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 Revd 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 offear 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. Badimo had to descend to hell so Modimo could rise to heaven. In Zambia, Anglicanism appeared to mirror the way a 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 again ‘dini’. Of course Christian movements not only spoke in familiar terms, but took up new ones: Zambian Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witnesses) followers called those who refused baptism ‘wasatani’, ‘devils’, and in Ghana Ewe Christians embraced the dualist vision of heathen ways as Satan’s and Christianity as God’s, because the Devil could be a useful guide, a partner ferrying them into the new dispensation. Good translation is an art. The New Caledonian 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 ‘Christ’s blood’.
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. 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 stratagems. Tapu, or ancestor- propitiation, did not fall into neglect because of inherent flaws in their host cultures, but because of guns, wells, corvee labour, 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 practitioners, 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. Missionaries’ lasting textual imprint has also been to primitivize and tribalize peoples in their own histories, construing their pasts as enchanted or superstitious. Not only popular insurgencies, but the forces of diffusion and oppression, have (re)occupied Christianity’s vocabulary. The legacy of missionaries’ engagement with the languages of the Empire is not an entirely uplifting one.