Margaret Griffiths, a Missionary Wife
The women who accompanied their husbands on their early missionary endeavours in East Africa were a stalwart bunch. One such was wife of John Bynner Griffiths, a Methodist missionary at Mazeras. Margaret E. Edwards was born in Bangor, Wales, on 11 Jan 1866. Her father, a draper, died when she was eight, and her mother followed him to the grave four years later. The twelve-year-old Margaret and her youngest sister Winifred were then cared for by an aunt with firm religious views. By the time she was eighteen Margaret wanted to become a missionary. Her engagement to John Bynner Griffiths, who was appointed by the Methodist Missionary Society to a position in East Africa, brought that desire to fruition. Griffiths departed for Mombasa in 1894, but Margaret did not follow him till three years later. Meanwhile she trained at the Zenana Training College in London. She left for Mombasa in February 1897 with Annie J. Brown, the fiancée of the missionary Robert Moss Ormerod. A three-week voyage through the Red Sea brought them safely to Mombasa.
Griffiths and Ormerod were there to meet them. The two ladies were taken to stay at the Ribe mission on the mainland near Mombasa island, with William George Howe and his wife Alice. Three weeks later, on 25 March 1897 the Griffiths and Ormerods had a joint wedding at Mazeras church and in the British consulate in Mombasa. The Ormerods then sailed for Golbanti on the Tana River, and the two women never saw each other again.
Margaret Griffiths’ new home at Mazeras (formerly called Ganjoni) was an unpretentious two-roomed cottage. She described Mazeras: ‘We have now a population of about 400 persons in the town, and this is continually increasing. Our chapel is a large stone building, and on Sunday mornings it is crowded. In the afternoon and evening it is not so full. Daily morning service is also well attended and the day school is very encouraging. There is an average attendance in the school of 67. The Uganda railway runs at the base of the hill upon which our town is built. It is in one way alone a good to our town, as both men and women can get work there and so save money. The women are very industrious, but the men are not quite so diligent. We have one rather serious drawback to our work here, and that is intemperance. Palm wine is used in great excess here. Drunkenness is not regarded by the men as a mark of dishonour, but rather of greatness. I am thankful to say the women are not allowed to join in it.’
Every day, for nearly an hour after breakfast, Margaret dealt with patients who came to be treated for various complaints, the commonest of them ulcers. She also joined her husband on his visits to distant mission stations, travelling for hours on a donkey, with her husband walking by her side. At Tzunza she slept in a native hut – ‘the only disturbance we had during the night was caused by the rain falling in on us, the roof being badly out of order.’ By the end of 1897 smallpox had broken out at Mazeras. Griffiths wanted to send Margaret to Mombasa, but she refused. She ran the Sunday school classes and held a sewing class every afternoon for the children. Yet she was starting to have trouble with her eyes – ‘whether it is that I am getting old, or whether it is the fever that I have had, I do not know.’ By the end of 1898 she was feeling depressed, a sentiment not helped by the death of her faithful servant Maggie. She rallied in early 1899 – ‘Our work makes the time fly. I have never felt my life here to be at all monotonous – sometimes we see none but natives for weeks together but I love them, and am never tired of them.’ Perhaps she was delighted to be pregnant. At the end of June Margaret gave birth to a baby girl. Within a few days puerperal fever set in and on 6 July Margaret died. She was buried in a lonely grave near the Mazeras mission house, one of the scores of missionaries who died in East Africa before the dawn of the twentieth century.
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