Cultural Politics of Translation

East Africa in a Global Context

Alamin M. Mazrui, Alamin Mazrui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138499157
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317233183
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is the first full-length examination of the cultural politics at work in the act of translation in East Africa, providing close critical analyses of a variety of texts that demonstrate the myriad connections between translation and larger socio-political forces. Looking specifically at texts translated into Swahili, the book builds on the notion that translation is not just a linguistic process, but also a complex interaction between culture, history, and politics, and charts this evolution of the translation process in East Africa from the pre-colonial to colonial to post-colonial periods. It uses textual examples, including the Bible, the Qur'an, and Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, from five different domains – religious, political, legal, journalistic, and literary – and grounds them in their specific socio-political and historical contexts to highlight the importance of context in the translation process and to unpack the complex relationships between both global and local forces that infuse these translated texts with an identity all their own. This book provides a comprehensive portrait of the multivalent nature of the act of translation in the East African experience and serves as a key resource for students and researchers in translation studies, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, African studies, and comparative literature.

1 Language, Identity, and Translation

Between the Bible and the Qur’an

Swahili translators of sacred texts have generally been more preoccupied with the issue of language—of which African language or language variety is more suitable for translation—than have translators of secular literature. In their Swahili edition of Brecht’s The Good Woman of Szechwan, the translators raise the issue of which dialect is best placed to make world literature accessible to the Swahili-speaking peoples of East Africa, but such discussions in the secular domain are more an exception than a rule, and the reasons are essentially ethnonationalist. In the translation of sacred literature, however, the linguistic concern is both recurrent and textual even as the question of ethnonationalism continues to be an accompanying attribute. By its very nature, sacred literature forces upon the mediator of religious meaning a grave concern about the ability of translation, and of a language or a particular language variety, to adequately transmit the word of God. In this chapter, then, I hope to present a comparative perspective of the linguistic politics of Swahili translation of both the Bible and the Qur’an.

It is possible that, on average, translators of the Bible have been more concerned than translators of the Qur’an about the question of language. There is certainly a good amount of literature on Bible translators grappling with problems of conveying meaning in the Swahili translation, including the important volume The Bible in Africa: Transactions, Trajectories and Trends, edited by Gerald O. West and Musa W. Dube. Nothing comparable exists in the scholarship about the Swahili translation of the Qur’an. One possible reason for this disparity is the sacred value placed on these translated holy books by the communities of their respective faiths. In Christianity, a Bible translated into any language has the same value as the “original,” depending on the quality of the translation. The English Bible is no less sacred than the Aramaic Bible on which it may be based, as long as they are “equivalent” in meaning and have no “errors” in translation. The same cannot be said about translations of the Qur’an from the Arabic “original.” Indeed, the translation of the Qur’an is not considered the Qur’an at all, irrespective of the quality of the translation, to the extent that the translated text is always a stage removed in sacredness. Therefore, the linguistic anxieties that punctuate the religious sensibilities of Bible translators (Tanner, “East”) may be less pronounced among translators of the Qur’an.

The Bible and the Swahili Language

Some of the earliest recorded views on Swahili translation relate to biblical materials. Christianity is fundamentally a religion of translation. The Bible is by far the most widely read book in translation in the history of the written word. Even the original four gospels of the New Testament (Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John) were written primarily in the Greek language, with only a smattering of Aramaic phrases. By about 1450, a decade after the introduction of the printing press, there were already thirty-three translations of the Bible. By the end of the twentieth century, the Bible was available either in part or in whole in hundreds of languages.

Within East Africa, translated biblical materials had virtually dominated the Swahili publishing scene in the early period of European colonial rule. In the words of Jack D. Rollins:

In terms of literary influence, one set of figures alone will explain more than several paragraphs. Between the years 1900–1950, there were approximately 359 works of prose published in Swahili; 346 of these were written by Europeans and published mainly in England and Germany. Many of these were translations: Swift, Bunyan, Moliere, Shakespeare, but none more pervasive, in more abundance, and having more effect than the Bible. The British and Foreign Bible Archives in London show that thousands of copies of either books from the Bible, or the entire Bible itself had been distributed in East Africa by the turn of the century. A common yearly run was between 5–10,000 copies. This is not to mention the many editions of individual hymn books, catechisms, prayer books, lives of saints and so on that also quickly found their way into Swahili by the beginning of the 20th century. (51)

Underlying this phenomenal outpouring of biblical material in Swahili, however, was an intense missionary debate about the suitability of the language in conveying the Christian message.

Throughout much of the colonial period, Swahili was considered an Afro-Islamic language—a medium of East African Islam—by many Christian functionaries. After all, Swahili is partly a product of the interaction between Bantu languages in East Africa and Arabic. However, the impact of Arabic upon the development of Swahili is itself part of the wider impact of Islam. The Islamic origins of Swahili lie partly in its readiness to borrow concepts, words, and idioms from the Arabic language and from Islamic civilization, and partly from the fact that embedded in many aspects of the civilization of the Swahili people has been the influence of Islam. In other words, Swahili’s Islamicity derives both from the language’s history of sustained interaction with Islam and from the fact that the great majority of the native speakers are historically Muslim.

