Mary Slessor
BLACK AFRICA:
“THE WHITE MAN’S GRAVEYARD”
African Christianity, according to Andrew Walls, should be seen as “potentially the representative Christianity of the twenty-first century.” No longer is African Christianity a missionary religion. It carries distinctives all its own and exemplifies Christianity of the present and future. “The Christianity typical of the twenty-first century,” continues Walls, “will be shaped by the events and processes that take place in the southern continents, and above all by those that take place in Africa.1 This role for African Christianity—even if no more than symbolic—makes the study of the missionary movement to that region critical to our understanding of the church both present and future.
Black Africa, known for centuries as “the white man’s graveyard,” has claimed the lives of more Protestant missionaries than any other area of the world. Evangelism was a costly undertaking, but the investment paid rich dividends. Although Protestant missions got off to a late start in Subsaharan Africa (in comparison to Asia), it has been one of the most fruitful “mission fields” in the world—though not in the early generations of mission outreach. The rapid expansion of the church came primarily in the twentieth century. Indeed, church growth in the nineteenth century was often painfully slow, but it was the nineteenth-century missionary pioneers who risked all to open the way for Christianity in Africa.
Modern Protestant missions to Africa began during the eighteenth century in the Cape Colony with the Moravians. By the end of that century, the London Missionary Society had entered South Africa and, with Robert Moffat, began penetrating into the interior, though the majority of the missionaries remained in the healthier environment south of the Orange River and in the coastal regions. The thrust of Protestant missionary activity moved from south to north, and by the mid-nineteenth century the Baptists, Anglicans, and Presbyterians each had a solid foothold on the west coast. These were soon followed by permanent mission stations on the east coast, with almost all of Black Africa opened up to missionaries by the end of the century.
In spite of the tremendous sacrifice, African missions have been harshly criticized, particularly in regard to the missionaries’ ties to colonialism and their exporting of European civilization. Moffat’s philosophy of the “Bible and plough” was expanded by Livingstone’s philosophy of “Commerce and Christianity,” and even Mary Slessor insisted on the necessity of trade to raise the African standard of living and to make the people more suited to Christian ethical standards. In the eyes of the missionaries, the future of Christianity in Africa depended on European influence and trade, and few missionaries opposed the underlying concepts of imperialism that have come under fire in recent generations. But such harsh criticism may be unwarranted.
It is true that missionaries were often closely tied to colonialism, unashamedly identifying European civilization with the Christian message. But they, more than any other outside influence, fought against the evils that colonialism and imperialism brought. They waged long and bitter battles (sometimes physically) against the heinous traffic in human cargo. And after the demise of slave trade, they raised their voices against other crimes, including the bloody tactics used by King Leopold to extract rubber from the Congo. The majority of missionaries were pro-African, and their stand for racial justice often made them despised by their fellow Europeans. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that without the conscience of Christian missions, the crimes of colonialism might have been even more horrific.
Missionaries have also been accused of being racists. They were. They were men and women of their time, and racist language and beliefs were commonplace. But perhaps more significant, they appear to have been significantly less racist than many of their contemporaries. It was the nineteenth-century intellectual of high society who viewed black Africans as inherently inferior—many rungs below Caucasians on the ethnologists’ evolutionary ladder. Missionaries, on the other hand, were sometimes ridiculed in scholarly journals for their shallow thinking in regard to race, and most educated English citizens would have agreed with Mary Kingsley (whose Africa travelogue was widely circulated) when she criticized missionaries for their “difficulty in regarding the Africans as anything but a Man and a Brother” and their belief in “the spiritual equality of all colors of Christians.”2
If missionaries frequently sounded like true nineteenth-century racists, it was because they viewed Africans (or any unchristianized peoples) to be degraded because of their lack of Christian moral teaching. Henry Drummond’s views were characteristic. He described Africans as “half animal and half children, wholly savage and wholly heathen,” but he qualified his blatant racism by concluding that “they are what we were once.”3
Perhaps the greatest criticism of African missions has come from social scientists and anthropologists who have charged that Christian missions have wreaked havoc on African culture. It is true that missionaries of the nineteenth (and even the twentieth) century often failed to appreciate the distinctive qualities of unfamiliar cultures and failed to make Christianity compatible with the customs of other societies. But there were some customs, such as twin-murder and cannibalism and witchcraft, that did not contribute to a healthy environment. The missionaries’ efforts to eradicate these practices helped preserve Africa’s most valuable cultural asset—the people themselves.
The most significant missionary contribution that has profoundly affected African culture relates to Bible translation—an endeavor that influenced all aspects of life. This contribution “has few parallels, and should stand as a monument to the scaling down of cross-cultural barriers,” writes Lamin Sanneh of Yale University. “We should give praise and honor to God that he raised in the Western church servants of his cause in Africa and elsewhere. The dry bones of many of these missionaries, rising from their unmarked graves, gave voices to our ancestors.”4
The early Protestant missionaries to Africa, like Carey and his colleagues in India, were not ordained clergy. They were artisans and gardeners and factory workers who often spent much of their time as manual laborers and artisans in the mission work. Yet despite their mundane labors, they were missionary evangelists—and in some instances, notable Bible translators.
Robert Moffat is sometimes regarded as the patriarch of South African missions, a man who had a significant influence in that region for more than half a century. Yet even during his own lifetime, he was overshadowed by his famous son-in-law, often being referred to as “the father-in-law of David Livingstone.” Moffat, nevertheless, was the far greater missionary of the two. He was an evangelist, a translator, an educator, a diplomat, and an explorer, and he effectively combined those roles to become one of the truly great missionaries to Africa.
Born in Scotland in 1795, Moffat was raised in humble circumstances that offered very limited education and no formal biblical training. His parents were Presbyterians with a strong missionary zeal, and on cold winter evenings his mother gathered the children around her and read aloud stories of missionary heroes. But young Moffat was not inclined toward spiritual things. He “ran off to sea” for a time, and at the age of fourteen he became apprenticed to a gardener, learning a skill that he would use the rest of his life.
At the age of seventeen, he moved to Cheshire, England, to begin his work as a gardener. There in 1814 he joined a small Methodist society that met in a nearby farmhouse—an association that offered him a harmonious blend of Scottish Calvinism and Methodist “enthusiasm.” The following year, after making contact with William Roby, a director of the London Missionary Society (LMS), he applied to that board for missionary service. The society responded by saying that they could not “receive all who offered their services for missionary work” and were thus “obligated to select those who possess the most promising acquirements,” which in their view did not include him. He was turned down.5
Undaunted by his rejection, Moffat secured a new gardening position near Roby’s home and began studying theology with him on a private basis. After a year he again applied to the LMS, and this time he was accepted. Founded in 1795, the year of Moffat’s birth, the LMS was an interdenominational evangelical mission board. In its twenty years it had seen steady growth and had missionaries stationed all over the globe. Moffat was sent to South Africa with four other new missionaries. After eighty-five days at sea they arrived in Cape Town to launch their missionary careers.
Moffat had hoped to begin his missionary career as a married man. During his last year as a gardener in England he had become interested in his employer’s daughter, Mary Smith, whom he perceived as having a “warm missionary heart.” Though her father was enthusiastic about Moffat’s missionary plans, he was less excited about involving his only daughter into such work. So Moffat went to South Africa single, waiting more than three years before Mary’s parents relented and agreed to let their twenty-four-year-old daughter join him.
