On 28 May 1940, a group of 33 people met at the British and Foreign Bible Society headquarters (‘Bible House’) in London for a conference on African languages. The evacuation at Dunkirk was under way; the sea was full of U-boats; on the morning of the conference, the news arrived of the Belgian capitulation. What better moment to discuss the state of Biblical translation on the African continent? The conference report contrasted the shared sentiment that “lights were going out one by one in Europe” with the “unquenchable optimism” of those present, “a band of men moving towards the sunlight”; the opening speaker called to mind that the BFBS had also been founded at a time when Napoleon was plotting his invasion of England.
The occasion for the conference was to discuss a series of reports by the BFBS secretary for Africa, W.J. Wiseman, and the outcomes of a questionnaire sent out to missionaries and missionary societies (all in BFBS archives, Cambridge University Library: GBR/0374/BFBS/BSA/F2/9/8, marked as ‘confidential’; no outcomes of the conference seem to have been published). Between 1937 and 1939, Wiseman had made two large inspection tours along missionary stations and Bible colporteurs in sub-Saharan Africa and on the larger islands, covering more than 40,000 miles by plane, boat, lorry, and any other means of transport. The purpose of this was to survey the efficacy of Bible translations. While the BFBS mission was to make the Bible available to all people in their own language, in practice the cost and difficulties associated with producing a full translation – printed and shipped from Britain – were proportionally larger for smaller languages, and the reliability of the translations hard to ascertain except in situ. Meanwhile cheap Bibles were being mass-produced in European languages; Wiseman quotes customer complaints that “The price of a small French New Testament in Douala was 2 francs, while a New Testament in the local language (in the same bookshop) was priced 10 francs. The African cannot understand why prices to Europeans are so much lower. We point out that the books are smaller; then he, too, wants a smaller book.”
Questionnaires and Language Engineering
The question with which Wiseman was travelling the continent, then, was not only which languages still did not have a Bible translation and which translations needed revision, but also which language communities could be served more easily through a cognate language, a larger (trade) language such as Hausa or Swahili, or even the colonizer’s language. How to demarcate a ‘language’ within a language continuum or dialect cluster was more than a theoretical issue here: apart from the money and effort involved, translation also implied creating a standard written language and thereby cementing or reshuffling linguistic hierarchies. About Lingala, for instance, Wiseman reported that “We are told that the language is being stabilised along the line of the New Testament speech”. To get this picture clearer, and expressly to avoid wasted effort, the questionnaire that the BFBS sent out requested missionaries to indicate
- The language of your district.
- Boundaries of the language area.
- (a) Number who speak the language.
(b) Number of Christians. - What progress has been made since 1930
(a) in the number of Christians?
(b) in the literacy of the tribe? - Is the language known to other tribes?
- What relation does it bear to other tongues?
Which is the principal language?
…as well as the state of extant translations, work in progress, and further translation work needed. Most tellingly, and somewhat chillingly, the last question was about the viability of the language:
- Is (a) a European language, (b) a trade language, (c) another principal language, likely to supplant that of your tribe?
As questionnaires go, the response was uneven; the most detailed information was provided by the Conseil Protestant du Congo Belge, from whom Wiseman desired ‘a wide statesmanlike view of the whole Congo field’ notwithstanding the fact that the Protestant mission in Congo was seriously outnumbered in the field by its Catholic rivals. More modestly, the Conseil’s secretary offered a criticism of the state-sponsored overview of Les Peuplades du Congo Belge (1937), which was “based on very incomplete data” and “not reliable in details. Furthermore, no map can indicate accurately the overlapping of tribes which is almost universal” – a picture further complicated by “the penetration of trade-languages and government languages”. Echoing Wiseman’s concerns, the Conseil Protestant’s secretary stressed the ‘tragic wastefulness’ of some translation efforts in the past:
There was no means to estimate the potential usefulness of a language. Wherever a gifted and energetic linguist happened to settle, a translation was made. The tragic wastefulness of this is evident to-day in the versions used by limited and declining numbers of people, often bea[u]tiful and scholarly versions, such as the Bobangi Bible, the Inkongo Bible [and] the Luba-Sanga Bible; and in the multiple versions which have divided people instead of uniting them, as in the case of Kikongo, Ngala, Lunda, and the many varieties of Luba.
The 1940 BFBS conference brings to mind a similar conference that had been hosted at the Prussian embassy in London eighty-six years earlier, the so-called ‘Alphabetic Conference’ convened by Baron Bunsen and the CMS Secretary, John Venn. There, the discussion had been about a uniform system of phonetic transcription for non-European languages, to be used by missionaries and philologists alike; along with an unlikely list of leading scholars from different fields, all the main Protestant missionary societies had been represented. If the 1854 conference had sought to establish a framework for standardized Bible translation, the 1940 conference was taking stock. Enquiries were made by Wiseman into 59 African languages; appended to his reports was a longer list of 204 languages, with ticks to indicate if that language possessed ‘Bibles’, ‘Testaments’ (generally the New), or ‘Portions’. On the carbon copy, where the column ‘Bible’ was empty, Wiseman indicated in red ink what other languages could fill the gaps. Most listed were Hausa, Swahili, Kikongo, English, and Portuguese.