As the language of the Qur’an and Islamic ritual, Arabic is very susceptible to Islamic imagery and connotation. This helped enrich Swahili alongside borrowings from Bantu and other languages. The word for God in Swahili (Mngu), for example, comes from Bantu, whereas the word for angels (malaika) comes from Arabic. The word for heavens (mbingu) is of Bantu origin, while the word for earth (ardhi), especially when used religiously, comes from Arabic. The word for prophet (mtume) is from Bantu, whereas the word for devil (shetani) comes from Arabic. A wider range of illustrations could be added to these, showing an important interplay of meaning and symbolism between the universes of religious experience in the traditions of Bantu-speaking peoples and the legacy of Islam (Mazrui and Mazrui, Power 169–70).

Of course, Arabic was a language of Christianity on the Arabian Peninsula long before it became the language of Islam. The earliest Arabic translation of biblical texts goes back to the ninth century. Since then, many other versions of the Arabic Bible have come into existence, especially in Lebanon and Egypt; significantly, the standard Protestant version of the Arabic translation of the Bible is in the Classical Arabic variety usually associated with the Qur’an (Persson 10). But it is not the Arabic language per se that matters in the development of Swahili: It is the fact that in East Africa, the Arabic language came as part of the Islamic civilization. As Canon Godfrey Dale observed, even

the dominant ideas of the Koran found their way into the intellectual atmosphere in which the Swahili lived; and many words and phrases, especially the words and phrases constantly repeated in the Koran and in prayers, found their way into the everyday speech of the Swahili people, affecting it much as the ideas and languages of the Bible have affected the speech of Christians. (5)

To the extent that Islam was built into the very life and fabric of the Swahili language and culture, Dale concluded that the task of translating the Qur’an into Swahili must be a relatively easy one.

The original alphabet used in writing Swahili also added to its Islamic image. It has been a written language for hundreds of years. Until the twentieth century, the Swahili script, also known as Ajami, was based entirely on the Arabic alphabet,¹ with such modifications as were necessitated by the phonological peculiarities of this East African lingua franca.² The acquisition of that script was almost invariably tied to early training in reading the Qur’an.

This presumed Islamicity of Swahili became an issue of great concern when the language began its entry into the mainstream of Western formal education. A colonial debate then got under way about the media of instruction for Africans, the comparative merits of Swahili against what were called “vernacular languages,” and the comparative merits of Swahili against the European languages of the colonizers. This debate, especially when it touched upon the fundamental issues of educational policy, became quite often an issue between church and state in a colonial situation.

There were, of course, differences of opinion between German and British colonizers of East Africa on the implications of Swahili’s Islamicity for African education. Prior to the war of resistance against colonialism on the German side of East Africa, an important section of the colonial establishment regarded Swahili as a reservoir of Islamic spirit and was openly opposed to its use in the translation of the Bible. According to Marcia Wright:

In Germany, Director Buchner proved to be an unrelenting foe of Swahili, going so far in a speech before the Kolonialrat in 1905 as to declare that it was irredeemably mixed with Islam that every expedient ought to be employed to obstruct their joint penetration … Buchner’s opposition to Swahili was adopted and expanded by Julius Richter, a member of the Berlin Committee. Richter delivered a diatribe during the Kolonial Kongress in 1905 against the pernicious influence of Islam everywhere in Africa. Isolating East Africa as the scene of the worst danger, he envisaged a mosque alongside every coastman’s hut, and took the official support for Swahili to be blatantly pro-Islamic. (113)

According to another colonial ideologue of the time, H. Hansen, Islam and Swahili together constituted not only mortal adversaries in the transmission of the Christian message, “but also, in Africa, the unrepentant enemies of colonial politics” (qtd. in Pike 231). The existence of An-Najah,³ a Swahili journalistic venture using the Ajami script to openly agitate against German colonial rule, was seen as a vindication of Hansen’s position.

On the other hand, Carl Meinhof, a prominent German linguist of that time who saw the adoption of Swahili as a very practical aid to German administration in its East African colony, suggested that the language could be purged of its Islamicity. To this end, he proposed the replacement of the Arabic-based script with Roman letters and Arabo-Islamic loan words with Germanic ones (Pike 224).⁴ Through this process, Christian missionaries were thus assured that the Islamicity of Swahili would no longer be in the way of conveying the good Word of God.