In the meantime, Moffat was introduced to the realities of missionary work and African culture. He was distressed by the strong prejudice against missionaries by both the English and the Dutch colonists, and he was impatient when, for that very reason, government officials stood in the way of evangelism of the interior. But if he was disturbed by government policy, he was shocked by the open immorality and dissension among the missionaries themselves. Writing to the LMS secretary in London, Moffat lamented that “never was there a period when a body of missionaries were in such a confused and deplorable (and awful to add) degraded condition.”6
While the LMS had seen its share of problems (including moral lapses) with some of its Cape Colony missionaries, there were many who served honorably. The first missionary to South Africa was John T. Vanderkemp, a physician from Holland. Though the son of a Dutch Reformed pastor, the well-educated young Vanderkemp had become a religious skeptic and remained so until the tragic deaths of his wife and daughter in a boating accident, which he himself witnessed. With a renewed faith in Christ, he arrived in the Cape Colony in 1799 when he was past the age of fifty. He worked primarily among the Hottentots where, despite discouraging setbacks, he won hundreds of converts. Vanderkemp was greatly distressed by the slave trade he daily witnessed and spent thousands of dollars in freeing slaves, including a seventeen-year-old Malagasy slave girl whom he married when he was sixty—an act that created an uproar among the colonists and missionaries as well. Vanderkemp died in 1811 after only twelve years of missionary service, but he was recognized then and in the years that followed as one of the great pioneers of the LMS.
After several months of delays, Moffat and a married couple were granted permission to journey into the bleak arid regions of Namaqualand, hundreds of miles north of Cape Town. There he first met Afrikaner, a once-feared Hottentot chief, whose life had changed after coming in contact with a Dutch missionary. Moffat spent nearly two years at Afrikaner’s camp and then invited him to travel to Cape Town so that the white colonists could see the change Christianity had made in this man, whose reputation for raiding colonists’ farms was widely known. It worked, and Moffat’s star as a missionary statesman began to rise.
Showing off Afrikaner was not Moffat’s only reason for traveling back to Cape Town. In December of 1819, Mary Smith arrived from England, and three weeks later they were married. It was a happy union from the start and remained so for fifty-three years. Their honeymoon, a six-hundred-mile wagon trek north-east to Kuruman was a taste of their future together. There were parched deserts, dense forests, quagmire swamps, and raging rivers to be crossed, which no doubt made them grateful they were not alone. With them throughout their honeymoon was a single male missionary.
Kuruman was, in Moffat’s eyes, a choice spot for a mission station. He had hoped Afrikaner and his people would move to the location, but Afrikaner died not long after their journey. The Moffats settled at the mouth of the Kuruman River, which was fed by a crystal-clear underground spring. “Here over the years,” writes Adrian Hastings, “he built up the Mission of Kuruman with its canal, its irrigated gardens, its square stone houses standing in a straight line beside the canal, its fences, its fruit trees, its wheat, barley, grapes, and figs. By 1835, there were 500 acres under irrigation and a population of 700 souls.”7
This model mission station consumed many years of arduous toil. Indeed, the Moffats’ early years in Kuruman were filled with hardships. They lived in primitive conditions, their first home being a mud hut with the kitchen separate from the house. Although Mary was not used to doing heavy domestic work, she adapted to African life remarkably well. She washed clothes by hand in the river and cooked on an open fireplace. She soon overcame her aversion to cleaning the floors with cow dung and even recommended it: “It lays the dust better than anything, and kills the fleas which would otherwise breed abundantly.”8
The greater hardship at Kuruman related to their ministry. The Bechuanas, with whom the Moffats worked, were not receptive to the gospel message. Tribal superstitions prevailed, and when the official rainmaker could not prevent long periods of drought, Moffat was blamed. Theft also was common, and the Moffats’ house was ransacked on many occasions. “Our labours,” wrote Moffat, “might be compared to the attempts of … a husbandman labouring to transform the surface of a granite rock into arable land.”9
As time passed, however, Moffat’s prestige among the Bechuanas grew. In 1823, after only a few years at Kuruman, the situation in the area began to change. Waves of nomadic tribes began sweeping across the arid plains, and the very existence of the Bechuanas was in danger. Moffat exercised his diplomatic prowess, and through mediation and military arrangements with another tribe, he was able to avert the impending destruction of the Bechuanas. He became a civilian general of sorts, and on one occasion rode out to meet the enemy. Though his peace efforts failed and a fierce battle ensued, the invading Mantatee tribe was severely weakened and driven back.
From this point on, Moffat’s leadership role at Kuruman was secure. As a diplomat and military leader, he commanded the highest respect, though there was little corresponding success in his evangelistic efforts. His converts were few. Polygamy was a nagging problem at Kuruman as it was elsewhere in Africa. How should the missionary counsel a convert who has many wives? Church membership was typically denied the individual, and consequently the church remained small. It was a discouraging situation, and Mary, particularly, was inclined to periods of despondency: “Could we but see the smallest fruit, we could rejoice midst the privations and toils which we bear; but as it is, our hands do often hang down.”10
Perhaps the greatest reason for the slow progress of Christianity among the Bechuanas was simply a lack of understanding. Neither Moffat nor the Bechuanas fully comprehended the other’s beliefs in spiritual matters. Moffat had little interest in the Bechuana religious traditions, and he sought to evangelize them with the mistaken impression that the tribe had no concept of or word for God. But an even greater handicap to his ministry was his failure to learn their language. For several years his sole means of communication was Cape Dutch, a trade language that some of the Bechuanas understood for rudimentary business transactions but that was hardly suitable for presenting a Christian message. Moffat wasted years of precious time trying to squeeze by on this shortcut, but he finally realized that learning the language, as difficult as it was, was the only solution to communicating the gospel. So convinced was he of this necessity that in 1827 he left Mary with their little ones, turned his back on his gardens, and went out into the bush to spend time with some of the men. For eleven weeks he immersed himself in language study.
On his return, he was ready to begin translating the Bible, a task that he began very slowly and that took him twenty-nine years to complete. Beginning with the gospel of Luke, he agonized over each sentence, and even then he was painfully aware that his translation was filled with errors. Only the patience of continual revising made the translation comprehensible. Printing the text also became a complicated ordeal. After traveling all the way to Cape Town in 1830, he found printers unwilling to print Scripture in a tribal tongue, fearing the equalizing tendencies it might have on the “inferior” race. His solution was to learn how to print himself and to secure a press for Kuruman.
Translating and printing the Bible often seemed like a fruitless, thankless task, but it also had its rewards. In 1836, while conducting a service in an outlying area, Moffat was astonished when a young man stood up and began quoting passages from the gospel of Luke. To Mary he wrote: “You would weep tears of joy to see what I had seen.”11
But even before he was able to make his translation available to the people, Moffat was seeing positive results from his language study. His ability to speak the language of the people brought a new understanding of his teaching. He started a school with forty pupils, and soon his message began to take hold and a religious awakening followed. The first baptisms took place in 1829, nearly a decade after their arrival in Kuruman. In 1838 a stone church was built that still stands today.
Although Moffat’s career is generally associated with Kuruman, his work extended far beyond that area. In fact, the nucleus of believers at Kuruman never exceeded two hundred, but his influence was felt hundreds of miles around. Chiefs or their representatives from distant tribes came to Kuruman to hear his message. The most notable instance of this occurred in 1829 when the great and fearsome Moselekatse, one of Africa’s most infamous tribal chiefs, sent five representatives to visit Moffat and bring him with them on their return journey. The meeting of Moffat and Moselekatse was an unforgettable encounter. The naked Moselekatse was overwhelmed that the great white “chief ” would come so far to visit him, and so began a thirty-year friendship built on a deep respect of one man for the other. Though Moselekatse himself was never converted to Christianity, in later years he did allow missionaries, including Moffat’s son John and daughter-in-law Emily, to establish a mission station among his tribe.
