Mary Slessor.
“The White Queen of Calabar.”
One day in 1898 onlookers at Waverley Station in Edinburgh Scotland, were astonished to see a woman of slight build, with a face like yellow parchment in hue and with short straight hair, get off the train accompanied by four wide-eyed African girls.
Mary Slessor had been the mainstay of her family after her father’s death, working long hours as a Scottish factory girl. But, like her compatriot David Livingstone, Mary had educated herself reading good books, few sentences at a time, while tending her machine.
Wherever Mary went on her triumphal tour among churches, the people were enthralled as they heard her tell how she had endured hunger and thirst under the flaming sun of Africa. She had been smitten down by tropical fevers, had controlled drunken cannibals brandishing loaded muskets, and had calmed warlike men lusting for her blood and had faced death a thousand times in her endeavor to bring redemption’s story to Africa’s perishing peoples.
They were moved to tears as she told of slave markets, of human sacrifices, of cannibalism and told specifically how, upon a certain chefs death, 25 heads were cut off and at death of another chief, 60 people were killed and eaten.
But there are stories of how she had rescued from death hundreds of baby twins and other deserted babies thrown out in the forest to perish or to be eaten by ants or leopards.
She often used the scriptures to 1Corinthians 15:45 “So also it is written: “The first man, Adam, became a living person.” The last Adam was a life-giving spirit.” to describe the reason to be born again with twins as an illustration of truth and not a curse. They believed the first born is the real and the second a shadow to haunt the first born – so they discarded them both.
Part 2 to follow.