As James Luke wrote in The Record in 1904, “Where the church has failed, a single woman has stepped into the breach.” But Slessor would have put it in simpler terms: “After all, it comes back to this: Christ sent me to preach the gospel, and he will look after the results.”

There is something about Mary Slessor that has turned her into a legend. By the time she died, she was as well-known as one of her role models, David Livingstone. Today, her name is still highly regarded both in her native Scotland (her image appeared on a 1997 Clydesdale Bank £10 note) and on her mission field of Nigeria, where she is often remembered as Obongawan Okoyong (Queen of Okoyong). Statues have been erected in her honor and schools and churches named after her.

And yet, as much as her commissioning mission board appreciated her achievements, they were baffled by her insistence to venture into the forests where natural dangers, protective tribes, and an oppressive climate had frightened most European missionaries. To make things worse, she discarded many of the typical Western precautions. In her effort to become one with the natives, she walked barefoot, drank unboiled water, and shunned both the protection of mosquito nets and sun hats. To some foreigners, she looked “mad and dangerous.”1

But, while she fully understood that God’s timetable differs from ours (“Christ never was in a hurry,”2 she famously said), Slessor had little patience with the missionary board’s hesitations. It was the challenge of bringing the gospel to an unreached population that had moved her to approach the mission board in the first place, and she was not about to sit with other missionaries in the relative comfort of a coastal town.

The Making of a Missionary

Despite her small frame and timid personality (she was famously afraid of crossing a road alone or standing in a field if there was a cow), Mary Slessor was used to challenges. Born on December 2, 1848, in Gilcomston, a suburb of Aberdeen, Scotland, she was only ten when her father’s alcoholism and consequent unemployment forced her to work as a weaver in the textile mills of Dundee to support her family. And yet, after her twelve-hour work schedule, she found time to improve her slim education and, later, to serve as a missionary teacher in the local United Presbyterian Church.

In 1873, captivated by the flurry of reports following the death of David Livingstone, she applied to her denomination’s foreign mission board. Three years later, with only minimal training, she was off to Duke Town, Calabar, near the southeastern coast of present-day Nigeria.

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1. Jeanette Hardage, Mary Slessor – Everybody’s Mother: The Era and Impact of a Victorian Missionary (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2008), 123.

2. W.P. Livingstone, Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), 27.