As far away as Moffat often traveled, his thoughts were never far from Kuruman. Over the years, Kuruman had become a showpiece of African civilization, where his philosophy of “Bible and plough” was practiced. Their stone house had a large enclosed backyard where their five servants did domestic chores around a huge open brick oven. It was a homey atmosphere, with children always at play. (The Moffats had ten children, though only seven survived to adulthood; and of those seven, five became actively involved in African missions.) Though Kuruman was an out-of-the-way settlement, not on the main route to the interior, it attracted so many visitors that Moffat sometimes regretted the circus atmosphere that interfered with his Bible translation and revisions.
Robert Moffat, missionary patriarch of South Africa.
After fifty-three years in Africa with only one furlough (1839–43), the Moffats were ready to retire. They had suffered some severe tragedies, particularly the deaths of their two oldest children within the space of a few months in 1862, but the work was moving forward. There were several native pastors active in the work, and their son John, who had joined them at Kuruman, was prepared to take over the mission. It was a sad departure from Kuruman and perhaps an unfortunate mistake. Kuruman was the only home they had known for half a century, and readjustment back in England proved difficult, particularly for Mary, who died only months after their return. Moffat lived on for another thirteen years, during which time he became a noted missionary statesman, traveling throughout the British Isles challenging adults and youth alike with the tremendous needs of Africa.
David Livingstone was the hero of Victorian England—and a hero for generations to follow. “After his death and his burial in Westminster Abbey,” writes Geoffrey Moorhouse, his “reputation was secure from assault by anyone but the most reckless heretic. Even in the middle of the twentieth century, historians would still acknowledge him as the greatest missionary of them all. For almost a hundred years he would … be considered in the same breath as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Joan of Arc.”12
Livingstone had unparalleled influence in the realm of African missions, but his own missionary work was slight. He was a frail, temperamental human being with serious personality flaws that hindered his ministry throughout his entire life. But despite his weaknesses, he, more than anyone else, focused the world’s attention on the needs of Africa.
Like his father-in-law, Robert Moffat, David Livingstone was born in Scotland and raised in humble surroundings. But unlike his father-in-law, his brilliant mind and insatiable desire for learning impelled him to seek a higher station in life. His fourteen-hour days at a textile mill beginning at the age of ten did not prevent his education. He bought a Latin grammar book with his first week’s pay, and he continued his schooling by enrolling in evening classes. He survived his difficult years of schooling by snatching glances at a book propped up on his spinning jenny and poring over homework assignments until midnight. His love for science caused a serious rift between him and his father and might have pulled him away from his Christian upbringing—but for the writings of Thomas Dick, who emphasized the compatibility of faith and science.
Livingstone grew up in a pious, church-going family who had left the established Anglican Church to attend an Independent chapel. After his conversion he dreamed of becoming a missionary doctor to China, but due to family hardships, further education was delayed. Finally, in 1840, at the age of twenty-seven, he was ready to begin his missionary career with a background in both theology and medicine.
Livingstone’s application to the London Missionary Society was accepted in 1839, but his plans to sail for China were thwarted by international politics—friction between Britain and China, which eventually led to the Opium War. The LMS directors thought Livingstone should go to the West Indies instead, but in the meantime Livingstone had been introduced to the striking, six-foot-tall veteran missionary to Africa, Robert Moffat. Moffat had a profound influence on the eager missionary candidate and tantalized him with the thrilling opportunities for evangelism beyond Kuruman in “the vast plain to the north” where he had “sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages, where no missionary had ever been.”13
It was with great anticipation that Livingstone sailed for Africa in December of 1840. After spending thirteen weeks in language study aboard ship, he arrived at the Cape in March of 1841 and remained there a month before beginning his journey to Kuruman, where he was to help with the work until the Moffats returned. He enjoyed his overland travel to Kuruman, describing it as a “prolonged system of picnicking.” He was critical of the missionary work at Cape Town, however, where having large numbers of missionaries concentrated in a small area discouraged indigenous leadership. Further disappointment awaited him at Kuruman. With the mental image of “a thousand villages,” he was surprised to find the region so sparsely populated, and he was shocked to discover the discord among the missionaries: “The missionaries in the interior are, I am grieved to say, a sorry set…. I shall be glad when I get away into the region beyond—away from their envy and backbiting.” Livingstone’s presence only complicated the situation, and most of the missionaries were only too anxious for him to “get away into the region beyond.” He complained that there was “no more Christian affection between most if not all the ‘brethren’” and himself than between his “riding ox and his grandmother.”14
While waiting for the Moffats to return from their furlough, Livingstone made several exploration treks northward. Of his two-and-a-half-years at Kuruman, more than a year was spent away from his base, and this practice of “riding off “ continued during the rest of his career. In 1843 Livingstone rode off to stay. He set out for the wooded and well-watered area of Mabosta, two hundred miles north, to establish a second Kuruman. With him was Roger Edwards, a middle-aged artisan-missionary, and his wife, both of whom had served for ten years at Kuruman. There were problems from the start. Edwards resented the imposed leadership of Livingstone, who was not only new on the African scene but was also eighteen years his junior.
Mabosta became Livingstone’s first African home—a large house with glass windows brought up from Kuruman. There he first encountered the ever-present dangers of the African jungle. While taking part in a lion hunt he was attacked and badly mauled. Though he was grateful to have survived, thanks to his African companions, his left arm was severely injured and maimed for life.
WHEN in the act of ramming down the bullets I heard a shout. Starting, and looking half round, I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me…. He caught my shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground below together. Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat…. The shake annihilated fear, and allowed no sense of horror in looking round at the beast. This peculiar state is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivora; and if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent Creator for lessening the pain of death. Turning round to relieve myself of the weight, as he had one paw on the back of my head, I saw his eyes directed to Mebalwe, who was trying to shoot him at a distance of ten or fifteen yards…. The lion immediately left me, and attacking Mebalwe, bit his thigh…. Another man … attempted to spear the lion while he was biting Mebalwe. He left Mebalwe and caught this man by the shoulder, but at that moment the bullets he had received took effect, and he fell down dead…. Besides crunching the bone into splinters, he left eleven teeth wounds on the upper part of my arm.”
(David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa)
By May of 1844, three months after the incident, he was feeling well enough to travel—on important business. He headed for Kuruman “to pay his addresses” to the Moffats’ oldest daughter, Mary, who at twenty-three had just returned with her parents from England. His period of convalescence no doubt convinced him that there were drawbacks to being single, and so, during that summer, he “screwed up … courage to put the question beneath one of the fruit trees.” Later that year he wrote to a friend, “I am, it seems, after all to be hooked to Miss Moffat,” whom he had described to another friend as being a “sturdy” and “matter-of-fact lady.”15
The wedding took place at Kuruman in January of 1845, and in March the Livingstones left for Mabosta; but their stay there was short-lived. Further problems developed with the Edwards, and later that year, after delivering his first child, he moved his family to Chonwane, forty miles north. The time at Chonwane was a happy one for the Livingstones, but it only lasted eighteen months. Severe drought in that area necessitated a move with the tribe northwest to the Kolobeng River. In the summer of 1847, after their second child was born, they moved into their third home.
David Livingstone, the world-famous missionary-explorer.
