Mary Slessor alone in Calabar
The barefoot missionary of Nigeria
Mary Slessor is a mill worker from Dundee, Scotland, who arrives in Calabar in 1876 at age twenty-eight — a red-haired, barefoot woman who will spend the next thirty-nine years in the interior of what is now Nigeria, in conditions that would have defeated most men.
She learns Efik. She moves into the interior beyond the settled mission stations, into areas no European has visited, living in mud-walled huts, eating local food, going barefoot, wearing local dress. She becomes fluent enough in the local language to adjudicate disputes between chiefs, to advocate for the rights of women and children, to translate portions of scripture.
She is terrified of mice. She is not terrified of anything else, apparently — she walks into situations of intertribal violence that diplomats would avoid, and she walks in alone.
The communities she works among practice twin infanticide: twins are believed to be the offspring of an evil spirit, and newborn twins are killed and the mother exiled. Slessor rescues twins by the score — raising them herself when no one else will take them — and eventually persuades local chiefs to abandon the practice.
She is appointed a magistrate by the British colonial government — the first woman so appointed in the British Empire.
She dies in Calabar in 1915, in the hut she has been living in for decades, surrounded by African children she has raised as her own.
“God and one are always a majority.”
— Mary Slessor, attributed, c. late 19th century
“The LORD said to him, Surely I will be with you, and you shall strike the Midianites as one man.”
Mary Slessor went alone into places where no European had gone, armed with the language, the relationships, and the presence of God.
She was not fearless in the sense of having no fear. She was afraid of mice. She walked into intertribal violence anyway.
The courage the tradition praises is not the absence of fear. It is the decision not to let fear have the final vote — the recognition that what you are called to matters more than what you are afraid of.
Slessor died in the hut she chose, surrounded by the children she saved, in the country she loved.
God and one are always a majority. She spent thirty-nine years proving it.