19/11/2025
Maria Fearing - Daughter of Africa
I cannot help but be impressed by the life and legacy of Maria Fearing (1838 – 1937). Born into slavery on a cotton plantation in Alabama in the American South, the plantation owner’s wife chose Fearing to work as a house-girl. Her mistress included her with her own children with the religious education in the home.
Freed from slavery in 1865 at the end of the American Civil War, Fearing attended the Freedman’s Bureau School in Talladega and qualified to become a teacher in the public schools. She saved enough to buy her own home in Anniston, Alabama.
In 1894, after hearing a sermon by William Sheppard, a pioneering African American Presbyterian missionary in the Belgian Congo, Fearing felt called to volunteer tor Christian work in central Africa. Even though the Presbyterian Mission Board was not willing to help her financially, probably because of her age of 56, Fearing was so determined to go that she sold her home and used the funds to pay her own transportation to the Belgian Congo.
Fearing adjusted well to the austere but simple life in Luebo, Belgian Congo. She knew the local language well enough after a year to teach classes and translate hymns. She started a home and school for girls who had been kidnapped by rival Congolese tribes. One of the primary missions at Luebo at that time was to rescue Africans enslaved by other Africans. Fearing taught sanitation, sewing, cooking, reading, and childcare. She became a mother to dozens at her school who had been orphaned, abandoned, or redeemed from slavery, and remained in the Congo for the next 20 years, until lovingly forced to return to the United States.