For seven years, the family lived a seminomadic life in Africa. Sometimes Mary and the children stayed at home alone, and other times they joined the expedition. Neither situation was satisfactory. On one occasion, when Livingstone was away from Chonwane for an extended period of time, he wrote: “Mary feels her situation among the ruins a little dreary and no wonder, for she writes me that the lions are resuming possession and walk around our house at night.”16 But accompanying him was not suitable either. In 1850, after an exploratory trip with her husband, she gave birth to her fourth child, who died soon after, while Mary was suffering from temporary paralysis. All this became too much for the more sedentary Moffats of Kuruman to tolerate. In 1851, when they heard from their daughter (who was again pregnant) that Livingstone was planning to take her and the “dear children” on another long jungle trek, Mrs. Moffat wrote her son-in-law a stinging letter:
Mary had told me all along that should she be pregnant you would not take her, but let her come out here after you were fairly off…. But to my dismay I now get a letter—in which she writes ‘I must again wend my weary way to the far Interior, perhaps to be confined in the field.’ O Livingstone what do you mean—was it not enough that you lost one lovely babe, and scarcely saved the other, while the mother came home threatened with Paralysis? And still you again expose her & them on an exploring expedition? All the world still condemn the cruelty of the thing, to say nothing of the indecorousness of it. A pregnant woman with three little children trailing about with a company of the other sex—through the wilds of Africa among savage men and beasts! Had you found a place to which you wished to go and commence missionary operations the case would be altered. Not one word would I say were it to the mountains of the moon—but to go with an exploring party, the thing is preposterous. I remain yours in great perturbation, M. Moffat.17
Whether the letter would have changed Livingstone’s mind is impossible to say, but the fact is, he did not receive it until he and the family were well into their journey. On September 15, 1851, a month after departure, Mary delivered her fifth child on the Zouga River, an event to which Livingstone devoted only one line in his journal, leaving more space for his exciting discovery of crocodile eggs. Apparently ignoring his own culpability, Livingstone bemoaned his wife’s “frequent pregnancies,” comparing the results to the output of “the great Irish manufactory.”18 Yet, he seemed to have genuinely loved his children and in later years regretted that he had not spent more time with them.
By 1852 Livingstone had come to realize that African expeditions were no place for a mother and little children. Earlier he had justified the risk: “It is a venture to take wife and children into a country where fever—African fever—prevails. But who that believes in Jesus would refuse to make a venture for such a Captain?” But no longer could he endure the criticism of his in-laws and others, so in March of 1852 he Livingstone’s Travels in Southern Africa saw Mary and the children off from Cape Town en route to England. How could he sacrifice his family for African exploration? “Nothing but a strong conviction that the step will tend to the Glory of Christ would make me orphanize my children.”19
The next five years were depressing for Mary. A biographer wrote that she and the children were not only “homeless and friendless” but also “often living on the edge of poverty in cheap lodgings.” It was rumored among the resident LMS missionaries that she had lapsed into spiritual darkness and was drowning her misery in alcohol.20 But for Livingstone, now free to explore, it was an exhilarating time. He had little to show for his first eleven years—neither converts nor a mission station. Now he was free to move. The interior of Africa was beckoning.
Livingstone’s first and greatest expedition took him across the continent of Africa along the Zambezi River. After seeing his family off at Cape Town, he leisurely headed back north, stopping at Kuruman and then going on to his favorite tribe, the Makololos, where he recruited a number of them to accompany him on the expedition. Beginning in central Africa, they followed the river northwest to the coast at Luanda. It was a hazardous journey with continual threats from hostile tribes and the dread of the deadly African fever, but Livingstone was never tempted to turn back. Although he was primarily an explorer, he never entirely abandoned evangelism. With him he carried a “magic lantern” (an early version of a slide projector) with pictures depicting biblical scenes. After six months of arduous travel, he and his men made history when they came out on the coast alive.
Despite offers from ship captains to return him to England, Livingstone, under a personal obligation to return the Makololo tribesmen to their homeland, turned back and started his trek down the Zambezi to the east coast. His journey east moved at a slower pace, hampered by dozens of bouts with African fever. In twelve months he reached Linyanti, his original starting point, and from there he continued on to the great falls that he named Victoria in honor of his queen. From this point, his single aim was to explore the Zambezi as a possible trade route from the East. The more he encountered the inhumane slave traffic of the Portuguese and the Arabs, the more convinced he became that only the combination of “Commerce and Christianity” could save Africa. He was convinced that slavery required the help of Africans (supplying slaves from enemy tribes), and his solution was to bring legitimate commerce to Africa by way of a navigable trade.
Although the expedition did not follow the Zambezi the entire route, Livingstone nevertheless arrived on the coast in May of 1856, confidently (though incorrectly) proclaiming the Zambezi to be navigable. It was a happy occasion, though he was disappointed again, as he had been on the West Coast, not to find a letter from Mary among all his mail.
Back in England in December of 1856 after fifteen years in Africa, Livingstone was heralded as a national hero. After only three days with his family, he went to London where he launched a year-long whirlwind speaking tour to adoring crowds and received some of the nation’s highest awards. During this year in England, he also wrote his first book, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. As a result of his high profile, new mission societies were formed—though he himself went in a different direction. Before returning to Africa in 1858, he severed his connection with the LMS and accepted a commission from the British government that allowed him more funds and equipment.
The remaining fifteen years of Livingstone’s life could never recapture the glory of 1857. He returned to Africa with an official entourage for his second expedition, only to discover that the Zambezi River was not navigable. The section of the river he had bypassed on his previous journey contained rocky gorges and white rapids. Disappointed, he turned northward (nearer the east coast) to explore the Shire River and Lake Nyasa. Unfortunately, slavers followed in the wake of his discoveries, and thus for a time his exploration was doing more to open the area to slave traffic than to missions.
Missionaries also followed his paths to the Shire River region, but not without painful sacrifice. The Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), founded as a result of Livingstone’s rousing speech at Cambridge, entered the area with enthusiasm and false assurance of favorable living conditions. Livingstone was not an organizer, and soon the mission was in chaos. Bishop Charles Mackenzie, the leading cleric in the party, was a controversial figure. He was reported to have “arrived in East Africa with a crosier [bishop’s staff] in one hand and a rifle in the other,” and he did not hesitate to use his rifle and distribute others to friendly Africans for military action against the slave-trading Ajawa tribe.21His behavior created a scandal and seriously hurt the UMCA. In less than a year, however, Mackenzie was dead, and others in the mission party soon perished also, including Livingstone’s wife, Mary, who had left the children in England to join her husband in 1861.
Livingstone returned to England in 1864, this time to much less acclaim. His second expedition had not been the success he had hoped it would be, and his reputation had been tarnished. Most of the members of his party, once enamored by their fearless leader, were complaining bitterly about his autocratic rule and difficult personality.
In 1865 Livingstone returned to Africa for the last time to begin his third and final expedition, this time for the purpose of discovering the source of the Nile. He took no Europeans with him, and in fact, did not see another European for nearly seven years. It was a difficult time for him. His body was racked by malnutrition, fever, and bleeding hemorrhoids, and often his supplies were stolen by Arab slave traders. Yet he was where he wanted to be. While he failed to discover the source of the Nile, he made other discoveries, and he was at peace with himself and his surroundings (except for the ever-present slave trade that tortured his conscience). As time passed, the Africans became used to the bearded, toothless, haggard old man who often spoke to them of his Savior.
