The Story of Mary Slessor and Selflessness
- RevShirleyMurphy
- Sep 6
- 6 min read
There are some people in history whose lives make us stop in our tracks. Their stories challenge our comfort, stretch our faith, and inspire us to live bolder for Jesus. One such person is Mary Slessor, a woman whose fierce devotion to Christ led her deep into the heart of West Africa. There she lived out her mission for Jesus, transforming lives, confronting injustice, and fearlessly carrying the gospel into places no one else dared to go.
Mary Slessor lived from 2 December 1848 to 13 January 1915. She made her name as a Scottish missionary to Nigeria, where her strong personality won her trust locally and afforded her considerable success in promoting both Christianity and women's rights. Her life is celebrated on a Scottish £10 note issued by Clydesdale Bank.
Mary Slessor was born in Aberdeen, moving to Dundee at the age of 11 in 1859. Her father was a shoemaker who lost his job due to an addiction to alcohol and eventually found work in Dundee's jute mills. Mary's mother was a strongly religious woman who ensured that Mary attended church and that she kept up her education by attending school on a half time basis, after family circumstances meant Mary also had to start work in the jute mills. By the time she was 14, Mary was a skilled jute worker, now working from 6am to 6pm each day having finished her formal education.
While still young, Mary joined a local mission to the poor, working to instil Christian values in Dundee's deprived areas. There is a famous story of her forcing a group of local youths to attend Sunday School as part of a dare in which she refused to flinch as one of them swung a heavy metal weight close to her face.
In 1876 at the age of 28, Mary applied to be a missionary with the Foreign Mission Board of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. She received training in Scotland before setting sail on the S.S. Ethiopia on 5 August 1876, arriving in Calabar in south-eastern Nigeria just over a month later.
The country she found was in a state of chaos. The colonial power, Britain, had seized control, but was more interested in the maintenance of trade than in the welfare of the Nigerians. The slave trade was still a recent memory in the country, and infanticide and human sacrifice still took place. Women's rights were next to non-existent. And disease was rife: Mary herself suffered from malaria.
Mary's determination steadily won her the respect of the Nigerians she came into contact with. Unlike most missionaries, she lived among those she worked with. She became fluent in the local language, Efik, and developed a deep knowledge of local customs and culture. Eventually the regional Governor offered her Membership of the Itu Court. Mary also adopted a number of local children rejected by their parents: twins were considered at the time in Nigeria to be cursed and could even be sacrificed as a result.
By the early 1900s Mary was helping vaccinate Nigerians against smallpox. But she was also suffering from increasingly severe bouts of malaria. Her strength declined, to the point where a woman who once embarked on all-night treks through the rain forest had to travel in a handcart pushed by an assistant.
Mary’s life between 1906 and 1912, was a struggle between ill-health, and her most strenuous duties – court sittings, teaching and preaching, palavers with native visitors. Once, after ten hours in court, she returned home to find fifty visitors waiting for advice and it took her till midnight ‘to straighten out their troubles.’
When she became thoroughly ill, she consented to travel to the Canary Islands, and rest there as she could not rest where she was known. On her return, wonderfully restored, the doctor’s report of her was: ‘Good for many years – with care.’ With the best possible will to take care of herself, however, old habits of entire selflessness could not be broken through.
She went on with most of her ordinary work – except that of the court, which she gave up – she visited the centre at Akpap, meeting crowds of her old friends of Okoyong – some of her rescued babies grown into healthy, happy young people – and she conducted a religious service with a congregation of four hundred.
For two more years she wrestled on and on, meeting the same old difficulties in her own original ways, still travelling up and down the rivers, still keeping a little home where her native ‘children’ were cared for – and then came a last shattering blow – the Great War of 1914.
It was August – strange, awful days in Europe, the first week after the Declaration of War – but it was not till August 13th that the news reached the Calabar Mission Field. It was the neighbourhood of the German territory of the Cameroons that brought fear to the European settlers there; fear for their settlements and work rather than for themselves. Miss Slessor’s health suffered greatly from the strain of anxiety but her fighting spirit rose, ‘Oh! if I were 30 years younger, and a man’, she cried.
The recurring illnesses and general hardships which she faced as a matter of course all took their toll on this redoubtable woman. By 1915, her physical strength had greatly declined, and the woman who had once thought nothing of all-night treks through the rain forest was finally reduced to travelling in a handcart propelled by one of her assistants. On the 13th of January 1915, after an excruciating and prolonged bout of fever, Mary Slessor died aged 67. Five of her native girls were with her, and the mission workers nursed her by turns. She suffered intensely from thirst and utter weakness: ‘O God, release me’, she was heard to say. On January 12th her strength was swiftly ebbing, her breathing difficult; the end came gently in the very early dawn. In his biography of 1980, James Buchan described her as the “Expendable Mary Slessor”. Expendable she may have been, but few have given so much of themselves to so many, and under such appalling conditions.
The grave of Mary Slessor, marked by an imposing cross of Scottish granite, is in the heart of the country she served so well. She was accorded a state funeral and, in 1953, the new head of the Commonwealth, Elizabeth II, made her own pilgrimage to the graveside. Mary Slessor is still remembered in Dundee, as in her adopted homeland, and there is a growing world-wide interest in her work. The finest tribute was from those of her own who knew her best. To them she was “Mother of All the Peoples” or, more simply, “Ma”.
There seems no need to try to sum up the results of her work; as we read of it, we feel indeed that the best part of it could not be described or expressed in any way. Her amazingly wide and deep influence was revealed to some extent after her death by the mass of letters she had received. It seems as though none came into contact with her without a deep impression of her simple, joyous, loving humanity. She is a beautiful example of the beautiful saying, ‘To have love is to work miracles.’
Mary died on 13 January 1915. She was given a state funeral in Nigeria and in 1953 her grave was visited by Queen Elizabeth. To Nigerians she is simply remembered as "Mother of All the Peoples".
In 1923 a stained-glass window was dedicated to Mary’s memory. This now resides in the café in Dundee’s McManus Galleries. There is also a stained-glass window dedicated to Mary in All Saints Church, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
A series of banknotes issued by the Clydesdale Bank (now withdrawn) featured a different design for each denomination, each depicting a notable person from Scottish history. The £10 note featured an illustration of Slessor’s work in Calabar (Nigeria) including a map of the area and a lithographic vignette depicting her work with children.
When she died, in 1915, Slessor was honoured with an elaborate funeral, with senior British officials attending in full uniform and flags flying at half-mast at government buildings.
Revered to this day by the Efik peoples in Calabar, Mary Slessor's legacy became one of mercy, rather than religious conversion.
"She didn't just take with her these Western values - she wore the same clothes as the locals wore, lived beside the people, learned their language and spoke to them in their tongue," said Mr Chalmers.
"That's what made her different - in many respects perhaps the first of a new missionary kind, not just importing stuff from this country but being sensitive to the culture and the needs of the people there."
"Her legacy is that you can't just take your beliefs and standards and values abroad and dump them on people.
"If you're really interested in people's lives and making them better, you have to understand where they come from. You have to understand them as people and love them as people, and that's what Mary Slessor did."
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