Language
Nearly all the worlds alphabets are elaborations of a Semitic
orthography from Canaan or Egypt.
Medieval missionaries brought the Roman version to Europe, and in the
modern era evangelists carried it to other continents. Inevitably the British Empire became a
party to this dispersion as it grew to administer a quarter of the worlds
population, but its subjects received their basic education from clerics. Such was even the case in Bengal, where
the East India Company funded Hindu and Muslim schools. The alphabet invariably spread through
religious teachings.
It
was inevitable that Christian missionaries would be interested in language and
literacy. Most of them believed
that reading was a direct route for grace. On a daily basis, they tested their pupils with recitations
and essays, and many of them composed and translated catechisms, prayer books,
hymns and Bibles, primers and spelling books. All such texts asserted that one must acknowledge God, that
Christ died for everyones salvation, that master and servant are both welcome
in Church, that you are a sinner, that there is life after death. At the same time, as missionaries knew,
the Empires peoples used their texts as they wished. Some of them regarded the book as a charm or form of
medicine, while others thought literacy was something that might come from a
dream or vision. Hymns might be
sung to praise nationalist politicians or beer. Even before missionaries lost their monopoly on the Empires
presses, print culture had expanded beyond their reach.
Missionaries also wrote histories,
genealogies, ethnographies, dictionaries, and grammars of their people, for
Europeans to read. Some such
material became part of the heritage of ethnic and nationalist movements, while
at the same time fueling the concept of the tribe, the favored sub-unit of
imperial governance for African and Pacific peoples. For instance, civil cases entailed appeals to native law
and custom, preferrably written down, which turned history into a kind of
eternal repetition. The dispersal
of stereotypes in images and texts, coupled with racial science and
administrative logistics, further imprinted this problematic concept in written
histories. Yet tribes only
resembled one another at a distance, differing greatly in what they stood
for. The odd decision of French
missionaries in Lesotho to use li
for a syllable elsewhere written as di,
for example, marked king Moshoeshoes family dialect as a language, seSotho. Nearby a new affiliation
emerged in an urban context, in which Shangaan migrant laborers used the
missionary Henri Junods rendering of Amatonga language, which was then taken
up by black clerks and other Tsonga professionals. Both Tsonga and Sotho became tribes in apartheid South
Africa.[1]
The
commonness and consistency of Christian texts in newly alphabetic languages
helped produce national identifications from the inside, among readers. Exernally, the state was also more
likely to recognize literate people with an administrative district and a
magistrate. But the alphabet could
also provide a forum for division. Mission presses, from Morija in southern
Africa, to Serampore in Bengal, both underwrote and challenged community identities. When missionaries encountered literate
elites schooled in Arabic or Sanskrit, their teaching of English and their
publications in vernaculars were rightly seen as destabilizing. Imperial officials were often leery of
educated natives.
This
chapter examines the effects of the evangelical concern for language,
translation, and literacy. To
begin, a consideration of Yorubaland in Nigeria and Kikuyuland in Kenya
demonstrate how colonized people used Christian-inflected languages in their
nationalist projects.
Contrastingly, examples from Oceania show how the comparative impulse in
missionaries scholarship could enfeeble subject peoples. In India, in multiconfessional and
urbanized Bengal, literate elites played off one another in competing translational
projects. Perhaps surprisingly,
there, as well as in South Africa, early contests over the lexicons for
divinity – a preoccupation of missionaries – left an indelible mark
on populist movements later on.
What people do gives significance to what they say and write. Missionaries approached their work in
this spirit, and looked for behaviours they might undermine. In Yorubaland, they interrupted
ordinary peoples orisa sacrifices and
stigmatized the tools of the babalawo,
the ifa divination specialist, as Satans
things. In place of babalawos attempt to access knowledge, they offered religious texts. In place of personal rites they
advocated a washing in the blood of the lamb, a sacrifice recapitulated in
Communion. J. D. Y. Peel shows how
such interactions permitted Christian nationalists to unite the Yoruba itself
as a communal identity. It is not
that the prejudices that Oyo and other city-states bore one another were
erased. Instead, Yoruba –
originally a Hausa word used about Oyo – was produced as a sensibility
worth competing for from the inside.
The
Yoruba seized the status the Bible offered all nations of the world, just like
Europeans had done, and interpreted Christianity as their own. They submitted olorun as the living God and eshu,
the trickster, as Satan. While
Gods wisdom contended with that of the orisa,
eventually Moses became an Ibaden warlord, and oduduwa was demoted to Yoruba ethnic founder. Their modernizing ideal tapped Muslim (Hausa) as well as
Christian traditions of literacy; Samuel Crowthers Yoruba dictionary of 1843
even chose the word alufa (Muslim cleric) for
Christs own priesthood. Literate
Brazilian and Cuban entrepreneurs and evangelists further molded Yoruba
identity, as they did other cults and ethnicities on the shores of the Black
Atlantic.[2] The
evanglical pan-Africanist Orishatukeh Faduma (b. William Davis) hypothesized
that God had always been a universal conception even in orisa, which further explained concordances. James Johnsons Yoruba Heathenism (1899), and Samuel Johnsons monumental History of the Yorubas (1897), both made sense of the past as a prelude to contemporary Yoruba
assertiveness.
The
following myth told by a senior diviner for royalty, about a brother of
Olorun (God?) named Ela, concerns literacy and ifa divination. Ela was
the father
of the diviners. In the morning
all the Whitemen used to come to Ela to learn how to read and write, and in the
evening all his African children, the babalawo, gathered around him to memorize
the Ifa verses and learn divination.
Ifa taught them to write on their Ifa boards . . .