During Livingstone’s last years in Africa, rumors periodically surfaced that he had died. Though his reputation had been marred, people the world over still held him in awe and were strangely curious about this eccentric old man in the wilds of Africa. It was this curiosity that spurred the editor of the New York Herald to send an ambitious reporter, Henry Stanley, to find Livingstone, dead or alive. After several months of searching, Stanley caught up with Livingstone at Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika, late in 1871. The initial meeting was awkward. After dismounting his horse, Stanley bowed and uttered the often-repeated phrase that soon became the butt of jokes: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
Stanley was a welcome sight to Livingstone. He brought medicine, food, and other supplies that Livingstone desperately needed. And perhaps more importantly, he brought companionship and news from the outside world. The two men developed a close and tender relationship; and in a moving tribute, Stanley described the months they shared together:
For four months and four days I lived with him in the same hut, or the same boat, or the same tent, and I never found a fault in him. I went to Africa as prejudiced against religion as the worst infidel in London. To a reporter like myself, who had only to deal with wards, mass meetings, and political gatherings, sentimental matters were quite out of my province. But there came to me a long time for reflection. I was out there away from a worldly world. I saw this solitary old man there, and I asked myself, “Why does he stop here? What is it that inspires him?” For months after we met I found myself listening to him, wondering at the old man carrying out the words, “leave all and follow me.” But little by little, seeing his piety, his gentleness, his zeal, his earnestness, and how he went quietly about his business, I was converted by him, although he had not tried to do it.22
Stanley would go on to follow in Livingstone’s footsteps with his 999-day journey across Africa—an expedition that intrigued the world and sent missionary societies scrambling to stake their claims in the Dark Continent. Before that, he had written his bestseller, How I Found Livingstone, which served as another source to the unfolding legend of Livingstone.
Livingstone lived a little more than a year after Stanley departed. On May 1, 1873, an African servant found the “master” kneeling as if in prayer “by the side of his bed, his body stretched forward, his head buried in his hands upon the pillow.”23 It was a fitting way for this man of living legend to die. His faithful servants Susi and Chuma determined that there was no other way to pay their respects than to deliver his body and personal papers to his former associates at the coast. After burying his heart under a Mpundu tree, the body was dried in the hot African sun until it was mummified and then carried overland fifteen hundred miles to the coast.
In England, Livingstone was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey, attended by dignitaries from all over the country. It was a day of mourning for his children, who came to say good-bye to the father they had never really known; but it was a particularly sad hour for the seventy-eight-year-old Robert Moffat, who slowly walked down the aisle in front of the casket bearing the man who decades before in that same city had caught a vision of “a thousand villages, where no missionary had ever been.”
The death of David Livingstone had a tremendous psychological impact on the English-speaking world. Missionary fervor reached a high pitch as zealous young men and women volunteered for overseas duty, no matter what the cost.
George Grenfell was one of the many British citizens inspired by the work of Livingstone and drawn to Africa in the wake of his death. He was born in Cornwall, England, in 1849. It was through reading Livingstone’s first book that he committed himself to African missions. After working in a warehouse for a number of years while serving as a lay minister, he enrolled for a year at the Baptist College in Bristol to prepare for his missionary service.
In 1874, at the age of twenty-five, Grenfell was accepted by the Baptist Missionary Society (the same mission that commissioned William Carey some eighty years before), and the following month he left for the Cameroons. In 1876, he was back home in England for his marriage to a Miss Hawkes, who returned to Africa with him but died less than a year later, leaving him bereaved and regretful: “I have done a great wrong in taking my dear wife into this deadly climate of West Africa.” He remarried two years later, this time to a “colored” woman from the West Indies who was also widowed.24
After a three-year apprenticeship in the Cameroons, Grenfell was assigned to do pioneer work on the Congo River, following on the discoveries of Stanley’s 999-day journey. It was Grenfell’s hope to pave the way for a network of mission stations across Africa. His mode of travel was a river steamer, the Peace, which he assembled himself after three engineers who were sent one at a time to carry out the task all died. The Peace became a home for Grenfell and his family, who accompanied him on his exploratory trips.
The Congo lived up to the reputation of a “white man’s graveyard.” Only one out of four missionaries survived their first term of service. Yet Grenfell pleaded for more missionaries: “If more men don’t soon come, the Congo mission will collapse, and the work that has cost so much will be thrown away.” His own family did not escape the clutches of death. Four of his children were buried in the Congo, including his oldest daughter, Pattie, who had come from England as a teenager to help in the work.25
But the disease-ridden jungle was not the only obstacle standing in the way of bringing Christianity to the Congo. Unfriendly tribesmen, known for their cannibalism, were a constant threat. Grenfell recalled as many as twenty harrowing experiences of “running away from cannibals.” “The people are wild and treacherous, for several times after a period of apparently amicable intercourse, without any other cause than their own sheer ‘cussedness,’ as the Yankees would say, they let fly their poisoned arrows at us.”26
Grenfell’s own perspective on the situation was very different from that of others. Sam Lapsley, a young Presbyterian missionary, visiting in 1890, was disillusioned, according to Pagan Kennedy:
But lingering day after day at this remote outpost with the famous Grenfell had unsettled the young missionary. Yes, the station appeared to be comfortable enough, with its machine shop, photography studio, and observatory, its tall palm trees and its steamship, Peace, docked in front. But Mr. Grenfell himself was a mess—“very anxious,” Lapsley commented. Grenfell hated the natives, and they hated him. They had even threatened him with murder…. Was this what it meant to be a missionary? Hiding in your fancy house, terrified that the people you’d pledged to help might shoot you in the head?27
Lapsley’s concerns were reinforced when he later encountered refugees from Grenfell’s steamship Peace who were disoriented and starving. “According to the refugees, they had run off after being starved and then whipped,” writes Kennedy. “Without enough rations, the Peace had become a floating torture chamber with hungry white men beating even hungrier black men.”28
Grenfell, like many missionaries before and since, was in over his head. The dangers were real. That he had intentionally gone to Africa to torture the native people for his own benefit is an accusation that no serious historian would make. But it would be difficult to make the case that he was a true friend of Africa. He found himself caught between hostile Africans and the imperialistic power of Belgium’s King Leopold, who viewed the Congo as his private domain. Grenfell’s private maps and notes, and later his steamboat, were confiscated. His years in the Congo corresponded with the increasing atrocities against Africans—atrocities that were happening all around him. But “he was not willing to go public with what he knew, or even to protect the villages against encroaching State men,” writes Kennedy. “It’s no wonder some of the Africans wanted him dead.”29
Despite these circumstances, Grenfell continued on in his missionary work, supervising the Baptist missions in the Congo for twenty years—with surprising success in later years. In 1902 he wrote: “You will be glad to know that here at Bolobo, shorthanded as we are, we are not without evidence of progress and blessing. People are more willing to hear, and give heed to the message they have so long slighted. In fact, many are professing to have given their hearts to the Lord Jesus, and there are signs of good times coming.” Growth did continue, and soon there was a need for a larger chapel. He told of how twenty years before he had been driven off by spears, but now was greeted with the singing of “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.”30
Though Grenfell was prevented by the Belgian government from completing a network of mission stations linking up with stations of the Church Missionary Society from the east, he continued to do pioneer work until his death from African fever in 1906.
After thirty years in Africa, Grenfell left behind a mixed legacy. Although he “had seen firsthand the full range of abuses, including Leopold’s state employees buying chained slaves,” he was mostly silent. In a letter home, he wrote that he was hesitant to “publicly question the action of the State.”31 There would be others, however, who would take a stand against this Mafia-like lawlessness. Among them was an African-American missionary whose writings drew the world’s attention to this holocaust claiming an estimated ten million lives.
