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Tag: Mary Slessor

  • Twins remember Mary Slessor 102 years after

    The Mary Slessor Twins Club International in Calabar, the Cross River State capital, has pledged to continue to honour and sustain the legacies of the late Scottish Missionary, Mary Slessor.

    Slessor, who was born on December 2, 1848 was a missionary of the Presbyterian faith that came to Nigeria from Scotland to spread Christianity. She was noted for protecting native children and promoting women’s rights, and particularly for stopping the killing of twins among the Efiks of Calabar. She died on January 13, 1915 and was buried in Calabar.

    The association also known as the Twins Foundation visited Slessor’s grave in Mission Hill, Duke Town, in Calabar, for a wreath laying ceremony as part of activities to mark her 102nd memorial.

    Founders and Executive Directors of the Foundation, Twins Ene and Mkpang Cobham, also married to a set of twin sisters, said January 13 was an important day in their lives.

    Mr Ene Cobham who spoke on their behalf said, “It is institutionalized in our calendar of activities that every 13th of January, we come to the Mission Hill where Mary Slessor was buried in Calabar to give honour to her. It is a day of remembrance and a day of celebration. It is something unique that the world celebrates in view of the fact that the quintessential missionary was the one who stopped the killing of twins. So we have every duty, every reason and every cause to celebrate her this special day.

    “In our calendar of activities, 2nd of December which is the day she was born and 13th of January being the day she passed on are two special dates that we visit the hospital to show solidarity with twins born within this period and to thank God for our lives.

    “It was Mary Slessor’s efforts that made it possible for us to be alive today and for the first time in Calabar, my brother and myself are also married a set of twin sisters and we recently had our 10th year anniversary in marriage.”

    We have to support twins and their parents in vocational trainings and other training that would give them livelihood. What is important is for them to have economic value for themselves and the society. We are looking forward to such assistance.

    “The aim of organisation is to bring all the twins together under one umbrella and provide the forum, where twins and other multiple birth can express themselves and with a sense of purpose, through creating opportunities for personal development for the betterment of themselves and the society.”

    Associate Minister of the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria, Hope Waddell Parish, Rev Aniefiok Asuquo Tom, also said, “We are here on a special thanksgiving unto God for the life of a young woman, who chose the call of God Almighty and decided to make herself available to the service of the Lord, all the way from Scotland and came down to Nigeria and in particular, Calabar to preach the gospel of the Almighty God to all.

    “Good enough her presence in Calabar really made an impact in the lives of the twins. It was a taboo before now for twins to be born and the mother of such children were thrown into the evil forest. But she came in and she stopped that mentality. Today the twins are celebrating the good work of the woman.”

    Other activities to mark the 102nd memorial included visiting a set of quintuplets recently born in Calabar and a special thanksgiving service in honour of Mary Slessor at the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria, Hope Waddell Parish, Calabar.

  • For Mary Slessor, twins invade Calabar

    For Mary Slessor, twins invade Calabar

    The name Mary Slessor is synonymous with the stoppage of the obnoxious culture of killing of twins in Calabar, the Cross River State capital. Hence it really was not out of place as twins from all works of life, under the aegis, Mary Slessor Twins Club International gathered in Calabar, the Cross River State capital, where the Scottish woman first landed the country in 1876, to commemorate her to sustain the legacies she stood for, in a one day memorial symposium.

    Founders of the Club, also known as Twins Foundation, Twin Ene Cobham and Twin Mkpang Cobham, said the symposium is to immortalize the woman and also to appreciate her for all that she did and the magnanimous show of love she showed by stopping the killing of twins.

    They said it also provided the opportunity to gather twins from all works of life from one umbrella where they can express themselves as one mind and a sense of purpose, developing themselves and the society.

    “If not for her coming, what we are experiencing today would not have come to pass. So we appreciate God for bring her to this part of the country and that is why we have this symposium to brainstorm on the way forward, immortalising her by promoting and sustaining her legacies. Her legacies are so enormous. We started the organization in August 23, 2002. We have been moving strongly although not without some challenges, especially financially. We have been working with some government agencies and the private sector and we believe the best is yet to come.

    “Though we have twin organizations all over the country and the world, ours is unique because we are celebrating the woman who stood and sacrificed her life to stop the killing of twins so it is very significant for us to that we honour her,” they said.

    Chairman of the event, Elder Eyo E. Okon, noted that Slessor was a selfless person, lamenting this was a quality that leaders in the country today lacked. He urged that if justice is to be done to the Scottish woman’s memory, then the ideals she stood for should be sustained, even as the twins commemorate her.

    Chief Executive Officer and the secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation in a paper titled the benefits of the Post Mary Slessor Centenary Celebrations to the Socio-Economic Applications: The Twins Perspective, said “the legacy of Mary Slessor must survive for us to build the same platform of the same shared dreams for stakeholders, partners and descendants.”

