The Life and Work of Mary Slessor

Record summary

Mary Slessor’s letters and mission reports from Calabar describe local disputes involving witchcraft accusations, twins, death, spirits and Christian conversion. Later biographies and edited collections may present these episodes as encounters with supernatural belief or as contests between missionary explanations and indigenous cosmology. The lead is relevant to apparition research because it shows how alleged spiritual causation entered administrative and missionary documentation in nineteenth-century West Africa. Researchers must separate Slessor’s own letters from later hagiographic retellings and identify the local terms translated as ghost, devil or spirit.