The verse continues: Muslims turned the Ifa boards into wooden writing
tablets, and Christians, into slates and books. Yoruba culture is in this way asserted to lie behind even
the inscription of Yoruba nationalism.[3]
On
the other side of Africa, among the hearty farmers of Kenyas central
highlands, the introduction of Christianity likewise accompanied the formation
of a broader identity. Previously,
political organization was local government gone mad, according to John
Lonsdale, a zone of masculine competitiveness, much as was the case in
Yorubaland. Mutual comprehension
meant contestation. Again
similarly God was already known by Muslim traders, this time Swahili ones, and Ngai – the word for God in the Kikuyu Bible – was a loan word
(Maasai).[4] The first generation of
students, called athomi, or readers, made
these ideas Kikuyu. Athomi joined their pre-colonial codes of obligation and work to a new
narrative of the self, one prefigured in the Bible: endurance, improvement
and salvation.[5] Their translations supported their argument for recognizing an ituika, the lapsed tradition of once-per-generation rupture and
independence. The readers called
letters of the alphabet cuts or stripes, so their writing itself evoked the
act of chopping trees, the emblematic work of mature Kikuyu masculinity. By alterating orthography to fit
anglophonic conventions, by espousing textually anchored truth, athomi helped make their own political project thinkable.
The
readers held their Kikuyuness in a universalizing idiom. This was so even when it came to
clitoradectomy and circumcision rites. In a well known debate the African
Inland Mission (AIM) denounced clitoridectomy, and athomi stood by it. The readers
pointed out that the Bible describes the Virgin as a muiritu, a circumcized woman.
They allied with their non-Christian kin, thus joining them as fellow
Kikuyu, against the AIM loyalists, the missionaries and some senior men. At another point the AIM favored
mandatory clitoradectomy for pubescent girls, done surgically, through
chiefs authority. In both cases athomi supported the sanctity of the female-controlled domain of reproduction
against intervention, and did so in the name of Kikuyuness. In his Kikuyu
ethnography, Facing Mount Kenya
(1938), future president Jomo Kenyatta put
forth more of the same associations.
Ngai was always already God; irua
for girls (clitoridectomy) is likened to surgery, and an icy river becomes
their anaesthetic. Their
instruction is like a school, and the genital cutting is done with the
dexterity of a Harley street surgeon.
Thus Kikuyu registered in the family of nations.[6]
The
Mau Mau insurgency of the 1950s again contested Kikuyu ethics, albeit with
weapons, and again Christian language played a role. Presbyterian students erased the name Jesus Christ from
their hymnbooks and pencilled in Jomo Kenyatta. The African Independent Pentacostal Church, adopting the
Bible as their sole doctrinal authority, permitted irua and wrote out a genealogy for themselves going back to the apostles. Athomi
taught English and writing in independent schools. The government closed them, and banned anti-AIM hymns, if to
little effect. Surely it was
enormously empowering that Ngai turned out to be omnipotent, but an omnipotent
being is often a content being. In
the end as Kikuyu Christianities multiplied, and as Ngai expanded his realms,
Kikuyuness no longer entailed access to open land and honorable work. John Lonsdale has argued that
Christianity clarified the nature of being Kikuyu, its base metal, and that
Mau Mau furthered the same process through violence. But Mau Mau was also about land and freedom, which Ngai
could not himself bring.[7]
The first Pacific islanders interactions with Europeans were dialogues
of the deaf held off shore or on the beach. James Cook described how in 1769 a Maori man went about
Cooks ship touching this and that[;] ... any new thing caught his attention
he shouted as loud as he could for some minutes without directing his speech
either to us or to any one of his countrymen.[8] Such a performance implied
the existence of a script or formula, a shadow text that a prayer book might
replace. Thirty-four years later,
on Christmas Day, 1813, Samuel Marsden preached his first sermon to New
Zealanders, drawing on Luke 2.10, and no one understood him either, the
preacher admonishing them not to mind that now. The field of comparative Oceanic religion began with these
incomprehensions. Thomas Kendall,
in Marsdens Wesleyan mission, was the first literate practitioner.[9] With the assistance of
northern hapu chiefs, he produced a Lords Prayer
and a grammar, following the method laid down in the Sanscrit Grammars of
Christian linguists in India (more about which below). Kendall tried to distinguish identities
from concepts. The wife of a
culture hero could not be the Virgin Mary, but the word atua could express the Divinity, because atua was not a personage.
Apparently Maori as in tangata
maori already meant we autochthones in the
18th century. Prayer books and
portions of scripture were translated, w[h]akamoari, meaning us-ified into the language of New Zealand. In 1837 William Colenso of the LMS
completed a New Testament, the KoTeKawenataHou,
standardizing the northern dialect.[10] It was from this time that
Maori became an ethnicity, and that white settlers numbers grew, soon to
eclipse them.
In
general the Pacific posed a great challenge: hundreds of languages each with
tiny numbers of speakers; vast and turbulent seas separating populations;
ritualized violence and hostility on individual islands. While most share a
basic grammar, their lexicons differ greatly. It was and is common for adults to know two or three of
them. In Papua New Guinea some 760
languages have been counted, a third of which have under 500 speakers; several
dozen are spoken by a villages worth of fishwives. Thus it was not possible to follow the example of Colenso
with the northern hapu Maori.[11] The Anglican pioneer
George Selwyn began his mission by teaching himself to read Maori aboard ship,
with a copy of Colensos KoTeKawenataHou
—or rather, he taught himself to read the KoTeKawenataHou – and, at St. Johns on Norfolk Island, he studied for two weeks
with a Pacific Christian making a vernacular version of a bit of
scripture. Then he learnt that the
mans dialect was limited to half the southern tip of the island. Ultimately the solution Selwyn found was the same that Marsden
adopted: the daily work of resident missions would be assigned to indigenously
Pacific pastors who could settle and learn languages related to their
own. (See John Barker chapter
XXX) The result was great variety
in linguistic practices and strategies in evangelism.
In
Melanesia two creole languages eventually predominated: the Motu of the
colonial police (which first drew personnel from Motu Island), and Pisin Tok,
pidgin talk, which emerged among Pacific migrant workers on Samoan coconut
plantations. People learnt them in
addition to their natal tongue, and neither became a national identity. When Melanesian Christians shouted I
know the one true God to identify themselves to other boats, they used the
English word God. As Pacific
pastors are aware, it was missionaries desire to communicate in English that
brought Oceania as a concept into being.[12] In many cases, government
and church seem to have been blended and overlaid in South Pacific
societies. In the Loyalty Islands,
antagonistic Catholic and Protestant factions of chiefs, abetted by competing
missionaries, repackaged their conflicts as religious wars. Their pastors later disseminated their
understandings of Christianity westward.