A missionary overlooked in most mission histories has been William Sheppard, a black American who went to the Congo in 1890 as a missionary sponsored by the Southern Presbyterians. He was part of a broader plan of “recruiting missionaries from the African race,” which coincided with the “back-to-Africa” movement engineered primarily by Southern whites. But whites were not the only ones attracted by the prospect of black missionaries in Africa. Returning to the land of their ancestors had long captured the imagination of many African Americans.
Born in Virginia at the end of the Civil War, Sheppard had the rare fortune of acquiring a good education, first at Virginia’s Hampton Institute and later in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at the Colored Theological Seminary. He became a Presbyterian minister and served congregations in Montgomery and Atlanta, and then applied to the Southern Presbyterian Church for an appointment as a missionary in Africa. “For two years the Presbyterians put Sheppard on hold,” writes Adam Hochschild. “Church authorities wouldn’t let him go to Africa unless a white man was available to be his superior.”32 Samuel Lapsley, also a Presbyterian minister and a descendent of slave owners, agreed to serve in that position—the younger directing the older.
After surveying the prospects for mission work, the two made plans to establish a mission post far north on the Kasai River. They worked well together, and Lapsley spoke highly of his partner: “The Bateke think there is nobody like ‘Mundele Ndom,’ the black white man, as they call Sheppard…. His temper is bright and even—really a man of unusual graces and strong points of character” and “a born trader.”33 The partnership was short-lived, however. In 1892 Lapsley, emaciated from African fever, journeyed downriver to the capital city. He never returned. When he learned of his partner’s death two months later, Sheppard went into the forest “to pour out my soul’s great grief.”34
“Sheppard continued to thrive,” according to Hochschild. “Unlike other missionaries, generally a pretty somber-looking lot, in photographs Sheppard seems to be enjoying himself.” When pictured with native people, “He has the distinct look of a football coach showing off a winning team.”35
Because of his contagious personality and sophisticated style—and his black skin—Sheppard suddenly found himself a dignitary among native Africans, welcomed as the returned spirit of a deceased king. He was the first outsider to obtain an audience with the intimidating Kuba king, Kot aMvweeky II, who received the stranger into his court. “Servants spread leopard skins for him to walk on whenever he approached the king, who sat on an ivory throne and wore a crown of beads and feathers.” Of the Kuba tribe, Sheppard wrote: “They are the finest looking race I had seen in Africa, dignified, graceful, courageous, honest, with an open smiling countenance and really hospitable. Their knowledge of weaving, embroidery, wood carving and smelting was the highest in equatorial Africa.”36
On furlough, Sheppard was also a celebrity. In London he lectured at Exeter Hall and was granted the honor of becoming a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Back in the United States, he visited with President Grover Cleveland and later Theodore Roosevelt and spoke at Princeton while Woodrow Wilson was president. During his first home leave he married Lucy Gantt, a teacher he had known during his student days. She gave birth to two children who survived, both of whom were raised by family back in the States.
As time passed, Sheppard encountered the increasingly terrible toll exacted by cruelties of colonialism, specifically, the rubber plunderers who had now moved into the Kasai River basin that was rich in rubber. Although he would later be acclaimed for publicizing the atrocities, he initially was reticent about challenging the white man’s rule in the Congo. Pushed by his new mission director, however, he was assigned to go right into the heart of the rubber plundering. Here he pretended to be an official inspecting the work of the African agents. What he found was worse than he could have imagined. The dead and dying were everywhere, and further evidence of King Leopold’s stranglehold on the country was offered by way of the grisly tradition of hand-collecting: “Malumba led Sheppard to a fire, outfitted with a grill. On top of it lay eighty-one right hands. Sheppard knew the exact number because he counted them.”37
Sheppard’s written reports and articles shattered the complacency of Americans and Europeans, and his role in exposing the atrocities was viewed as a threat by the powerful rubber racketeers. In a move to intimidate him and anyone else who would dare speak out, he was sued for libel. In the end he was vindicated, but more importantly, the court case helped bring the matter to the world’s attention. Under the headlines AMERICAN NEGRO HERO OF CONGO AND FIRST TO INFORM WORLD OF CONGO ABUSES, the Boston Herald wrote, “Dr. Sheppard has not only stood before kings, but he has also stood against them. In pursuit of his mission of serving his race in its native land, this son of a slave … has dared to withstand all the power of Leopold.”38
For all his fame and celebrity, Sheppard’s life was not without controversy and scandal. Following the libel trial, he was forced to step down as a missionary and return to America because of adulterous affairs with African women, one resulting in the birth of a son. He confessed these affairs in a written statement, and after a time of probation, he returned to the ministry, initially as a traveling speaker and later settling in Louisville as the pastor of a small Presbyterian congregation, where his wife led the choir and conducted children’s ministries.
While Grenfell and the Baptists were penetrating Africa from the west, the Church Missionary Society (CMS, an arm of the Anglican Church) was moving from the east in an effort to fulfill Stanley’s dream of spanning the continent with Christian mission stations. Johann Ludwig Krapf, a German Lutheran, was the first great CMS missionary to have this dream. He was one of many Lutherans from Germany who filled the ranks of the CMS when few Englishmen were willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Long before Stanley’s expedition, Krapf pioneered Protestant missions on the east coast. In 1844, after being driven out of Ethiopia, he founded a station at Mombasa on the Kenya coast, a victory that was overshadowed by the death of his wife and baby. Krapf continued in pioneer missionary work for more than twenty years, making some notable discoveries but never realizing his dream of spanning Africa with the gospel.
The most noted missionary commissioned to the east coast by the CMS was Alexander Mackay, who arrived in Africa in 1876, a year and a half after the arrival of Grenfell on the west coast. Mackay was a well-educated Scot, an engineer by profession but a jack-of-all-trades with a keen mind for linguistics and theology. He was one of eight missionaries sent out by the CMS in 1876 in response to Stanley’s rousing challenge to the Christian world that King Mtesa of Uganda had requested missionaries.
As the leader of this team of missionaries, Mackay felt an awesome responsibility, but his farewell message reflected the courageous determination such a venture required : “I want to remind the committee that within six months they will probably hear that some one of us is dead. Yes, is it at all likely that eight Englishmen should start for Central Africa and all be alive six months after? One of us at least—it may be I—will surely fall before that. When the news comes, do not be cast down, but send someone else immediately to take the vacant place.”39 Mackay’s words were still ringing in the directors’ ears when the news came that one of the eight had died. Five of them succumbed to the African graveyard in the first year, and by the end of the second year, Mackay was the only one left.
Though at times Mackay was at the point of death, he refused to give up. By 1878, two years after his arrival, he had constructed (with the help of African labor) a 230-mile road from the coast to Lake Victoria. But there was no joyous welcome. He arrived shortly after the murder of two fellow missionaries, and the rest of his colleagues had all left due to ill-health.
On reaching Lake Victoria, Mackay constructed a boat and then crossed the lake to Entebbe, where he met with King Mtesa. While Mtesa and his people welcomed him, there was opposition to his presence from other sectors—particularly Roman Catholics and Muslims. Mtesa himself was an unsavory character who almost daily executed his subjects for trivial offenses and allegedly had the largest store of wives of any man in history. With the protection of Mtesa, Mackay began preaching the gospel to the Baganda people, whom he found eager to learn. Soon he began translating the Scriptures. Long hours were spent at the printing press, but his labors were rewarded. Late in 1879, only a year after his arrival, he wrote: “Hosts of people come every day for instruction, chiefly in reading.”40 In 1882 the first baptisms took place, and two years later the local church had eighty-six African members.
