The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt. Mary Russell

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 on, all the way round.

      Annie’s was the fixed and limited view of the missioner whose commitment prevented her from appreciating the culture and beliefs of those she wanted to save. But it was that very commitment that led her to journey across China and into Tibet, hopeful of finally entering Lhasa. After Africa, China had become the next focus for nineteenth-century missionary activity. British traders made important economic links there, and in 1878 the first woman missionary was sent into the interior. The fact that the economic links had been forged on the sale of opium – in 1839 British ships were bringing in 2000 tons of opium annually – seems not to have bothered the missionary ladies. Their task was to bring God, not change, to the Chinese millions.

      Annie Taylor was accompanied on her journey by her faithful servant, Pontso, and the two of them disguised their true identity by dressing as Tibetans; Annie also cut her hair to look like a Buddhist nun. For the length of their 1300-mile trek they had to ward off bandits and robbers, sleep out in the open and seek sanctuary wherever they could. The rivers they had to cross were often flooded and swollen, posing a considerable obstacle. ‘The river is quite impassable, so they say, barring our way, but we are waiting until tomorrow to see if it will be lower in the morning. The Lord can do this for me. My eyes are unto him who made a passage in the Red Sea for the children of Israel.’

      When the river finally abated, they had to force their way through biting waters which froze to icicles on the spot. Pressing on along the tea road from China, Annie’s difficulties continued. One of the three men she had hired to carry her goods and care for the horses turned troublesome and threatened to reveal her identity. This was dangerous, for Tibet feared invasion both from Britain and China and justifiably viewed all foreigners with suspicion. Another of her men died along the way and a third turned back shortly after the journey had begun. Although armed with a pistol, her real trust lay in the Lord.

      Undeterred by the icy nights made worse by the altitude, she sold her tent in order to buy another horse. So high up did the route take them that you could plunge your hand unscathed into a saucepan of boiling water and when she put her Christmas pudding on to boil – for certain traditions after all had to be maintained – its centre was still cold after two hours of cooking. Nevertheless, on that Christmas day in 1892, far from the blazing log fire and roast turkey of childhood days in Egremont, she was cheerful and optimistic, doing what she had chosen to do: ‘Quite safe here with Jesus,’ she wrote happily in her diary. Her seven-month long journey to Lhasa proved fruitless in the end; she was apprehended within twelve miles of her goal, tried by the local elder and arbitrarily expelled from Tibet. What a long way this rocklike and forceful woman had travelled from a Victorian childhood plagued by heart trouble.

      Annie Taylor was a simple, solid soul, well suited to the sort of work which the Inland Mission to China required of its members. She plodded her way through some of the most intriguing places in Tibet, totally unaware of their significance, intent only on revealing to the impoverished peasants the golden gates of heaven through which they could walk one day if only they embraced the Bible. The town of Kum Bum is clustered round the famous Buddhist settlement – then the third largest monastery, housing three thousand lamas – and there the stalwart Annie braved the annual Butter Fair, distributing her evangelical leaflets and urging the holiday crowd to forsake their ancient religion and follow the Lord.

      What would have happened to Annie had she been forced to stay at home in England? Perhaps she would have found some satisfaction in evangelical work among the wretches who worked the dark satanic mills of the Midlands. Those places, after all, were every bit as godforsaken as Lanchow or Shanghai, or even Kum Bum. Instead, she chose to set out for the most impenetrable of countries, circled as it is by a fortress of snow-covered peaks. Like scores of travellers before and since, she was drawn towards Lhasa as if mesmerized by its inaccessibility. Her motivation was religion, but it was a drive fuelled by the challenges which her chosen life had laid before her – challenges to which her brave and adventurous spirit rose with stoical determination.

      Consumed by the same missionary zeal was the aptly named Evangeline French. With her sister Francesca and friend Mildred Cable, the three, known as ‘the trio’, spent fifteen years dining the 1920s and 1930s evangelizing in China; they crossed the Gobi Desert five times during that period. Wearing Chinese dress and learning the local dialects, the three women brightly and happily revealed the treasures of the Bible to the nomad tribes until forced to leave by the vagaries of the Chinese/Japanese war.

      Sublimely indifferent to their supposed weaknesses, Victorian women missionaries breached the wall of prejudice and proved themselves to be as vigorous and as tenacious as any man, giving practical expression to their spiritual message by setting up schools and hospitals, drawing attention to the difficulties under which the indigenous women laboured, and making representations to governments and royalty on behalf of the poor, the sick and the forgotten.

      Four years younger than Annie Taylor, Kate Marsden was caught up in the same wave of religious fervour that swept through Victorian England. After only eight months’ training as a missionary nurse, she was sent to Bulgaria in 1877, to tend to СКАЧАТЬ