    “The benefits of investing in the venerated name and legacy of Mary Slessor are awesome. Spiritually, she beckons a stepping-stone for our evangelism, a catalyst for breaking religio-ethnic barriers and a cornerstone of reference in terms of faith, courage and responsibility.

    “Mary Slessor is also a living legacy that brings continuous socio-economic wealth to the church, the catchment states and Nigeria, as she brings all to the realization of man’s ultimate spirit and ability to overcome every conceived spiritual and environmental challenge or obstacle.”

    Also presenting a paper on the Legacies of Mary Slessor in Time and Space, Rev Ubong E. Eyo of the Department of Religious and Cultural Studies, University of Calabar, said the path of honour is not always trod by those who were born into greatness but by those who irrespective of their birth made positive indelible marks in the lives of people. Such, according to him, could be said of Mary Slessor.

    “The boldness of traversing the jungle of Africa by this Scottish woman need not go uncelebrated. In the dark and thick forest of Africa were different customs which were inimical to the welfare of human society, and Mary Slessor delivered the people from those customs,” he said.

    Among her legacies, he said inhumation, which she fought against human lives accompanying dead kings of chief, stopping the killing of twins, acting as a judge and her mission work of professing the gospel. He noted Slessor was never married as she gave all of her life to helping people.

    He urged that her legacies be sustained at the personal level, the institutional level and also through the fight for gender equality.

    Represented at the event were the Obong of Calabar and the Muri Munene of the Efuts, who urged the Foundation to get bigger and stronger ad whatever should be done on Slessor’s behalf, must be properly done.

    Mary Slessor was born on December 2, 1848, near Aberdeen, Scotland. She was the second of seven siblings. She came from a poor family background and lost her father and four of her siblings at an early age. By 1859 when she was only eleven years, she began part-time work in a weaving mill and by 1862 was working full-time. She later became very active in church activities and in May 1875 offered her services to the Foreign Mission Board. Her heart was set on Calabar, but so eager was she to be accepted that she said she would be willing to go to any other field. Her personality, and the accounts given of her character and work, made such an impression on the officials that they reported favourably to the Board, and she was accepted as a teacher for Calabar. After training in Edinburgh, she set sail in the S.S. Ethiopia on 5 August 1876, and arrived at Old Calabar in West Africa in September of the same year. She died on January 13, 1915.

  • Church celebrates Mary Slessor

    The Presbyterian Church of Nigeria has started activities in celebration of the centenary of the pioneering missionary enterprise of Mary Mitchell Slessor.

    She was a legendary pioneer evangelist, teacher, judge, mother, medical aid worker and a quintessential crusader for the preservation of human lives, who lived and worked in Nigeria from 1876 to 1915.

    The activities began on January 12 with the laying of the foundation stone of the Mary Slessor International Centre at Amasu, Arochukwu, Abia State, by the Prelate & Moderator of the General Assembly of the church, Most Rev. Emele Uka.

    There will also be a Twins Festival in celebration of Mary Slessor’s achievements in the stoppage of the killing of twin babies and the banishment of their mothers in old Calabar, Okoyong and lbibio areas of Nigeria.

    Other activities will include a memorial lecture, a musical concert and a thanksgiving service, which will form the highlight of the celebrations.

    In a statement, the Director of Information & Public Affairs of the church, Rev. Kalu Eme, said The Presbyterian Church of Nigeria, which is the principal custodian of the name and work of Mary Slessor, was inspired to embark on the celebrations to highlight the legacy of Mary Slessor and use it to address the myriad of social challenges besetting the nation, such as ignorance, illiteracy, poverty, lack of infrastructural facilities, bad leadership, corruption, nepotism, youth restiveness, militancy, insurgency, etc.

  • Mary Slessor meets girl bomber

    Mary Slessor meets girl bomber

    When Mary Slessor visited this part of the world exactly 100 years ago, the killing of twins scandalised her missionary soul. Locals thought them a taboo. Twins sprang from the bad spirits in the ether world. So, slaughtering them did not amount to barbarism. Rather it freed their cultural consciences. Mary Slessor may have seen the killers in the light of Apostle Paul’s words, that their “consciences were seared with hot iron.”

    But they did not hate the twins. They only feared them. The strange creatures were malformed dainties. They had to let them go. The culture wept when ogbanje’s slipped out of its own fingers. But the same culture exulted at the barbarity of its own hands that wrung twins to death.

    Mary Slessor did not judge them. They did not know what they did. Even in Achebe”s Things Fall Apart, the novelist only scratched the surface of the benighted act, and no one looked at that primitive era of infanticide with righteous horror. Culture defines morality, and when culture is dark, good can be evil. Like in the poem Paradise Lost. Poet John Milton paints Satan in magnificence as a brutish beauty. “All good to me is lost,” chants the devil in that epic opus.

