In line with GloBil’s interest in spotlighting the agency of global majority/mother-tongue translators who collaborated with missionary linguists to translate the Bible into their own mother tongues in the colonial era, I am currently poring over archives of the Bremen Mission (Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) on the translation of the Bible into Ewe, the dominant language of German Togoland, spoken in present day southern Togo and south-eastern Ghana.
Several favourable circumstances have worked together for the successful performance of our task. The first of these is the ability of the native assistant, who was placed at my disposal by the North German Missionary Society. Ludwig Adzaklo…”
My preliminary discovery is one young Ewe mother-tongue speaker, Ludwig Adzaklo (1882-c?), who spent 5 years (1904- 1909) in Tübingen (Germany) co-translating the Ewe Old Testament with Missionary Jakob Spieth (of the Bremen Mission) under the sponsorship of the BFBS. As the above excerpt from a BFBS archive indicates, his competence was essential to the success of the Ewe Bible translation project in Tübingen. However, Adzaklo’s role has not (as yet) been adequately recognized and fully appreciated, being considered only as a language assistant (Sprachgehilfe in German) to Spieth, who in turn is acclaimed as the great Bible translator of the Ewe people (Bibelübersetzer des Ewevolkes) of the early twentieth century. Yet the existing archival evidence suggests Adzaklo played more than an auxiliary role in an enterprise that was sustained by a complex network of Bible societies with the BFBS playing the dominant role.
Fascinated by this, I am currently drafting alongside a research paper from a post-colonial perspective with the hypothesis that Ludwig Adzaklo is better seen as a mother-tongue co-Bible translator alongside Missionary Jakob Spieth, and not just a Sprachgehilfe to the latter.
Look out for the next updates on what we discover further about Ludwig Adzaklo, the young Ewe co-Bible translator of the Ewe Bible in the early twentieth century of German Togoland.
Michael Wandusim (Dr.)
Postdoc Research Associate
GloBil Team in Münster