Lilias Trotter

During the next few years, Trotter felt an impulse toward missionary work in non-Christian lands, even telling one of her friends that "whenever she prayed, the words 'North Africa' sounded in her soul as though a voice were calling her."[12] In May 1887, when a missionary to North Africa asked at a religious meeting if God was calling anyone to North Africa, Trotter rose and said, "He is calling me."[13] On 14 July, her thirty-fourth birthday, she applied as a candidate to the North African Mission—which then rejected her because she was unable to pass its health examination. However, because she had the resources to be self-supporting, the Mission decided that she might "work in harmony" with the society without being an official member.[14]

Nine months later, in March 1888, Trotter and two other financially independent women—including Blanche Haworth, who for more than thirty years played "Martha" to Trotter's "Mary"—[15] arrived in Algiers. Trotter recalled, "Three of us stood there, looking at our battle-field, none of us fit to pass a doctor for any society, not knowing a soul in the place, or a sentence of Arabic or a clue for beginning work on untouched ground; we only knew we had to come. Truly if God needed weakness, He had it!"[16]

The women moved into the French quarter and diligently studied Arabic through French study materials and eventually through a professional tutor. They also learned how do domestic work, all of them previously having had their needs met by servants.[17]

Later Trotter said that the early years were like "knocking our heads against stone walls," but the women were indefatigable, trying one technique after another in an attempt to make inroads into the Algerian culture and all the while improving their Arabic.[18] Eventually Trotter was able to gain access to the heavily secluded women by first befriending their children. The outreach to women, she believed, was a "great line of cleavage in the rock face of Islam."[19]

Converts were banished, beaten, even (Trotter believed) poisoned with "mind drugs" that were to be administered in food or drink and would produce "a paralysis of mind and will." Many converts died, and Trotter "came to rejoice in their loss. 'We were glad to let them go … One draws a breath of relief when they get safe home [to heaven].'"[20]

Trotter's health was so seriously impaired that she regularly spent extended periods of convalescence in Great Britain or on the continent. Adding to the difficulties of the English missionaries was French colonial suspicion of their activities. The local government bought a house across the street and for three years lured potential converts away with competing classes. Spies and gendarmes even followed the women into the southern desert and threatened fines and imprisonment for any who went near them or accepted their literature.[21]

An illustration from Trotter's Parables of the Cross.

Nevertheless, by 1906, with warming relations between England and France, Trotter experienced less governmental antagonism and more freedom for her missionary work. In 1907 five new workers joined the "Algiers Mission Band." By 1920, there were thirty full-time workers and fifteen preaching stations.[22] Trotter became the reluctant, but unchallenged, leader of the group, which in 1907 was named the Algiers Mission Band.[23] Trotter was sensitive to the contemporary difficulty of a woman exerting authority over a man, but as the staff included more men, she shrewdly refined "the organizational system to capitalize on their leadership."[24] Trotter never solicited funds because she said God's wealth was boundless.[25]

Trotter was also a pioneer in attempting to adapt Christian missionary endeavor to the Algerian culture. Referring to evangelistic meetings as a "European idea," she proposed evangelizing with "a native cafe on a Christian footing," readings of the Bible in a "rhythmical recitative" accompanied by a drum, a craft house that would teach little girls embroidery, and a Christian retreat for women to "take the place of the outings to shrines which are their only chance of fresh air." Trotter designed cards that had biblical passages drawn by an Arab scribe because "no one but a native can give the subtle lines & curves of the writing as they should be." The mission society even published a series of cards with a sentence from the Koran followed by verses from the Old Testament.[26]

Trotter was a "prodigious writer," filling a journal page nearly every day for forty years and illustrating the world around her with sketches and watercolors. From these efforts came several books of somewhat flowery and mystical prose, including Parables of the Cross and Parables of the Christ-life.[27] Though she considered orthodox Islam "dry as the dune, hard as the gravel," she responded to the "sincere hunger for things of the spirit" in the Sufi mystics and wrote for them The Way of the Sevenfold Secret as a devotional guide based on the seven "I am" statements found in the Gospel of John.[28]