Miss Slessor has arrived back in Calabar, and has sent an article on the position of women there. She describes their traditional life, the problems faced particularly by the Christian women, and her proposals to help them by providing means for them to make their own living.
From the Women’s Missionary Magazine of January 1908?. The article includes a photograph of “A Market Scene in Calabar”.
- Miss Slessor has arrived safely in Calabar, and has received a warm welcome from all, including the Government officials.
- Concerning Advance Work in west Africa by Miss Slessor
The kind of advance, which concerns the women of the Church more especially, lies in the direction of some development of our work which will make the native woman something more than a mere cipher in the community; something more than a mere creature to be exploited and degraded by man. According to native law, a girl child, if not betrothed by her guardians to some man, lacks all protection of law. If she be not “a man's wife” she may be insulted or injured with impunity, no punishment except the merest rebuke can be meted to the man. Then, too, as emancipation advances under Britain's administration, something must be done to meet it. Not only must we provide some way of protecting and sheltering women, but in order to this end we must create some industry by which these women may earn their living, and thus become independent of the polygamous marriage and the open insult.
Women who wish to live a Christian life in the Calabar towns, support themselves largely by dressmaking, the loose, almost shapeless garment used by the majority is easily made, and the sewing-machine is quickly mastered by our women. Cloth, which suits their pronounced taste, is sold cheaply by the trading houses, and there is a growing demand for such work. It is sent up country for sale, and it would be unwise to take the bread out of these women's mouths by a wholesale extension of this particular work up country, at least not yet. Something not too hard for her strength, something that will sell. Something that will not cost too much for initial expense can be found doubtless, and thus not only the woman be provided for, but the country be benefited.
Government has one or two Homes in Northern Nigeria for women, and girls beyond school age, but these are not distinctively Christian, and the future of the girls is a problem they have not yet solved. Several girls in their care are boarded out among our intelligent women in Calabar, and several have been given to the sisters of the Roman Catholic school. As these get older, something definite will have to be done for them, and even if the question did not press on ourselves regarding the girls growing up in and around our mission houses, and in the Church, who cannot be betrothed according to heathen fashions, it is time we had some place at which a woman can be received for any length of time necessary, and at which she can be employed at remunerative work. Shall we do it? Shall we take and befriend twin mothers and their outcast offspring in these new districts where the fear of them still holds sway, or shall we leave the Government and the convent to help them?
The leakage has been damaging to the Church in the past. Many who have been brought up in mission and Christian houses have gone to live with the partly educated natives, who come down from the coast to work in Government offices as clerks, artisans, or petty officers, in preference to becoming drudges in the harems of Calabar men. Hence their training, though not lost to the community, is wholly lost to the Church. Is this to go on? Shall we not rather gather them in to be saved, and saviours of others, to be an honoured factor in the community, a purifying and uplifting power in the market, in the home, and in the Church.