A SQUABBLE has erupted over the final resting place of Mary Slessor, the Scots missionary who died in West Africa 90 years ago and is remembered today on the Clydesdale Bank £10 note.
Two rival states in Nigeria — Akwa Ibom and Cross River — want to cash in on the tourism potential of the Slessor legacy and are claiming to be the site of her grave.
Victor Attah, the Governor of Akwa Ibom, plans to write to the Scottish Executive appealing for support in his battle with his rival governor, Donald Duke, of Cross River.
“Mary Slessor belongs to us,” Mr Attah said. “She lived here. I’ve been to see the foundation of her house and everything else, even her grave. All you have in Calabar [the Cross River state capital] is just a monument to her, albeit one visited by Queen Elizabeth II.”
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Mary Slessor was born in Aberdeen and brought up in Dundee where she worked in the jute mills until she was 28 when she left to train as a missionary. She was among the first Western women to venture into the wilds of West Africa to educate and to nurse the indigenous tribes, arriving in Calabar in August 1876.
She was to work in the area for about forty years, winning hearts and minds by quickly abandoning Victorian dress for lighter tropical garments and living with the local people and learning their language. She took on tribal chiefs and challenged local customs and superstitions, including human sacrifice and the murder of twins, and was so successful in changing attitudes, particularly towards women, that she became known affectionately as “The White Queen ”.
She succumbed to malaria in January 1915, dying in Use, Akwa Ibom, where she sometimes lived and worked. The controversy over her resting place arose because it was said by some that, after her death, her body was moved immediately from Use to Calabar, her main home and work base — a claim Akwa Ibom disputes.
Yesterday Dr Lawrence Mitchell, of the Mary Slessor Foundation, in Dundee, said that the row had rumbled on for about twenty years when state boundaries were introduced, and had escalated in recent months because of Akwa Ibom’s plans to develop tourism. He did not know how the dispute would be resolved, but believed that there was more to Cross River’s claim.
A charity project, the Mary Slessor Foundation’s Skill Centre, continues social aspects of her work there.