed to do more than ten of the rest of us.

Queen Elizabeth laid a wreath at her grave in 1956. In Dundee, the Central Museum of the Albert Institute displays stained glass windows that depict events from her life. In Dundee, a musical based on her life is being produced. This is often the first step in posthumous careers that end up in Hollywood.