    One hundred years after, the child still suffers in solitude. What will Mary Slessor think of the fate of the child today in Nigeria, especially the girl child? In the past half year, Boko Haram has hatched a new idea. Girl children are now deployed as bullets and bombs. They are no longer beauties but beasts. They haunt the innocent in the market, in the public square, on the populated streets, in churches. Young girls are innocents, but they are the scare of the adults and children and men. This is the height of perversion. They are like horror movies where girl children doom adults.

    But Mary Slessor would have mused on the savage irony of the day. Young girls roused a different odium a year ago. We frowned, including in this column, at the sexual perversion of girl-child marriages. A governor married a girl of about 13 years, and he tried to fetch justification from the constitution. We mourned the prevalence of VVF, the physical damage and the psychological trauma, of the big men crouching in sexual ecstasies over unformed female organs. Governors do it. Senators do it. Bankers do it. We moan it. But no one has stopped it.

    Mary Slessor would have campaigned against it. A moral heroine of that day, she changed a whole culture. Can a voice rise today to save the girl child up North? Mary Slessor had no Internet, or newspapers, or television, or the sort of bandwagon convulsion of the #bringbackourgirls movement. Yet she succeeded with the charisma of faith and majesty of moral suasion. Is this an age of irretrievable evil?

    It is justified falsely in the name of religion. The answer, we opined, is the brilliance of education. Reports have shown girls in revolt. Some run away into an uncertain world, but prefer the wilds of uncertain streets to the servitude of sexual tyranny. Others sulk to their hoary graves in sullen slavery.

    Now, while bemoaning this, we face another tyranny: the girl bomber. Last month, Zaharau, a 13-year-old, did not detonate her bomb in the Kanti Kwari Market in Kano. She disavowed the paradise of her so-called liberators and chose to live. Others have gone who obeyed.

    Is the girl child not an endangered species? In one case, we moan rape. In the other, we mourn their murder-suicides. Those who marry them see them metaphorically as bombshells, alluding to their physical charms. The others see them as bombshells. The Chibok girl saga still haunts a nation that looks with paralysis at the failure of a government to do something strong, or to even pursue even a symbolic story that could ease the pains of the loss. The president visited Maiduguri to mark the Army Day Memorial, but was it an act of empathy from a president? He has not up till now visited the town of the notorious abduction. Does the president’s visit assuage any conscience? Who would say the president’s visit was not cynical? He goes to Maiduguri one month to election at the same time CNN features the eerie testimonials of Nigerian soldiers who buy their own uniforms and cannot access drugs. They confess that Boko Haram soldiers have better weapons and are better motivated.

    In those circumstances, how would the Boko Haram fighters not raze down Baga town, and make away with the girls, and kill the men and recruit the boys? The greater evil is a government that fails its primary responsibility: security of its citizens. Foreign media have flayed President Goodluck Jonathan for condemning the attack on a French newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, while keeping mum over the massacre of Baga town that wipes the place out of the map.

    How are we sure these girl bombers are not being radicalised by the sect, and launched back at us as messengers of death? Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, has terrorised many villages in Uganda and environs, and abducted hundreds of girls in the past decades. Some of the girls are stigmatised while others with children from rape and forced marriages are trapped forever. That is the prospect for the Chibok girls and others abducted. Zaharau’s case is another dimension. Her father decided to volunteer her for Boko Haram. This is another form of early marriage. Rather than force their 13-year-olds into marriages, they prefer apocalyptic paradise.

    By ceding their kids to the sect, they believe they have done good to the Almighty. Whether they are defiled sexually or strapped with bombs to die while killing others, the parents think they have done good to their souls and to the Almighty. The new defilement is bad. I don’t know which is worse though. Is it the girl who lives in psychic turmoil all her life in a forced marriage or the one who dies in meaningless martyrdom in the name of the Almighty? One a living dead, the other a dead living.

    This tragedy happens only when a state fails. That is why the president’s visit only helped to worsen a sense of alienation in the beleaguered citizens in the Northeast. If President Jonathan had visited them often and done more symbolic acts, his empathy would have registered, but not a few days to elections.

    Essentially, to save the innocent girls, we must mount a campaign around the North to tell girls not to allow anyone strap any devices around their body. It is time to incite girls against murderous parents. These girls are too young to know what is happening to them in the name of religion.

    Let us do what Mary Slessor would have done. Let us save the girl child. Girls are the mothers who fashion families that make cultures. It is one of the great tasks of this generation.

