Nearly all the world’s 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 world’s 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 everyone’s 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 Empire’s 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 Empire’s 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 fuelling the concept of the ‘tribe’, the favoured subunit of imperial governance for African and Pacific peoples. For instance, civil cases entailed appeals to ‘native law and custom’, preferably 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 Moshoe-shoe’s family dialect as a language, seSotho. Nearby a new affiliation emerged in an urban context, in which ‘Shangaan’ migrant labourers used the missionary Henri Junod’s 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. Externally, 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 demonstrates 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 multi-confessional 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 people’s orisa sacrifices and stigmatized the tools of the babalawo, the if a divination specialist, as Satan’s things. In place of the 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’ in 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 God’s 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 Crowther’s Yoruba dictionary of 1843 even chose the word ‘alufa’ (‘Muslim cleric’) for Christ’s own priesthood. Literate Brazilian and Cuban entrepreneurs and evangelists further moulded Yoruba identity, as they did other cults and ethnicities on the shores of the ‘Black Atlantic’. The evangelical pan-Africanist Orishatukeh Faduma (b. William Davis) hypothesized that God had always been a universal conception even in orisa, which further explained concordances. James Johnson’s Yoruba Heathenism (1899) and Samuel Johnson’s 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.
On the other side of Africa, among the hearty farmers of Kenya’s 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). The first generation of students, called athomi, or ‘readers’, made these ideas ‘Kikuyu’. Athomi joined their precolonial codes of obligation and work to a new narrative of the self, one ‘prefigured’ in the Bible: ‘endurance, improvement and salvation’. 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 altering 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 clitoridectomy 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 circumcised 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 favoured mandatory clitoridectomy 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) the 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.
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 Pentecostal 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 honourable 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.