GREAT MOTHER AND QUEEN OF OKOYONG

These grand titles belong not to an African queen or empress but to a diminutive Scottish textile weaver, Mary Slessor. She was born in Aberdeen on 2^nd December in 1848 and died sixty seven years later in Calabar, on the Nigerian coast close to the border with Cameroon. For most of her adult life she had worked in the East African mission fields and was as famous as her compatriot and inspiration David Livingstone.

Presbyterian by faith, she became a voluntary teacher in the Queen Street Mission in Dundee. The family had left Aberdeen to find employment after Mary’s father had lost his job. Having left school at the young age of eleven to work in the mills she was mainly self taught. Full of missionary zeal, she determined that she would work in the overseas mission fields and after three months training at Moray House in Edinburgh, she left Scotland in August 1876 sailing to Duke Town in Calabar. Thus began her remarkable life.

Very soon she left the comparative comfort of Calabar and went up country to the district of Okoyong to help the women of the area. She was responsible for ridding the area of the barbarous practice of killing twin babies. These babies were believed to be the results of the mother coupling with evil spirits. They were usually killed and their mothers were shunned. Many of the babies she saved she adopted and they became her family. Although engaged for a time to another Scottish missionary teacher, Charles Morris from Duke Town, the relationship failed because the Mission Board refused to let Charles join Mary in the Okoyong and she would never leave her people.

She scorned the comforts of the colonial lifestyle and lived as the native people, drinking unboiled water, walking barefoot, dispensing with a hat by day and a mosquito net by night. The Victorian traveller, Mary Kingsley stayed with her in 1895 and commented in her writing how Mary was loved, admired and respected by the people she served but that the missionary authorities regarded her as "mad and dangerous". Throughout her life, she was at odds with the mission authorities because or her constant pressing to go deeper into the bush and set up new, remote mission stations. The British government, however, were aware of her qualities and standing within the native communities and they appointed her as magistrate, the very first woman to hold this post. In 1892 she became the vice-consul in Okoyong presiding over the native courts and in 1905, the Vice President of the Ikot Obong Native Court. Regardless of her now important position she still lived simply and for most of her life in Nigeria she had suffered poor health She died of fever and dysentery in Calabar in 1915.

She had continued to support her family in Scotland financially until her mother and sister died. At this time she felt her links with "home" had broken and she wrote that "Heaven is now nearer to me than Britain". She did return to Scotland from time to time to raise funds for her work and she often brought her twins with her.

Although Livingstone is well remembered, outside Scotland Mary Slessor is less so. Her fellow countrymen commemorate her on their £10 bank note. In Nigeria, there is her church in Calabar and the legacy of her work with the women of the Okoyong. She was first and foremost a bearer of the Christian message. She wrote "With every visitor who comes to give compliments, with every curious passer-by who comes to see what the white woman and her house are like, with every company who brings a palaver to settle, with every dose of medicine, we try to send home the message of salvation". She was indeed quite a lady!