  • Mary Slessor: 100 years after

    •Her humanity still beckons us today

    How time flies! So it is a hundred years since Mary Mitchell Slessor died. The good thing though is that her works continue to speak. This is the reason she is being celebrated by people in Cross River State, where she left very strong impact, thousands of kilometres away from her native Aberdeen, Scotland, where she was born on December 2, 1848.

    Mary, the great Scottish Amazon liberated old Calabar, brought Christianity and modernity as well as stopped the killing of twins, then thought to be devil-sent, in the area. Her mother’s strong Presbyterian background influenced her decision to become a teacher, even as she admired missionary work. The opportunity for the latter came when David Livingstone, a great explorer and missionary died, and Mary applied to the Foreign Mission Board of the Presbyterian Church in Edinburgh to embark on missionary journey to Africa. She set sail on August 5, 1876, and arrived her destination one month after. She worked first in the missions in Old Town and Creek Town (in the present Odukpani Local Government Area of Cross River State  and lived in the mission house), where many supernatural beliefs – witchcraft, and ritual sacrifice of twins – among others, were common.

    Because of her commitments to her beliefs and her duty, she was never found wanton where duty called or danger. Like some other early missionaries in Africa, she once suffered malaria attack, necessitating her return to Scotland for treatment. She took many daring risks, travelling sometimes by boats and canoes to dangerous enclaves for the purposes of evangelism and her campaign against twin murder superstition. To prove that twins were no evil, she picked up a twin abandoned for dead, took her home and brought her up as daughter. This was to mark a turning-point for the people engaged in the evil practice as many of them saw the matter as what it was: mere superstition and jettisoned it; it has been so till date.

    If on this score alone, Mary’s expedition to Nigeria was not in vain. But she did not stop at being an agent of social change; she was also involved in settlement of communal disputes among villagers, thus helping to save lives. She was instrumental in introducing education and encouraging trade in the area. Indeed, the history of Waddel Training Institution, Calabar, which has produced many great men and women cannot be complete without her illustrious contributions. She frequently campaigned against injustices against women and took in outcasts and unwanted children.

    A woman of the people that she was, Mary, while in Okoyong, stayed in a traditional house with the people and learned to speak the Efik language. She was nicknamed “Obongawan Okoyong” (Queen of Okoyong), which she is still being called till today. It was in recognition of her contributions to the society that she was made the vice consul in Okoyong in 1892; she was also awarded the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem for her philanthropy.  Mary died on January 13, 1915 and her body was transported to Duke Town (in present Calabar) where she had a colonial equivalent of State Burial.

    We join in commemorating the centenary of the departure of this great woman. It is however regretful that some of the ideals for which Mary sacrificed her all are being jettisoned today. Nowadays, we read stories of child bombers; children are no longer getting the quality education that they should have; healthcare is not a thing that can be taken for granted even for the child. People may have stopped killing twins, but it is still common to see children being accused of witchcraft in Calabar, and a few other places.

    We are happy that the Cross River State Government has made Mary’s house at Okoyong and her grave at Duke Town as heritage sites. But the best way to immortalise her is to see to it that all those things that she sacrificed for are completely eradicated. It is by so doing that her efforts would not be in vain.

  • Calabar Carnival Queen emerges

    Calabar Carnival Queen emerges

    EIGHTEEN-year-old Miss Nancy Olive Asisagbeonhi of the Niger Delta University in Bayelsa State has emerged the 2013 Calabar Carnival Queen.

    Asisagbeonhi, a 200-level student of Chemistry, beat 29 others to clinch the tiara.

    She earned the star prize of Hyundai Saloon car and N2 million.

    According to the organisers, the beauty queen from Esan South East Local Government Area of Edo State is the new Face of Tourism, Ambassador of Goodwill and spokesperson for Mother Against Child Abandonment (MACA).

    Crested as Miss Mary Slessor, Asisagbeonhi’s feat was contested by Miss Old Residency, who became the first runner-up, winning N500, 000. The second runner-up, Miss WAPI, did not also go home empty-handed, as she got N250, 000.

    The queen was crowned by her predecessor, Miss Sophia Chidinma Dije, and decorated by the initiator of the pageant and wife of the Cross River State Governor, Mrs. Obioma Liyel Imoke.

    Dije, who advised her successor to be focused, recalled meeting several personalities during her reign as the Face of MACA.

    She said she visited secondary schools to discuss premarital sex and abstinence.

    Dije said she participated in the Trinidad and Tobago carnival and the Calabar Festival.

    Mrs. Obioma Liyel Imoke said the pageant was close to her heart because she promised God that she would use it to provide succour to abandoned children.

    She said over the years the winners had taken the message to young boys and girls across the state.

    Mrs. Imoke assured that money donated at the ceremony would be used for the upkeep of inmates at the Destiny Child Centre.

    The 2013 queen promised to uphold the ethics of her new status and use her position to represent the pageant effectively.