What Wiseman was delivering at the BFBS conference, then, was effectively both an ethnolinguistic survey and a business report. Though Wiseman never intended his work as a contribution to linguistic scholarship, and did not delve into linguistic details, he may well have been at more places in Africa to gather information about languages in the area where they were spoken than any Africanist. More technical linguistic information must have been provided at the conference by Ida Ward, at that point Head of the Department of African Studies at SOAS, who is listed as a speaker about “Bible translations and new orthographies”. She had been involved in the making of the Africa Alphabet, a version of the Latin alphabet supplemented with IPA characters. Whether or not to adopt it was a major issue for the BFBS, although the resolution passed about orthography was functionally vague (“a modern orthography, where possible acceptable to the Government of the country, and based upon the principles recognized by the Bible Society and by all the missions concerned”).
Bible Industry
The local detail in Wiseman’s reports, rather, is about the commercial realities of selling Bibles in the colonies. In Northern Nigeria, the use of box tricycles enabled the colporteurs to cover greater distances in less time; and as “the methods adopted will create a desire for literacy, the Government is showing interest in this effort”. One colporteur targeting Indians in East Africa was taken to task because “he is apparently mainly occupied in evangelical work. The Secretary impressed upon the friends responsible for this work at Nairobi that the Bible Society’s grant is to be taken for selling the scriptures among Indians.” A more industrious colporteur in Kenya, however, was applauded for creatively piecing together his own means of transport and thereby saving the Society the cost of buying and running a truck:
The Rev. J.G. Stephenson has built a large comfortable motor colportage caravan, with special back-door shelves opening in the form of a bookstall and with ample accommodation for carrying stocks of books. A large photograph of this caravan can be seen in the Secretary’s office at the Bible House. Mr. Stephenson is prepared to undertake four-monthly winter tours, November to February, the best season of the year for such operations, wholly in the interest of the Bible Society. […] The total expense to the Bible Society for such a tour of four months is about £ 125. This is enormously less in cost than any scheme hitherto submitted. The Secretary has seen the man and the van and unreservedly recommends that the Committee should undertake a trial for these four months of the Winter season.
Unfortunately no photograph of Stephenson’s ingenious vehicle has been kept in the archive folder, but a resolution was passed (to general cheer, one imagines) to grant him the £ 125.
In his reports on Bible sales, Wiseman comes across more as a travelling sales agent than as a missionary, making a cool-headed assessment of profits and losses. Here the image of tinkering in local conditions stands in stark contrast to the industrial scale of operations, with 1,200 colporteurs active and sales of up to 56,415 Bibles (in Madagascar) yearly. To allay any fears that “Christian organisations are not alert and businesslike”, Wiseman provided reassurance that the Bible was an unbeatable best-seller and the BFBS outperformed all competitors, even if sales across West Africa had gone down in recent years because a slump in the cacao industry had left people destitute. Still, the very fact that the otherwise parsimonious BFBS spent a considerable sum on Wiseman’s two six-month inspection tours is a sign that selling the Word was by no means easy business, and his reports repeatedly emphasized how language variety – among other factors – was a liability:
For various reasons Africa is not yet so feasible a proposition for colportage as India and China. The peoples of the Orient live in huge centres of population and tens of millions can be reached in one language alone. In parts of Africa languages change in every fifty miles, money is very rarely needed and therefore seldom available, also, worst of all, often more than ninety percent of the people are wholly illiterate.
But contrary to that grim assessment, he stated on the same page that “more Bibles are sold in [Equatorial] Africa alone than in the whole of India and China by all Bible Societies combined”; in West Africa mission bookshops avowedly held an almost complete monopoly over the stationery and book trade. The result of this Bible industry was nothing less than a cultural transformation on a continental scale. Since the late 2010s, Africa is the continent with the largest Christian population, whereas Christianity has remained a minority religion in India and China.
Wiseman’s reports and the general tone of the conference were inevitably paternalistic. Interest in African cultures and traditions was nil, unless where it affected sales; Africa was the ‘Dark Continent’, converts were viewed as a flock, and local salesmen described as lazy and unreliable (except for one Colporteur Sododo, “a clean, neat, alert and happy-looking man” and former tailor who was making phenomenal sales on the Gold Coast). But if the BFBS imagined the future largely in terms of a mission civilisatrice, that future also included African leadership. A clear power shift occurred in the Kingwana (Congolese Copperbelt Swahili) version, where the voice of native translators was given primacy – as the head of the Stanleyville mission reported, in the full awareness of the impact of its language engineering:
We had a splendid Language Conference, with about forty present, mostly evangelists. We had before them the pure SWAHILI of Zanzibar and copies of the versions from Stanleyville and Ruwenzori and our old style and the new mss I was working upon. At the request of the natives, we whites left and they continued the discussion themselves.
In the afternoon we met together. They had decided that we as a Mission ought to take up the Stanleyville dialect known as the LUABALA KINGWANA. Because it is so different from our old style of speaking, the change-over will be a tremendous task, involving all our printed matter – Hymnbooks, Primers, Readers, etc. – and to change the spelling as well as the grammatical construction will amount to almost learning a new language. But it will be worth while. It is ‘a disturbing of the present to establish the future’. All agreed that it is much fuller in expression and vocabulary.