Lay evangelists on Tuvalu used hymns inappropriately and formed their
own ekalesia. After a Solomon
Islands pastor- chief, Soga, extended his dominion by preaching against local
raids and killings (headhunting), the title Soga was taken by paramount
chiefs. Anglicans in the Solomons
associated themselves with a vunagi kiloau
or church masters council – Soga II competed with one – much as a
samaj (society) of elders and churchmen emerged
among the Rishi (Untouchables) of the Ganges plain, and much as cattle-owning
Christians occupied kingships in central and southern Africa. Authority and Christianity spoke the
same language, and tended overlap in many parts of the empire.[13]
It
fell to Selwyns junior colleague, Robert Codrington, to attempt the first
broad-based study of Oceanic languages, in the 1860s. Not only did Codrington compile the Police (Pai) Motu dictionary but he mastered the
rudiments of forty other languages, writing a massive comparative grammar. Codringtons texts established the
Oceanic meaning of mana, a word found everywhere,
even in New Zealand, as an invisible spiritual force or influence deriving
from the ancestors; the Melanesian mind is entirely possessed by the belief
in mana, a supernatural power or influence.
Pacific religion was all about mana,
its pursuit and deployment. In his
1911 study, History of Melanesian Society,
the anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers also accepted mana, after conducting his research aboard the Anglican mission ship, The
Southern Cross, his main informant the son of a
native pastor. Raymond Firth, in
Tikopia (1940), further Christianized its meaning
as soul substance.[14]
Recent
scholarship suggests mana originally meant only
that something worked, with
nothing spiritual in it. According
to Roger Keesing, it connoted to be efficacious, as opposed to drevi, useless. In this view,
Pacific missionaries brought mana
into being as a spiritual concept so they could replace it with a Chistian
alternative. Mana was about ambition and the exertion of will, whereas grace, which the
Christian cherished, was something one received. It was manas inscription in
this opposition that made it exterior and receivable, and requiring faith. Codrington seemed to have harbored doubts
about manas spirituality, but it was his
study, The Melanesians, that defined it so,
effectively casting Pacific peoples efforts to be powerful in life, to have
juice, as a superstition.[15]
Pacific
people also wrested control of Christian language themselves. Although the first Maori baptism
occurred in 1825, by the 1860s nearly all Maori represented themselves as
normative Christians, regardless of what missionaries thought. On the East Coast, the Rev. William
Williams found Maori eager to internalize Christian ideas, and he was crushed
when his Church later lost nearly all its members to the Kereopa, the local manifestation of the great Pai Marire insurgency in 1865 (See
Lester chapter & Edgar chapters, XXX). In many respects, however, Kereopa was quite close to Maori Christianity, though it was politicized
differently. Even the Maori high
god, Io, was apparently adapted from
scripture. As J.Z. Smith argues,
it derived from a Taranaki Maoris vision of Gabriel in September, 1861, at a
critical juncture in the insurrection.
From that point on Io appeared as the
equal and opposite protagonist to the God of the Southern Cross. The name was a refitting
of Ihowa, or Jehovah. As Smith aptly remarks, homo
religiosus is essentially homo faber.[16]
Captain Cooks Voyages inspired an
apprentice cobbler in Bristol, William Carey, to seek a missionary career in
Tahiti. Initially rebuffed as a
miserable enthusiast, Carey co-founded the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792
and went to India the following year.
He settled at Serampore, under Danish protection, because the British
East India Company barred him from their territory, believing that missionaries
would subvert order. In fact the
Company disciplined the governor of Madras for using the word heathen in his
correspondence and posted offerings at major Hindu shrines. India, although denied parity with the
West, was not viewed as lacking in structure or civilisation as were Africans
and Pacific peoples.[17] Carey, William Ward, and
Joshua Marshman were known as the Serempore Trio. Their families created a super-domestic unit, sharing their
finances and possessions. Careys
involvement with indigo plantings at Mudnabati served both economic necessity
and the principle of self-sufficiency.
The constraints and prejudices of caste reminded him of the class
snobbery he knew in England. The
Trio handed out pamphlets and accosted upper-caste Brahmins in debates that
were soon found to be intolerable.[18]
Unlike
the Pacific or Africa, in India there was a profound literate tradition in
Nagari and a prior history of language work. The first European Christians had arrived in 1498 to find an
existing population of Thomas Christians. In 1706 Danish protestant missionaries reached Tranquebar in
the south. The Jesuits wrote an
influential Q. & A. dialogue in vernacular Bengali in 1599, and a
Portuguese Bengali grammar appeared in 1743. After Clives conquest of Bengal, the work accelerated. The Rev. William Jones wrote a Persian
and Sanskrit grammar in 1771 and 1786. Warren Hastings hired pandits to compile
Hindu law from all the shastric literatures, their output supervised by
Nathanial B. Halhed, which produced the Code of Gentoo Laws in 1768; Halhed also wrote a Bengali grammar in 1778, Bartholomeo one
in 1790, and H.P. Foster a dictionary in 1802.
Carey
appears to have worked on his many Bible translations with but little reference
to these predecessors. His first
was Bengali, in 1802. With it he
embarrassed the cosmopolitan pretensions of the BMSs fund-raising by baldly
translating baptize as immerse in Bengali. He argued that
the word baptiso, John the Baptists act,
meant immerse in Greek, and so constrained him in his choices. Careys diary shows him obsessed with
language, disciplined and scholastic.
From dawn to starlight he typically prayed, translated, studied an
Indian language with a pandit, studied Greek and Hebrew on his own, practiced
his Sunday homiletics, and then prayed again.[19] New missionaries in
Calcutta did not like being directed by the Trio, which separated from the BMS
in 1827. Even after forty years in
Bengal, detractors noted, Serampore had only 43 converts in good standing.