Church growth was not without hazards. There were numerous attempts on Mackay’s life, and the situation became critical after Mtesa died in 1884 and was succeeded by his son, Mwanga. In 1885 more than thirty Christian boys were reportedly burned alive for refusing to succumb to Mwanga’s homosexual exploits. Later that year James Hannington, an Anglican bishop attempting to enter Uganda from the east, was killed by orders of Mwanga. Tensions reached a climax when full-scale civil war broke out between Protestant and Catholic natives, ending with the bloody battle of Mengo. Through British military intervention the region was divided into Protestant and Catholic spheres of influence.
The Catholic presence in this area was largely a result of the intelligent, imaginative, and forceful leadership of Charles Lavagerie, who, according to Adrian Hastings, was “the most outstanding Catholic missionary strategist of the nineteenth century.” Lavagerie was the founder of the White Fathers in 1868, and later the White Sisters. Unlike the Jesuits in previous centuries, the White Fathers conformed very closely to Rome on theological matters, but Lavagerie insisted that his missionaries otherwise conform to African customs. Developing an indigenous ministry was his prime concern. The growing conflict between Catholics and Protestants was not so much a matter of deep hostilities between the missionaries as it has been sometimes portrayed. Rather, it was the appeal of the Christian message from both sources that led to the tension. “Standard missiology,” writes Hastings, “has portrayed the arrival of two competing societies … as an evangelical disaster in a most promising field. The evidence suggests the contrary. It was the very tension between the two … which created a genuinely intellectual challenge and made Christianity so intriguingly appealing.”41
During these years Mackay was threatened repeatedly with expulsion, but his value as a skilled engineer served him well until 1887 when the Arabs finally convinced Mwanga to expel him. Mackay continued his ministry in Tanganyika on the southern end of Lake Victoria, where he continued translating and printing the Bible and serving Christian refugees from Uganda. In 1890, at the age of forty, this single and often solitary missionary died of malaria. After his death one of his grief-stricken colleagues lamented the irreplaceable loss in a simple but telling eulogy: “A score of us would never make a Mackay.”
Mackay’s death did not end the struggle to bring the gospel to Uganda. The CMS refused to be intimidated. In 1890, the year of Mackay’s death, Alfred R. Tucker, a saintly Anglican bishop, arrived in Uganda and, through the invaluable assistance of African evangelists, built a church membership of sixty-five thousand. His unswerving commitment to racial equality stirred opposition among fellow missionaries, but his ideals triumphed, and the church in Uganda thrived.
One of the African evangelists to carry on the work of Mackay was Apolo Kivebulaya. He had first heard the gospel message from Mackay—a message that stayed with him during his military service and was later intensified through a vision. This was his call to preach to the pygmies. Christ “appeared to me in the form of a man and stood beside me…. He said to me, ‘Go and preach in the forest because I am with you.’”42 He followed that call and went into the forest to Mboga, where he encountered severe persecution. He was beaten repeatedly, on one occasion so badly that he was left for dead, “cast into the bush.” The chief declared that “the wild beasts would soon make an end” of him.43
But miraculously, Kivebulaya survived. “Mboga was stirred to its depths; everyone flocked to see the dead man who had come to life again, foremost among them the startled chief…. He declared with weeping that God had spoken to him. After due teaching, he was baptized.”44 Kivebulaya continued on in the ministry for thirty years until he died in 1933. “It could be said that the entire Anglican province of today in eastern Zaire has grown out of Kivebulaya’s work,” writes Adrian Hastings, “a work wholly untouched by the pursuit of power, wealth, or any physical satisfaction whatsoever.”45
The exploration and missionary work of Livingstone and Stanley inspired scores of others to embark on Africa—women as well as men. Most of the women, not surprisingly, envisioned their ministry sheltered within the confines of an established mission station, such as Kuruman where Mary Moffat spent most of her life. Exploration and pioneer work was not even an option for a single female missionary—until Mary Slessor arrived on the scene.
The story of Mary Slessor, as much as that of any missionary in modern history, has been romanticized almost beyond recognition. The image of her as a Victorian lady dressed in high-necked, ankle-length flowing dresses, escorted by tribal warriors through the African rain forests in a painted canoe, is far removed from the reality of the barefoot, scantily clad, red-haired, working-class woman who lived African-style in a mud hovel, her face at times covered with boils and often without her false teeth. Yet her success as a missionary pioneer was amazing, and the oneness she felt for the Africans has been equaled by few. She held the distinction of being the first woman vice-consul in the British Empire, but the greatest tribute she ever received was paid to her before her death by fellow missionaries who knew her well and, in spite of her faults and eccentricities, honored her as a great woman of God.
Mary Mitchell Slessor, the second of seven children, was born in Scotland in 1848. Her childhood was marred by poverty and family strife due largely to the sporadic work habits of her alcoholic father, who had been known to throw her out into the streets alone at night after he had come home drunk. At age eleven she began working alongside her mother at the textile mills as a half-timer while she continued on in her schooling. By the time she was fourteen she was working ten-hour days, and for the next thirteen years she was the primary wage earner in the family.
Though she later referred to herself as a “wild lassie,” there was little time or opportunity for leisure in the crowded, polluted working-class district where her family lived. Church activities, however, offered a fulfilling outlet from her miserable home life. She taught Sunday school, and when she was in her early twenties, she began working with the Queen Street Mission. Here she confronted street gangs that tried to break up her open-air meetings in the blighted neighborhoods of Dundee—neighborhoods that served as a training ground for her work in Africa.
Since early childhood, she had been deeply interested in overseas missions—particularly in the Calabar Mission (located in present-day Nigeria), established two years before her birth. Her missionary-minded mother hoped her only living son, John, would become a missionary, but his death shattered her dreams. However, the tragedy opened the way for Mary to escape the mills and to take her brother’s place. The Calabar Mission had always made room for women, and she knew she would be a welcome addition to the staff. The death of David Livingstone clinched her decision.
In 1875 Slessor applied to and was accepted by the Calabar Mission, and in the summer of 1876, at the age of twenty-seven, she sailed for Calabar, long known for its slave trade and deadly environment. Her earliest years in Africa were spent at Duke Town, where she taught in a mission school and spent time in the nearby villages. But she was dissatisfied with her assignment, never feeling at ease with the social niceties and ample lifestyle of the missionary families comfortably stationed there. (And no doubt they also had reservations about her—a twenty-nine-year-old woman who admittedly had climbed every tree worth climbing between Duke Town and Old Town.) Life was too routine. Only a month after her arrival she had written, “One does need a special grace to enable one to sit still. It is so difficult to wait.”46 Her heart was set on doing pioneer work in the interior, but for that “privilege” she would have to wait.
After less than three years in Africa and weakened by several attacks of malaria (and many more of homesickness), Slessor was allowed a furlough to regain her strength and reunite with her family. She returned to Africa, refreshed and excited about her new assignment at Old Town, three miles farther inland along the Calabar River. Here she was free to work by herself and to maintain her own lifestyle—living in a mud hut and eating local produce allowed her to send most of her mission salary to her family back home. No longer was her work routine. She supervised schools, dispensed medication, mediated disputes, and mothered unwanted children. On Sundays she became a circuit preacher, trudging miles through the jungle from village to village, sharing the gospel with those who would listen.
