Mary Slessor, the Scottish missionary who saved the killing of twins in Calabar, popularly known as “The White Queen of Calabar,” remains one of the most remarkable chapters in Nigeria’s history.

When Mary arrived in Old Calabar in 1876, she discovered a practice deeply rooted in local spiritual beliefs. The idea that twins were evil, cursed, or the result of a mother’s infidelity.

In many communities, twin births were seen as a bad omen. One or both babies were abandoned in the forest. The mothers, considered unclean, were often shunned or exiled. It wasn’t cruelty, it was fear, passed down through generations.

Mary Slessor refused to accept that innocent children were being killed because of an ancient belief.

She became a powerful force for social change, rescuing abandoned twins, mediating local disputes, and bridging cultural gaps in the Efik and Ibibio communities.

Mary walked into communities other Colonial Officials avoided, sat with mothers, listened to chiefs, learned the Efik language, and built trust from the ground up.

Through patience, empathy, and active engagement, Mary Slessor helped communities transition away from twin-killing; not by force, but by trust.

Mary spent years explaining, negotiating, and calming fears. She helped chiefs see twins not as curses but as children with futures. She taught mothers to care for babies they were once told to abandon.

Her fearless work against the twin-killing tradition, her deep integration into local culture, and her role as a peacekeeper made her one of the most influential figures in Southern Nigeria.

By the early 1900s, the twin-killing practice had declined sharply in the areas under her influence.

Communities that once hid twin births eventually began to celebrate them. Mothers who once ran into the forest now held their babies proudly. The stigma slowly dissolved.

When she died in 1915, she was buried right there in Calabar, among the people she had called family for decades. Mary Slessor left behind hundreds of children, countless families, and a cultural shift that still stands today.

Twins, once condemned, are now celebrated throughout Calabar and beyond.
Her name remains tied forever to that transformation.

By: Idris Olayinka