Carey
employed teams of pandits of diverse backgrounds, most of them non-Christian
and English-speaking. They knew
about God, Jesus and Mohammad from their own contacts. Once it became clear that many of
Bengals languages were related to one another and to Sanskrit, it remained to
translate the Bible into Sanskrit.
This was done in 1810 and became an ur-text
for Serempore, paralleling the Greek Septuagints relationship to the Standard
Bible. None of the translations
remained in use for as long as the Sanskrit, their interpretive lynchpin; and
it fell into desuetude after only thirty years. Careys system produced Oriya, Hindi, Assamese, Hindustani
(Urdu), Marathi, Pashto and Punjabi translations of the New Testament in the
decades that followed. Among
Careys dictionaries, the Marathi is really a smallish lexicon, ordered in
Nagari according to roots which could be located in Sanskrit; the definitions
are English. Several of the Bibles
were criticized as structurally erratic, their sentences formed according to
English grammar. Carey however
also wrote Indian-language grammars, beginning with Bengali (1805), and he
revised his Bibles in subsequent printings.[20]
In
1811, Serempores press published William Wards long book, An Account of
the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos,
a work revealing of the Trios perspective. Instead of seeing Hinduism from within, riven as it was by
competing movements of reform, Ward viewed it from the outside, a totality he
divided into unequal compartments: literature, philosophy, architecture,
prayers, medicine, cults, sacrifices, law, astronomy, etc. Ward argued theologically against Hindu
ideas, and also highlighted their impurity and cruelty.[21] Hinduisms idolatry was
disgusting, especially in condoning sexual outrages and featuring ecstatic
pain. Ward called sati or widow-burning an offence against humanity, and decried the
withholding of education from women.
It cannot be denied that compared to the alufa and the mallam, Christian missionaries
were more apt to welcome girls into their classrooms. Most of all, Ward discerned in Hindu myths that the eternal
and omnipotent God is given by many names, with none of them adequate. Some parts of Him are represented as
Brumhu (both the clay and the potter, invisible, perfect), others are
not. Ward used Brumhu (or Brahma,
Brahmo) as a name for God, but specific narratives were rejected, for instance
that Brumhu lusted after his own daughter. In other respects Vishnu, who came before Brumhu, or Krishna
or Shiva were like God.[22]
The
Account derived from the Trios conversations
with Serempores translators. One
educated Brahmin told Carey God was a great light, and as no one could see
him, he became incarnate under the three-fold character of Brumha, Beesho, and
Seeb. Such were errant beliefs
about God associated with their own deities. In other words the Trio was fashioning a single godhead from
scraps of Hindu lore, literature and law.
For example, Careys Marathi dictionary defines a single word as the
staff or beam of a plough, and The Lord, God. Secondarily, God (defined as he who fixes the situation of
all) is nested amongst derivations of the root signifying pedestal, temple,
heaven, sacred, idol, providential, revelation, and fate. The result of all such work was to
translate prior mythology and customs as a set of mistakes, or lies, behind
which one might glimpse a vestige of higher truth without a single sufficient
appelation.
Serempore
is recognized as the fountain of Indian vernacular publishing largely through
the efforts of Brahmin translators about whom little is known.[23] They worked on Joshua
Marshmans Signpost or Dig-Darshan,
the precursor of the News Mirror (Samachan
Darpan) from 1818, a pioneering Indian
newspaper. Vidyalankar and Ram
Basu were two of the translators; Ram Mohun Roy was briefly another. Vidyalankar became a leading exponent
of anti-reformist Hindu orthodoxy, and Ram Mohun Roy became the father modern
Hindu reformism. In a process
reminiscent of Yoruba, Kikuyu and Maori situations, Roy drafted the translated
God into a prior Hindu tradition, returning to the great light behind
specific Hindu incarnations (the very corruptions Ward denounced). Roy adhered to Unitarianism aside from
denying the expiatory nature of Christs death, and he launched his
organization, Brahmo Sahba (council or congress) by filing a deed to build
a church.[24] Renovation had long been a
dimension of Hindu intellectual life, and for a while one could be a Hindu
Christian; complimentarily, the idea arose that Hindus had their own
distinctive . . . religious system, or dharma.[25] In 1843, Debendranath
Tagore changed Roys organization to the well known, progressive Brahmo Samaj
(Transcendent Deity Society). The
Ramanandis, a sect devoted to Rama (Vishnu), rejected caste and proselytized
among the poor; they spread the Hindi translation of the Ramayana, which Carey
and Marshman had translated into English, in the newly cost-effective medium of
moveable type. Other reformers made
Krishna into a masculine, righteous deity, projecting the triumphal colonial
strength of Christianity back into the Hindu past, updating Roy. [26] And there remained
Serampores Bruhmhu, His light now clear of Vedic particularities.
Missionaries in Bengal helped usher into
being new social identities with familiar lexical material. This section traces how missionaries
turned a single concept, ancestor (sing.: modimo, pl.: badimo), into God, and looks
at the reverberations of this translation. The account here differs
from previous scholarhip, not least in contextualizing the particular
interactions through which translation happens.[27]
Today
the word Tswana denotes both a language and an ethnic identity. Originally the term (-chuana) appears to have meant to be similar. As in Kikuyuland and Yorubaland, a common field of
comprehension meant a common field of conflict. Tswana patriarchs fought to
keep their populations in proper Bechuana towns where authority and
production could be recoupled.
They made alliances through marriages, including with Korana, the
Khoe-speaking people of the Orange River.
They rustled cattle, killed one another in raids, and absorbed their
scattering peoples, always seeking to establish themselves – with their
penumbral genealogies – as rulers.[28] At the
end of the eighteenth century cultural, new religious and racial pluralisms
entered Tswana territory from the colonized parts of the Cape Colony. Tswana people often outnumbered the metis people they joined for military protection, who often spoke
seTswana. Records show also the
interpenetration of ex-slaves, Korana and San (Bushmen) with Tswana , and the
existence of markets in ivory, beads, captives and iron involving foreign partners. Dutch-speaking bushmen (with cattle)
accompanied Tswana leaders on diplomatic missions. Christianity flowed through these various patriarchies like
electricity as they vied for guns and trade, legitimacy, safety and wealth.