Evangelism in Calabar was a slow and tedious process. Witchcraft and spiritism abounded. Cruel tribal customs were embedded in tradition and almost impossible to eradicate. One of the most heartrending of these customs decreed that a twin birth was a curse. In many cases both babies were killed, and the mother was exiled to an area reserved for outcasts. Slessor not only rescued twins and ministered to their mothers but also fought the perpetrators, sometimes risking her own life. But after three years she was once again too ill to remain in Africa.
On her second visit home she was accompanied by Janie, a baby girl she had rescued from death. She and Janie were a sensation—so much so that the mission committee extended her furlough. She was also detained by her sickly mother and sister. In 1885, after nearly three years’ leave, she returned to Africa, determined to penetrate farther into the interior.
Mary Slessor, pioneer missionary to Calabar, West Africa.
Soon after she returned, Slessor received word of her mother’s death, and three months after that, of her sister’s. Another sister had died during her furlough, and now she was left alone with no close ties to her homeland. She was despondent and almost overcome with loneliness: “There is no one to write and tell all my stories and troubles and nonsense to.” But along with the loneliness and sorrow came a sense of freedom: “Heaven is now nearer to me than Britain, and no one will be anxious about me if I go up-country.”47
“Up-country” to Slessor meant Okoyong, a remote area that had claimed the lives of other missionaries who had dared to penetrate its borders. Sending a single woman to that region was considered by many to be an exercise in insanity, but she was determined to go and would not be dissuaded. After visiting the area a number of times with other missionaries, she was convinced that such work was best accomplished by women, who, she believed, were less threatening to unreached tribes than men. So in August of 1888, with the assistance of her friend King Eyo of Old Town, she was on her way north.
Life was very difficult up-country—especially during the first months, as entries in her diary indicate:
In the forenoon I was left alone with the mud and the rain …, with a gap round the window frame and more round the doorway. I looked helplessly on day after day at the rain pouring down on the boxes, bedding, and everything…. I am living in a single apartment with a mud floor and that not in the best condition. Moreover it is shared by three boys and two girls and we are crowded in on every side by men, women, children, goats, dogs, fowls, rats and cats all going and coming indiscriminately.48
For the next quarter of a century and more, Slessor would continue to pioneer missions in areas in which no white man had been able to survive. Her reputation as a peacemaker spread to outlying districts, and soon she was acting as a judge for the whole region. In 1892 she was appointed the first vice-consul to Okoyong, a government position she held for many years. In that capacity she acted as a judge and presided over court cases involving disputes over land, debts, family matters, and the like. Her methods were unconventional by British standards (often refusing to act solely on the evidence before her if she personally was aware of other factors), but they were well suited to African society.
Slessor was very isolated from outsiders during much of her missions career, but in 1893 she enjoyed a visit from Mary Kingsley, a British journalist who would later write Travels in West Africa. Though Kingsley confessed that she was not a believer, she greatly admired her missionary hostess. Of Slessor, she wrote:
This very wonderful lady has been eighteen years in Calabar; for the last six or seven living entirely alone, as far as white folks go, in a clearing in the forest near one of the principal villages of the Okoyong district, and ruling as a veritable white chief over the entire district. Her great abilities, both physical and intellectual, have given her among the savage tribe a unique position, and won her, from white and black who know her, a profound esteem. Her knowledge of the native, his language, his ways of thought, his diseases, his difficulties, and all that is his, is extraordinary, and the amount of good she has done, no man can fully estimate. Okoyong, when she went there alone … was given, as most of the surrounding districts still are, to killing at funerals, ordeal by poison, and perpetual internecine wars. Many of these evil customs she has stamped out…. Miss Slessor stands alone.49
Slessor’s life as a pioneer missionary was a lonely one, but she occasionally traveled back to England or to Duke Town. During one of her sick leaves to the coast, she met Charles Morrison, a missionary teacher who was much younger than she was. Their friendship grew, and Slessor accepted his marriage proposal, with the provision that he would work with her in Okoyong. The marriage, however, never took place. His health did not even permit him to remain in Duke Town, and for her, missionary service came before personal relationships.
She was probably not suited for marriage anyway. Her living habits and daily routine were so haphazard that she was no doubt better off remaining single. Women had tried to live with her but usually without success. She was careless about hygiene, and her mud huts were infested with roaches, rats, and ants. Meals, school hours, and church services were irregular—more suited to Africans than to time-oriented Europeans. Clothing, too, was a matter of little concern for her. She soon discovered that the modest, tightly fitted long dresses of Victorian England were not suited to life in an African rain forest. Instead, she wore simple cotton garments, often clinging to her skin in the dampness (causing one male missionary to insist on walking ahead of her on jungle treks so he would not have to look at her, even though she was the one who was familiar with the trails).
Though Slessor often failed to take the most basic health precautions and “lived native” (as other missionaries were prone to say), she outlived most of her fellow missionaries who were careful about health and hygiene. Nevertheless, she did suffer recurring attacks of malaria, and she often endured painful boils that appeared on her face and head, sometimes resulting in baldness. At times, however, she was surprisingly healthy and robust for a middle-aged woman. Her many adopted children kept her young and happy, and she could heartily say that she was “a witness to the perfect joy and satisfaction of a single life.”50
Although she was highly respected as a judge and civic leader, she reported few conversions. She viewed her work as preparatory and was not unduly anxious about her lack of converts. She organized schools, taught practical skills, and established trade routes, all in preparation for others to follow. In 1903, near the end of her term at Okoyong, the first baptism service was held (with seven of the eleven children baptized being her own), and a church was organized with seven charter members.
In 1904, at the age of fifty-five, she moved on from Okoyong with her seven children to do pioneer work in Itu and other remote areas. Here she encountered great success with the Ibo people. Janie, her oldest adopted daughter, was now a valuable assistant in the work, and another woman missionary was able to take over the work at Okoyong. For the remaining decade of her life, she continued in this pioneer work while others followed behind her—their ministry made easier by her pioneering efforts. In 1915, nearly forty years after coming to Africa, she died at the age of sixty-six in her mud hut.
During the span of her ministry in Africa there had been a dramatic increase in missionary work. Independent faith missions were rapidly developing. The denominational missions supported by the Anglicans (who grew from a little over a hundred to more than a thousand during this period), Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists made dramatic increases in their overseas outreach. Likewise, such missions as the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Evangelical Alliance Mission, the Sudan Interior Mission, and the Africa Inland Mission had all gained a solid foothold in the interior and were on their way to becoming a major missionary force in Africa.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buchan, James. The Expendable Mary Slessor. New York: Seabury Press, 1981.
Buxton, Meriel. David Livingstone. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Christian, Carol, and Gladys Plummer. God and One Redhead: Mary Slessor of Calabar. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970.
Falk, Peter. The Growth of the Church in Africa. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979.
Hastings, Adrian. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Jeal, Tim. Livingstone. New York: Dell, 1973.
Kennedy, Pagan. Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo. New York: Viking, 2002.
Livingstone, W. P. Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915.
Morrison, J. H. The Missionary Heroes of Africa. New York: Doran, 1922.
Mueller, J. Theodore. Great Missionaries to Africa. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1941. Northcott, Cecil. David Livingstone: His Triumph, Decline, and Fall. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973.
______. Robert Moffat: Pioneer in Africa, 1817–1870. London: Lutterworth, 1961.
Ransford, Oliver. David Livingstone: The Dark Interior. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978.