The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt. Mary Russell

from the blood and sweat of childbirth and placed high upon the pedestal of perfection – the Angel of the Drawing-Room presiding over her own prison. Marriage, however, was not the destiny of every woman, nor was every woman prepared to be held within this domestic cage, and no book about women travellers would be complete without reference to the band of women who in those days set out with courage and conviction to present their foreign god to the unsuspecting peoples of Africa and China.

      Women had always played an important role as missionaries, women whose lives had been illuminated by a vision so compelling that they left family, home and country to pursue it. The great mystic, Teresa of Avila, took to the rough roads of sixteenth-century Spain, preaching reform of the Carmelite Order. In the following century, a Frenchwoman, Marie Guyard, abandoned her child in order to become a missioner. In 1617, at the age of seventeen, she had been forced into marriage much against her will, for she had hoped to become a nun. Within three years, she was widowed and left with a small son. This child she put in the care of a sister before sailing to Canada to set up a convent. Attacked on numerous occasions by the Iroquois Indians whom she had come to convert, she nevertheless survived to the age of seventy-three.

      The English tradition of the woman preacher travelling the countryside had been established by the Quakers in the seventeenth century. Later, the wave of energy which surged through England during the Industrial Revolution was reflected in the blossoming of Victorian evangelism, its success due in part to the army of women who carried the message with enthusiasm and vigour to the furthermost points of the empire. It was a time when there was work to be done, coal to be mined, lessons to be learned, money to be made and a Queen to be honoured.

      For many women, missionary work provided a most satisfying alternative to marriage or stay-at-home spinsterhood. The empire offered men numerous opportunities to travel abroad: they could serve in the army, take a posting as an army chaplain, or make a career for themselves as administrators. They could even make a name for themselves as explorers. No such options were open to women, who had to content themselves, if they were single, with a position as a governess or lady’s companion – both lowly states of existence. There were few acceptable occupations open to the single woman in a society which regarded marriage as the only proper state and in which spinsters were regarded as second-class citizens.

      Their value in the missionary field lay in the fact that as members of the gentler sex, they presented little threat to the local people; furthermore they had easy access to the local women – a great advantage, since it was commonly held among missionaries that to convert a family, you need only convert the mother. Their most attractive quality, however, was the simple fact that they were unmarried. As such, they could be relied upon to pursue their goals with a single-minded disregard for the hardships encountered along the thorny path to heaven. Staunch and sensible, they were admirably suited to unceasing and unquestioning labour in the name of all they – and the empire – considered decent.

      The rationale of religion is, of course, an excellent ingredient to throw into the traveller’s brew. It can be used as an elixir, giving fresh and unsuspected strength to a mind and body exhausted by lack of sleep or sustenance. The missionary traveller knows that despite rejection and ridicule, despite the alien climate, the strange customs and only half-understood language, despite the isolation, discomfort and danger, reward will follow, if not by the end of the day, at least at the end of a lifetime. And which of the ungodly among us can be sure of that? In a perverse way, the hardships suffered reinforced both the missionary’s zeal and her determination to carry on, her mental state not unlike that of a patriot waging war. ‘I am,’ said one, ‘a soldier of Christ.’

      The British Government was quick to see how useful these women could be with their energy, local knowledge and reputation for being fair. Indeed, in the colonies, the link between Church and state was thinly drawn with no distinction at all existing in the minds of some. Born in 1848 in Aberdeen, little Mary Slessor was a millhand by the time she was eleven – the family of seven children needed her earnings. Her mother was a weaver and her alcoholic father a shoemaker. Determined to free herself from the evils of poverty though not from her family commitments, she educated herself as best she could and in the process learned a lot about the famous Doctor Livingstone, another Scot who had become the inspiration of the empire. She too, she decided, would become a missionary. In 1876, at the age of twenty-eight, she sailed from Liverpool on the SS Ethiopia, bound for the Niger region of West Africa. Her salary, as a missionary, would be £60 a year. In Calabar, her practical approach to her work and her expertise in dealing with local disputes led to her appointment as British government agent. She saw nothing incongruous in this dual role, simply viewing her job of conducting judicial courts as an extension of her religious duties. Nor did she feel it was unchristian to administer an occasional box on the ear to a local chief when he spoke out of turn.

      It was her humanitarian work in saving the lives of twins that evinced uncharacteristic praise from Mary Kingsley and the two formed an immediate if unlikely partnership, for they were both intent on promoting better understanding of tribal customs. Local animists believed that each person was born with a guardian spirit – an invisible companion. When a woman gave birth to twins, however, the Efiks – among whom Mary Slessor was living – believed that the spirit companion had been displaced and its place taken instead by the human child. There could be only one explanation, the Efiks believed. The woman must have secretly mated with the devil. The punishment was horrific. Both children must be killed – for who could be sure which was the devil-child and which the good one? The mother too must be banished, driven out of her home and away from the tribe. The whole thing, as Mary Kingsley noted, was seen ‘as a sort of severe adultery’. Mary Slessor devoted herself to saving the lives of both the babies and their mothers, doing so with such tact and understanding that she was soon able to set up a refuge for the unhappy victims.

      Hers was a lonely life, far from family and home, living in the bush surrounded by her African helpers. Her red hair was shorn to a boyish crop and the climate took its toll on her health. At the age of thirty-two, another missionary appeared on the scene and the two formed a friendship that looked as if it might end happily in permanent companionship, but circumstances forced them apart and she devoted the rest of her life to her beloved Africans, to whom she was known simply as Ma. Mary Kingsley, despite her dislike of missionaries, afforded her the highest praise: ‘The sort of man Miss Slessor represents is rare.’

      Mary Kingsley herself, of course, was something of a rare bird, and through her studies of local customs and beliefs she too hoped to make the African better understood. She drew attention, for instance, to the damage she observed being done in girls’ schools in Calabar by ill-informed missioners. It was the custom for the girls to wind a long strip of cloth round their waist and to leave a part of this to trail behind them on the ground to be held by their guardian spirit In the safety of their homes, this train could be caught up and tucked into their skirt but outside in a public place, where danger lurked, the cloth had to trail along the ground. The missionaries briskly forbade this practice, seeing it as yet another example of the lazy, slovenly habits of the Africans. The girls were torn between the two: no respectable girl would go about without the protection of her guardian spirit; if she did, she must be bad. It was a war, Miss Kingsley noted, between native and Presbyterian respectability and it is not difficult to imagine which practice she favoured.

      While she found the work done by Slessor admirable, Mary Kingsley would have found it difficult to applaud the zeal with which Annie Taylor, another of her contemporaries, pursued her missionary work in China and Tibet, for Annie’s arrogance fed upon her ignorance: ‘I was shocked to see men and women near Ta’ri’si,’ she wrote, ‘prostrating themselves the whole length of the road … Poor things, they know no better; no one has ever told them about Jesus.’ How different was Alexandra David-Neel’s objective and careful observation of the same scene some fifty years later, written with the intention of understanding, not dismissing, the custom:

      Many of the pilgrims [she wrote] went round the mountain, prostrating themselves at each step, that is to say, stretching their arms as they lay on the ground, and marking with their fingers the length they had covered with their bodies. They would get up and stand at the exact place which their fingers had touched, after which they would again prostrate themselves and measure their length once more, and so