In
1813, John Campbell of the LMS, together a party of local evangelists and
Griqua captains, including Adam Kok, arrived at Dithakong. They came to parlay with Mothibi, the
Tswana chief of the Bachapees (meaning thus: ba- [people of] Tlhaping, the
eponymous kingly ancestor), and the Bastard Captains living under his
authority. As Mothibi was away
hunting, Campbell decided to talk to some royal women.
Mahooto
the queen . . . was averse to our going away [before Mothibi returned] . . . we
explained to her the nature of a letter.
Mr. [William] Anderson showed her one he had got from his wife[;] . . .
that Adam Kok had brought it, yet did not know anything that was in it . . . by
the use of the wax [.] The bible was lying on our table, which gave rise to our
explaining the nature and use of a book, and particularly that book. That it informed us of God who made all
things; of the beginning of all things which seemed to astonish her very much,
and many a look was directed toward the bible.
In the complex multi-lingual conversation that followed missionaries may
have noticed someone speaking the word moreemo (ancestor: modimo), because Campbell henceforth used it to name God. So did the Rev. James Read, who had
consecrated the status of many of the regions most powerful evangelists. Read held up the Book and said gravely,
The people that lived in darkness have seen a great light; light has dawned on
those who lived in the land of deaths dark shadow, and again all this, even
deaths dark shadow, had to be (doubly) translated. Mahutu posed questions that had previously occurred to
her. She asked, Will people who
are dead rise up again? Is God
under the earth or where is he? – showing clearly that she too viewed
the matter under discussion as concerned with ancestors and death.[29]
As
late as 1827 it was not established that this Tswana term would become the
regional signifier for God. Korana
and Bastard or Griqua (metis)
power brokers on the highveld saw no profit in the translation; in 1812, a
Khoe-speaking interpreter equated moolemo
with the Dutch word for devil, and Mothibe himself spoke the Kora native to
his mother and his wife.[30] The Griqua accompanying Campbell made Mothibi nervous, who greeted Campbell by
saying, you neednt have brought Captain Kok with you for safe passage. Metis people were the dominant power on
the highveld. Jan Hendricks, for
instance, besides being a deacon and pastor for the LMS, was a magistrate of
the fledgling Griqua polity.
Mothibi was nonetheless persuaded to receive the teaching by the
following exercise. The Rev.
Anderson asked Mothibi the names of his predecessors in government, wrote
them down on a scrap of paper and read them aloud, ostensibly to demonstrate
the power of writing. From
Mothibis point of view, the recital was a public inscription of his own
descent from legitimating ancestors back to the recognized founder-king,
Tlhaping, and logically, to the very ancestor
that Anderson offered as the greatest king of all. Mothibi reiterated his position in the new lineage in his
response: Let the missionaries come.
I will be a father to them.
In
the complicated politics of the frontier, the mixed Cape-descended Captains
living nominally under Mothibi issued raised objections, probably to the
Christian Basters who would come with any missionary. Over the next three years Mothibe
stalled the LMS, but in a fresh band came to implore Mothibi to keep his
promise, including a West Indian (Corner), Cupido Kakkerlak, at least one
Tswana Christian, and several of Koks men. In 1816, Jan Hendricks and James Read settled beside
Mothibis town with 29 parishioners and their families from the Griqua town of
Bethelsdorp. During one of his
early services Read discovered that many of the chiefs (dikgosi) thought modimo was a way for Read to
refer to himself. Thereafter
Hendricks took over the preaching.[31]
As
Christianity expanded modimo developed
further usages. Not only could it
signify a missionary, but also power, past kings, the station of ones
ethnonym, or even a living king whose rule united a nation. Ancestors involved the powers of
collective action and patrimony, so a cow with a wet nose, a breeder that
might produce wealth and (therefore) human dependents, was ancestor. A woman who married among Mothibis
people claimed to speak to modimo
daily, demanding gifts of livestock for her blessings. A freelancing preacher, Stephanus,
disseminated what missionaries called a false theology in advance of their
own work (Brock chapter, XXX). Modimo
became a contested notion in common speech. A woman caught stealing meat from a Kora captain explained
herself by saying, she could not help it, as modimo told her to. By this did
she mean ancestor or The Ancestor (God)? How could one know, with no definite article the in the
Tswana language? In time it became
clear that Mothibis alliance with teachers of the message of (the) ancestor
had not payed off. While guns
helped him in battle, he remained vulnerable to guerrilla attacks and in
1820had to repair to the Griqua
statelet of Andries Waterboer, who superintended his own version of an LMS
church.[32]
A
Methodist missionary, Samuel Broadbent, brought further complications, coming
from Ceylon, where he felt he saw diabolic ceremonies and
demon-worship. As he traveled
through the disturbed frontier zone of the Dithakong (Lattakoo) region,
patriarchs threw themselves at his feet, begging him to keep close by, holding
hostages, taking their cattle. His
party witnessed cannibalism born of starvation. Although virtually all his papers were incinerated in 1824,
a lexicon survives. Relying on a metis Dutch-speaking interpreter , Broadbent rendered Badeem (badimo, ancestors) as The Devil, and as he had in Ceylon, he diabolized South
Africas heathendom, shaping antitheses of his own prescriptions into
naturally occurring instances of traditional religion. Broadbent altered the spelling of the
root (-dimo) from its appearance in God,
which was Mulimo or Mudeemo in the same list, to -deem as if badeem were a one-off singular on its own. The LMS missionary Robert Moffat initially agreed,
commenting that badimo had no plural. (In the Pacific atua had also been a plural embracing a competitive pantheon before it
became God.) Broadbents
first attempts at public preaching in Tswana avoided the word modimo itself. Instead he read
out his version of the Lords Prayer, with its deployment of father. He asked a group of the more
intelligent villagers to repeat after him, a rote recitation without any
evident content:
Hara oa rona u mo ligudimong (Father, our, who art above.) I then asked, whether they knew who was
meant by our Father above? No,
was the general answer; we do not know who you mean. Addressing one of our cattle watchers by name, Roboque
[Broken], dont you know who it is we speak to in these words? He burst out in laughter; no, said he,
I have no father above![33]
One did have fathers, not above, but below, where the dead were
buried. Yet Broadbent would not
say, Our father who art below.
