The twin babies she saved
Slessor and the African custom of killing twins
The first time Mary Slessor hears the sound, she does not know what it is.
It comes from outside a village — a cry from the bush, thin and desperate. She finds two infants, newborn twins, left to die. In the Efik tradition she has come to understand, twins are the offspring of an evil spirit — the result of two different fathers, which means the mother has been unfaithful. Both babies must die. The mother must be exiled from the village.
Slessor picks up the babies.
She carries them back to her hut and nurses them herself. She argues with the chief. She is told that the custom is older than memory, that it protects the community, that she does not understand what she is interfering with.
She keeps the babies.
Over the years she rescues dozens of twins. She raises them in her hut alongside the other children she has taken in — the orphaned, the discarded, the ones nobody wanted. Her household in the Okoyong region is a perpetual chaos of children of multiple ages, all of them calling her Ma.
The change comes slowly. Chiefs who watched her defy the custom and saw that no evil followed begin to question the belief. The practice of twin infanticide gradually diminishes in the regions where she works.
She never gives a speech about it. She just keeps picking up the babies.
The argument she makes is not rhetorical. It is a life — a woman who means it, who keeps meaning it, who will not stop meaning it until she dies.
“I am not afraid. I was not made for fear.”
— Mary Slessor, attributed, c. late 19th century
“Defend the weak, the poor, and the fatherless. Maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy. Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.”
Slessor didn't give speeches about twin infanticide. She picked up the babies.
The most convincing argument for the gospel is not a well-constructed case. It is a life that acts on what it believes, publicly, repeatedly, at personal cost, until the surrounding culture starts asking why.
Chiefs who watched her defy the custom and saw no evil follow began to question the belief. The absence of the expected consequence was itself the argument.
You do not always need the right words. Sometimes you need the right action, repeated enough times that the watching world has to find an explanation for it.
What baby are you being asked to pick up?