Among the Efik and Ibibio peoples of Old Calabar in present-day Cross River State, the birth of twins carried a theological verdict that no family could appeal. Twins were not considered naturally human. The dominant belief held that no human man could father two children simultaneously, and therefore one of the infants must have been fathered by an evil spirit, a malevolent supernatural interloper who had violated the mother. The mother was simultaneously guilty of spiritual adultery and contaminated by proximity to the demonic. Both infants were taken to the forest, the so-called evil bush, and abandoned to die by starvation or predation. The mother was expelled from her community, stripped of her social standing, and exiled to the same evil bush that had received her children. The father, regardless of innocence, faced communal suspicion. The community, having disposed of the threat, considered the matter closed.
That is where the practice began. The question of who stopped it is where the historical record has been most deliberately falsified.
The Origin of Twin Killing in Efik and Ibibio
The theological framework that drove twin killing was not random superstition. It was a coherent cosmological interpretation of biological anomaly in a community with no medical explanation for multiple births. The same logic that produced twin killing also produced the institution of deity marriage documented in the Ahebi Ugbabe piece: communities under demographic and spiritual stress developed institutional responses to perceived supernatural violations of the natural order. A single womb producing two lives simultaneously, in a cosmological worldview where conception was understood as a direct spiritual transaction between one man and one woman, produced an arithmetic crisis. One child had a human father. The other did not. The one without a human father was therefore not human. That conclusion, terrifying in its internal logic, drove the infanticide.
The practice was not confined to Calabar. Some Igbo communities in the Niger Delta region and parts of the Benue valley practiced variants of twin killing under similar cosmological reasoning. But Calabar became the geographic focus of the 19th century abolition campaign because it was simultaneously the most documented case and the most commercially significant port town on the southeastern Nigerian coast, where British trading interests and missionary activities converged from the 1840s onward.
Who Stopped Twin Killing: Facts Discovered
In 1848, Mary Slessor was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. She was one year old. At that moment, an Efik king named Eyo Honesty II had already been working for at least a decade to curtail twin killing and related human sacrifice practices in Old Calabar. Empirical records, including mission logs and colonial reports, confirm that King Eyo Honesty II curtailed twin killing and related sacrifices from the 1830s, as part of broader efforts to align with emerging trade and modernisation imperatives that favoured stable, commercially reliable communities. His motivation was simultaneously humanitarian and economic: a port town that abandoned infants in the forest and expelled mothers was not a reliable trading partner for the European merchants whose commerce he was carefully cultivating.
In 1849, when Mary Slessor was one year old, British Consul Beecroft formally worked with King Eyo Honesty II and King Archibong I to ban human sacrifice and twin killing in Old Calabar. The Obutong community, known as Old Town, broke the agreement. Consul Beecroft, with military support, destroyed Obutong in 1855 as punishment. On 18 January 1855, when Mary Slessor was seven years old, King Duke Ephraim and other Efik chiefs signed a second formal agreement with British Consul Hutchinson to abolish the murder of twin children in Old Calabar. That agreement predates Slessor's arrival in Calabar by 21 years. The first documented rescue of twins occurred in 1852, carried out by Rev. Edgerley and his wife, both of whom arrived in Calabar long before Slessor. Rev. Hope Waddell and Rev. Hugh Goldie, the missionary who later taught Slessor to speak the Efik language, had been working against the practice for decades before she left Scotland.
Mary Slessor arrived in Calabar in September 1876 aboard the SS Ethiopia, assigned by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland's Foreign Mission Board. She was 28 years old. She chose to live among the people rather than in a mission compound, learning Efik, adopting local dress, eating local food, and walking barefoot. Her personal courage in physically intervening when she encountered individual twins being abandoned in the Okoyong bush was real and documented. She rescued specific children. She confronted specific families. Her bravery at the individual level is not disputed by any serious historian. What is disputed, and now definitively corrected in peer-reviewed scholarship, is the colonial narrative that she abolished twin killing across Calabar single-handedly.
Mary Slessor
Historian David Lishilinimle Imbua's 2013 peer-reviewed paper, published in African Economic History under the title "Robbing Others to Pay Mary Slessor: Unearthing the Authentic Heroes and Heroines of the Abolition of Twin-Killing in Calabar," established the definitive scholarly corrective. Imbua documents that the suppression of twin killing was a collaborative process spanning at least four decades, initiated by Efik kings, formalised through colonial treaty agreements, advanced by earlier missionaries, and reinforced by local Christian converts whose influence within their own kinship networks was more decisive than any single European figure's personal advocacy. Slessor arrived at the tail end of a process already in motion and was credited with starting it entirely because colonial historiography needed a white saviour narrative, and the red-haired Scottish woman walking barefoot through the Efik bush was the most photographically compelling candidate available.
The erasure of King Eyo Honesty II from this story is its most consequential historiographical crime. He acted in the 1830s. He formalised action in the 1849 agreement. He used his royal authority to suppress a practice that his own tradition had sanctioned, accepting the political cost of challenging cosmological consensus within his own kingdom, motivated by both moral conviction and commercial pragmatism. He died in 1858. Mary Slessor arrived 18 years after his death. She was given his story. His name was given to oblivion.
For these narrations to be effective and corrected we suggest that the Cross River State government must erect a formal public monument to King Eyo Honesty II in Calabar, equal in scale and prominence to the existing Mary Slessor effigy carrying twin babies, because a city that has named streets after Slessor without naming a single prominent public structure after the Efik king who began the abolition she is credited with has embedded colonial historiography into its own urban geography.
Also, Imbua's 2013 African Economic History paper must be incorporated into the Cross River State secondary school curriculum as required reading, replacing the colonial Slessor narrative with the documented sequence of King Eyo Honesty II's leadership, the 1849 and 1855 formal agreements, and Slessor's subsequent but real individual contributions.
Final loo the Nigerian government must formally request that the United Kingdom review and update British educational materials on Mary Slessor to reflect the corrected historical record, since the mythology of Slessor as the sole abolisher of twin killing in Calabar continues to circulate in British school curricula, reinforcing the colonial narrative that Africans were incapable of moral reform without European intervention.
King Eyo Honesty II stopped it. An Efik king. In the 1830s. Before Slessor was born. The street in Calabar bears the wrong name.
Ire ooo (Sewo).