Instead he propounded a kind of camouflaged genealogy.
I was at a stand for a moment, but soon replied, You know that we exist,
and descended from our progenitors, and they from theirs, and so on to the
first of human kind; but who gave them being? Several voices answered, Mudeemo. I then spoke of the earth and heavens,
and remarked they also had a beginning and must have had a producing cause, for
you know, from nothing, nothing can proceed; who then, I further asked, is the
great first cause of all? Again
they replied, Mudeemo.
Who had the most power, the most long ago? elicited the answer, An
ancestor! Having orchestrated a
comprehensible dialogue, how far would Broadbent go in making God more like an
ancestor? He and his colleagues
were already alarmed by the words variety of uncontrolled uses. A visitor called the Rev. Hodgson modimo, clapping his hands, in appreciation of how he how had drop-forged lead
shot in a water bucket. It was not
clear whom missionaries were talking about when they spoke of modimo. Has he hair as we have?
people asked Moffat. Have you
seen him? Modimo was shouted in pain, said of clever people, even fast horses. Most troubling, confided Broadbent in
his diary, was that people made the traditionary [sic], though inconsistent statement of Mudeemo proceeding from beneath some
mountain, though it is unclear if one ancestor or one of many might so
proceed. Broadbent preached mostly about father, king,
and king of kings, and he hoped missionaries would adopt the term
Jehovah. But if people said
tell me about a/the ancestor, one necessarily obliged, while stressing that
there was, and could be but one, Mudeemo, [and] that He is Eternal . .
.[34]
The
dominant personality among South African LMS agents in the field was Robert
Moffat, who, at the time he sent Broadbent his translation of John 1, seemed
well on the way to a definitive version of the rest of the Gospels. Moffat used modimo to mean God, although he nursed doubts, seeing the indigenous idea (not
his comprehension of it) as ambiguous, an unknown force below ground.[35] Further he considered
using a word built on great, possibly mogolo
or mogologolo (a doubling for emphasis), which
would have made God a cognate of the term chosen by Nguni speakers (unkulunkulu). Broadbent felt Moffat
still lacked sufficient command of Tswana, a judgment confirmed by Mrs. Moffat
even in 1827; that year Moffat went to remedy his deficiency by moving
up-country for four months, living in the company of non-Christian Tswana
companions in a remote cattle-post settlement.[36] The following year he
finished the translation of the New Testament, completing the initial phase of
missionary endeavours to refer to their God with Tswana concepts.
In
it the end, the term for ancestor indeed came to mean God. Future missionaries would supply
narratives for this Modimo, displacing specific
lore about Tswana pasts in favour of a history common to everybody but known
best by Christians. Henceforth
Tswana people would read their own ancestral histories as versions of the
Bibles stories of Ancestors reign, in Exodus and Acts, and in later key texts
such as Pilgrims Progress. The relationship
between Modimo and historical kings
ceased being denotative and became metaphorical. Missionaries and new Tswana Christians agreed there would be
no plural for Modimo, which received its own
special noun-class (1-a); ancestors (badimo)
became the plural demons (pl., cl. 2, not 2a) and had no singular form. As Toril Moi remarks, the power struggle
intersects in the sign. In
retrospect, the precolonial Tswana modimo
became the imperfect version, a remote and half-known god.[37]
The
appearance of Moffats 1828 New Testament in Sechuana was a watershed also in
another sense. As the first
African language Bible it opened the way for dozens of others which
disseminated Christianity and alphabetic literacy throughout much of
sub-Saharan Africa. And although
subsequent South African Tswana, Sotho, and Pedi Bibles appeared, the Moffat
Sechuana version remains in use today.
The Bible became a source book for the ethnic identity Tswana, which
would grow to number in the millions, and supplied the basic vocabulary to
Isaac Schaperas oeuvre of genealogies, in which ancestor names become tribes,
and ancestor rites a depoliticized religion.[38]
Missionaries collective engagement with other languages shaped
theology, nationalism and national reformist movements throughout the
Empire. Not only did the bureaucratic
machinery of imperialism rely on missionaries language work; subject peoples,
when they wanted to be heard and understood by the colonial state, represented
themselves in ways the Christian state could grasp. It is clear that missionaries interaction with indigenous
modernizers was at least a two-way street. James Read committed adultery with a deaconess at the
Bushman mission at Bethelsdorp and was suspended in 1817. The missionary who worked most closely
with Ram Mohun Roy in Bengal, the Rev. William Aden, became a freethinker in
Calcutta. Thomas Kendall, the
linguist in New Zealand, left the ministry and married a Maori. Apparently there was a danger in
half-known logics: one might get converted out of Christianity instead of
converting others into it.
A
missionary in alien surroundings typically looked for familiar practices,
rituals and concepts, and learned words for them: divination, ancestor,
effectiveness (mana), etc. Often he split such words in two: one
remaining the heathen target of his efforts at replacement, perhaps for
generations, while the other named the intended replacement itself. Thus in Kongo, nkisi was lifted from its position in local symbologies of fear and success,
and used in two ways: as fetish object (among non-Christians) and, as a
written and spoken word, as holy, its veritable opposite, among
Christians. In Zambia, Anglicanism
appeared to mirror the way a Chewa secret society (dini) operated; when Anglicanism became a religion and a church for Chewa
people, alongside the original secret dini,
the word adopted for a religion or church was dini. And badimo had to descend to hell so modimo
could rise to heaven. Of course
Christian movements not only spoke in familiar terms, but took up new
ones. In Northern Rhodesia
Watchtower (Adventist) followers called those who refused baptism wasatani, devils, and in Ghana Ewe Christians embraced the dualist vision of
heathen ways as Satans and Christianity as Gods, because the Devil could be a
useful guide, a partner ferrying them into the new dispensation.[39] Good translation is an
art. New Caldonian missionary
Maurice Leenhardt took fifteen years to render the Gospel of Matthew in the
Houailou tongue, determined not to ask converts to parrot ideas before they could make sense of them. In considering how to translate
propitiatory, he let go of violent sacrifice as a font of analogies
altogether, and translated a word meaning
healing leaf as Christs blood.[40]
Even
such contextualization was unavoidably partisan. Each term, olorun and
eshu, nkisi,
dini, io and
mana, ancestor and leaf, became a kind of
prism through which different viewpoints vied for hegemony, and by which
different constellations of people elevated competing usages. Now, Robin Horton
has argued that in Africa, pre-Christian religions were mostly about
explanation-prediction-control.
Following his view, the notion of the high god emerged in colonized
societies not primarily due to missionaries but because local explanatory and
magical paradigms failed to account for the changing world. Face to face societies were
intellectually closed, they valued custom over innovation.[41] In departing from this
somewhat (Sir J.G.) Frazerian model, I have paid attention to the intersection
of missionaries aims with genuine political forces and strategems. Tapu
or ancestor-propitiation did not fall into neglect because of inherent flaws in
their host cultures, but because of guns, wells, corvee labor, racial thinking,
and extractive bureaucracies, in a word, imperialism. Whether murder and feasting are religions or crimes is
always a political matter.
Finally,
for scholars, missionaries involvement with translation and publication has
bred a body of knowledge managed in part by post-colonial, for instance
African Traditional Religion, which revalues diverse rituals as expressions
of an overarching religious orientation proleptic of the essential ideas in
Christianity and Islam. Crucially,
missionaries interventions produced an unprecedented number of newly
constructed written languages and millions of readers for them. Less pleasantly, missionaries lasting
textual imprint has also been to primitivize and tribalize peoples in their own
histories, construing their pasts as enchanted or superstitious. And not only popular insurgencies, but
the forces of diffusion and oppression have (re)occupied Christianitys
vocabulary, too. Such effects are
also part of the legacy of missionaries engagement with the languages of the
Empire.
[1] Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities, 2nd edn. (New York, 1991); Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses
of Print in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, 1987); Patrick Harries, Exclusion,
Classification and Internal Colonialism: The Emergence of Ethnicity among the
Tsonga-Speakers of South Africa, in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern
Africa,
ed. Leroy Vail (London, 1989), pp. 82-117.
[2] E.g. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (New York, 1997); Lorand J. Matory, The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XLI (1999), pp. 72-103; and Stephan Palmi, Wizards & Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham, N.C., 2002). See Peel (bibl.).
[3] William R. Bascom, Sixteen Cowries:
Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World (Bloomington, 1980); and
Moses N. More, Orishatukeh Faduma: Liberal Theology and Evangelical
Pan-Africanism, 1857–1946 (Lanham, MD, 1996).
[4] Richard Waller, Kidongois Kin:
Prophecy and Power in Masaailand, in Revealing Prophets, ed. D. M. Anderson and
D. Johnson (London, 1995), pp. 28–64.
[5] Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH, 2004); John Lonsdale, Kikuyu Christianities: A History of Intimate Diversity, ch. 6 in Christianity and the African Imagination, ed. D. Maxwell (Leiden, 2002), pp. 157–97.
[6] David Sandgren, Christianity and the
Kikuyu
(New York, 1989), 73 ff.; Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (London: Vintage,
1938), 140; B.A. Ogot, Politics, Culture and Music in Central Kenya: A Study
of Mau Mau Hymns, 1951-1956, Kenya Historical Review V (1977), pp.
275–86; and John Lonsdale, Listen While I Read: The Orality of
Christian Literacy in the Young Kenyattas Making of the Kikuyu, in Ethnicity
in Africa: Roots, Meanings and Implications, ed. L. de la Gorgendire (Edinburgh,
1996), pp. 17-53.
[7] V. Neckbrouke, Onzieme
Commendment: tiology divine, glise independente au pied du Mont Kenya (Immense: Nouv. rel.
de Science Missionaire, vol. 27, 1978), pp. 316 ff; Lynn Thomas, Politics of
the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley, 2003); John
Lonsdale, The Moral Economy of Mau Mau, in Unhappy Valley: Conflict in
Kenya and Africa, ed. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (Athens, Ohio, 1992) pp.
265–504; Lonsdale, in Maxwell, op. cit., 161.
[8] Nicolas Thomas, Cook (New York, 2003), pp.
53 and 65.
[9] Alfred Penny, Ten Years in Melanesia
(London,
1888), p. 16.
[10] Thanks to personal communication from
Doug Munro (in 1990), Courtney Handman, Marie-Paule Robitaille, and especially
(for the Maori quotation ) Ross Clark and Mark Laws.
[11] Illaitia S. Tuwere, What is Contextual
Theology: A View from Oceania, and Sr. Keiiti Ann Kauongataa, Why
Contextual?, Pacific Journal
of Theology, II, XXVII (2000), pp. 7–20, 21–40.
[12] David Hilliard, Gods Gentlemen: A
History of the Melanesian Mission, 1849-1942 (St. Lucia, Qld., 1978), p. 34; David
Hanlon, God vs. Gods: The First Years of the Micronesian Mission in Ponope, Journal
of Pacific History XIX (1984), pp. 41-59; Michael Goldsmith and Doug Munro,
Conversian and Church Formation in Tuvalu, Journal of Pacific History XXVII (June 1992), p.
51; D.C. Laycock, Melanesian Linguistic Diversity: A Melanesian Choice? in Melanesia:
Beyond Diversity (2 Vols.), ed. R.J. May and Hank Nelson (Canberra, 1982), Vol. 1,
pp. 33-6 esp.; Jeremy Beckett, Torres Strait Islanders: Custom and
Colonialism (Cambridge, 1987).
[13] Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First
Meetings Between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772 (Auckland, 1991), p.
112; K.R. Howe, Nation, Culture, and History: The Knowing of Oceania (Honolulu, 2000), p.
14; Geoffrey M. White, Identity Through History: Living Stories in a Solomon
Islands Society (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 94 ff.; Tom Dutton, The Missionary
Response to Language Division: the Papuan Example, in May and Nelson, op.
cit.;
Cosimo Zene, The Rishi of Bangladesh: A History of Christian Dialogues (New York, 2002), 142-7.
[14] Codrington, The Melanesian Languages (Oxford, 1885), p. 52;
R. J. Codrington and J. Palmer, Dictionary of the Language of Mota (London, 1896), 66;
Codrington, The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore (1891, repr. New Haven,
1957), pp. 188, 121; George Stocking, Jr., After Tylor: British Social
Anthropology, 188–1951 (Madison, 1995).
[15] Roger Keesing, Rethinking Mana, Journal
of Anthropological Research XL (1984), pp. 137–56; Malcolm J. Ruel, Belief,
Ritual and the Securing of Life: Reflective Essays on a Bantu Religion (Netherlands, 1997).
[16] Kay Sanderson, Maori Christianity on
the East Coast, New Zealand Journal of History XVII (1983), pp.
166–84; Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to
Jonestown
(Chicago, 1982), p. 92.
[17] Brian Stanley, The History of the
Baptist Missionary Society, 1792–1992 (Edinburgh, 1992), and Carey, An
Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of
the Heathen (1792, repr. London, 1961), and Eustace Carey, Memoir of
William Carey (Boston, 1836), Williams diary entries, p. 68; John Clarke
Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward (2 Vols.) (London,
1859), quoting Wards journal of 1802; Daniel Potts, British Baptist
Missionaries in India, 1793–1837 (Cambridge, 1967), p. 124; and Gauri
Viswanatha, Coping with (Civil) Death, the Christian Converts Right of
Passage in Colonial India, in After Colonialism, ed. Gyan Prakash (New
York, 1994), pp. 198-200.
[18] Brian Stanley, Some Problems in
Writing a Mission History Today, in Missionary Encounters, ed. Rosemary Seton and
Robert Bickers (Cornwall, 1996), p. 46; Stanley, History, 67; and Geoffrey A.
Oddie, Constructing Hinduism: The Impact of the Protestant Mission on Hindu
Self-Understanding, in Frykenberg, ed. (bibl.), p. 169.
[19] See Smalley (bibl.) for Carey, and
Careys letters in Periodical Accounts Relative to the Baptist Missionary
Society, Vols. 1–5 (London: Morris, 1800–15), hereafter PARBMS.
[20] Carey, A Dictionary of the Mahratta
Language
(Serampore, 1810); Stanley, History, 57 ff.; and Stewart Gordon, The Marathas,
1600–1818 (Cambridge, 1993).
[21] Ward, Account [. . . ] 2 Vols. (Serampore:
BMS, 1811), 1, xxxvii. Revised in
1815 as A View of the History, Literature and Religion of the Hindoos [. . .
].
[22] Ward, 1: cxi, cxl, and 81-4.
[23] Carey to Ryland, Oct. 14, 1815, PARBMS.
[24] David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the
Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, 1979); and R.E. Frykenberg, The
Construction of Hinduism at the Nexus of History and Religion, Journal of
Interdisc. Hist. XXIII (1993), 523–50; and Richard Fox Young, Resistant
Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth
Century India (Vienna, 1981).
[25] Oddie, in Frykenberg, ed. and citing
Cynthia Talbot, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in Colonial
India, Comparative Studies in Society and History XXXVII, 4 (1995).
[26] Ashis
Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery
of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi, 1983), p. 26.
[27] For other interpretations, see Sanneh
(Bibl.), esp. 171 ff., Chidester (Bibl.), and Jean and John L. Comaroff, Of
Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 1: The Colonisation of Consciousness (Chicago, 1991), pp.
214 ff., and Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, 76, 110 ff.; and
William Worger, Parsing God: Conversations about the Meaning of Words in
Nineteenth Century South Africa, Journal of African History XLII, (2001), pp.
417–47.
[28] See Robert Ross, Adam Koks Griquas (Cambridge, 1976), and
Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for
Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853 (Montreal, 2002), esp.
220ff., 320 ff.
[29] CWM , LMS In-letters, 5/2/D, Campbell
July 27, 1813.
[30] William J. Burchell, Travels in the Interior of South Africa (repr., London, 1953), 550.
[31] Karel Schoeman, ed., The Mission at
Griquatown, 1801–1821 (Griquatown, S.A., 1997), p. 17; Schoeman, The Griqua
Captaincy of Philippolis, 1826-1861 (Menlopark, S.A., 2002), p. 13, 24; and
Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for
Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853 (Montreal, 2002),
197-206.
[32] Hoyt Alverson, Mind in the Heart of Darkness: Value and
Self-Identity Among the Tswana of Southern Africa (New Haven, 1978), 125-6.CWM, WMMS, Journal of Thomas Hodgson (ms.) 1822; Hoyt Alverson, Mind in the Heart of Darkness (New Haven, 1978), p. 178.
[33] CWM, WMMS, Missionaries Papers, Box
600, Samuel Broadbent, Reminiscences, ms. notebook Second Part.
[34] Ibid. ms. Broadbent.
[35] CWM, LMS In-letters
8/1/A, Moffat to LMS April 16, 1819.
[36] Chidester (bibl.), 184
ff; Ross, 24 citing CWM, LMS in-letters, 10/2/B, Melvill to directors, April 2,
1827.
[37] Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual
Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London, 1985), cited by Janice Boddy, Wombs
and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult In Northern Sudan (Madison, 1989), p. 310;
contrastingly, Comaroffs, Revelation, Vol. 1, 218, 337 n27.
[38]The nonetheless painstaking Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom (Oxford, 1940), and Ethnic Composition of Tswana Tribes (London, 1952).
[39] John Janzen, Tradition of Renewal in
Kongo Religion, in N.S. Booth, ed., African Religion: A Symposium (New York: 1977),
69-115; Richard Stuart, Anglican Missionaries and a Chewa Dini, Journal of
Religion in Africa, 10, 1 (1979), 46-69; Meyer (bibl.).
[40] James Clifford, The Translation of
Cultures: Maurice Leenhardts Evangelism, New Caledonia, 1902-1926, Journal
of Pacific History, XXV, (1980), pp. 2–20.