Dr. Karl Roehl, a missionary of the German Lutheran Church, was particularly attracted to this idea of dis-Arabizing the Swahili of Christianity. He made deliberate attempts to reduce to the very minimum the use of Arabic-derived words in his Swahili translation of the Bible. Roehl argued that “the Arab expressions are linked up with Moslem ideas, which are very often strongly divergent from the corresponding Christian ones …” (197). Noting that in its natural spread into the interior, the language was already being “released from its Arabo-Islamic isolation,” Roehl concluded that the final aim of this historical trajectory

should be a pure, noble—if the expression is permitted—rebantuized Swahili. This should be the programme in view of the unprecedented rapid spread of Swahili in Eastern and Central Africa: to restrain the too exuberant growth of Arabic words, which after all are a foreign element in the language, and to use instead genuine Bantu words. The simple fact that the strongly arabicized Swahili of religious books, which is also used in the Bible, is called Kimisioni, i.e. ‘mission language,’ by the natives of the coast shows how keenly this form of speech is felt to be something which is not really Swahili. (199)

As we shall see later, it was not the Arabisms in the language that led native speakers of the language to refer to the Swahili of the Bible and the Church as “Kimisheni.” On the contrary, it was the perceived emergence of a dialect that either diluted or distorted the Arabic elements.

In any case, at a 1914 meeting of representatives of four different German missions, it was resolved finally that a new translation of the Bible would be produced that would be suitable for the whole of German East Africa. A main objective of this exercise was “to purify Swahili as a Bantu language, by eliminating the majority of the Zanzibar Arabic words, which are either not used, or imperfectly understood, by the natives of the coast, and are quite unintelligible to those in the interior” (Mojola 516).

This anti-Arabic sentiment was to continue well into the postcolonial period. In the guise of using an informal style of Tanzanian Swahili, for example, the Biblica online Swahili translation of the Bible seems to make a deliberate effort to minimize “Arabisms,” preferring the Latin-derived Lusifa (from Lucifer) for the Devil, for example, to the more commonly used Arabic-derived Shetani. According to Ken Walibora Waliaula of Nation Media, Nairobi, for example, one of Biblica’s translators displayed outright hostility toward Arabic influences in Swahili during his interview with Waliaula on QTV’s Sema Nami program on February 22, 2014. In fact, Waliaula suspects that the recent translations of the Bible that claim to use “Tanzanian Swahili” or “Kenyan Swahili” were, in effect, attempts to dis-Arabize “Biblical” Swahili.⁵

To Karl Roehl, the presence of Arabic influence in Swahili was a cultural affront to both Africa and Europe. It denied Africa of its linguistic authenticity and self-determination and, ironically, subverted colonial efforts at inscribing a Euro-Christian ethos on African soil. Under the circumstances, the dis-Arabization of Swahili became an important prerequisite for the success of the modernization project of European colonialism in the whole of East Africa. A dis-Arabized Swahili not only offered “the possibility of translating the highest scientific knowledge into practical [African] life,” but also transformed the language into a more formidable medium for “introducing African peoples into the modern mental world of Europe” (Roehl 201, 200).

In response to Roehl, Canon G. W. Broomfield argued that a non-Arabic Swahili is essentially a contradiction in terms, and that Arabic is to Swahili what Latin is to English. He criticized Pastor Roehl’s Swahili translation of the New Testament that endeavored to make the least possible use of words of Arabic origin. The translation, according to Broomfield, resulted in a language that is impoverished and clumsy; Swahili renderings of the holy book totally distorted its intended meanings. Some of the specific examples that he cites from Roel’s translation are kutwaa (take) in place of the Arabic-derived kurithi (inherit), mfumbuaji (a mystery solver) for the Arabic-derived Nabii (prophet), and wamizimu (a term of uncertain meaning) in place of the Arabic-based mataifa (nations) (83–84). For Broomfield, it is not the Arabisms in Swahili that threaten to distort the Christian message; the semantic danger lies in Roehl’s ill-conceived efforts to dis-Arabize/re-Bantuize the language.

Broomfield’s remarks are reflective of the situation in British colonies, specifically Kenya and Uganda, where the Christian opinion was more divided. A number of missionaries felt that because both Islam and Christianity were monotheistic religions drawn from the same Middle Eastern ancestry and share a considerable number of spiritual concepts and values, Swahili would serve well as a transmitter of biblical lessons and Christian values precisely because it could already cope with the religious universe of Islam. Because of its Islamicity and its role as a transethnic medium of wider communication, Swahili was seen as the best available option for reorienting the African “native” from his presumed fear of spirits and the unknown toward Christian notions of paradise and hell. Any attempt to dis-Arabize Swahili was opposed by these British missionaries because of the fear that it would “limit the possibility of bringing out the meaning of the sacred text, especially if words which have been for a long time in use are replaced by less meaningful words [from other African languages]” (Mojola 517).

As early as 1850, the Reverend Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf of the Church Missionary Society was already campaigning for Swahili as a language of the Bible and Christian evangelism. Its status as a lingua franca and its rich reservoir of religious concepts relevant to Christianity made Swahili, in the eyes of the Reverend Krapf, an ideal language for East African Christianity. The only aspect of the language that he found objectionable was its use of the Arabic script, which, if left to continue, would leave a door open to “Mohammedan proselytism among the inland tribes which may hereafter be Christianized and civilized” (Krapf 170). It was partly due to this fear that Krapf pioneered the use of the Roman script in writing Swahili. Otherwise, he was among the missionaries who not only championed the use of Swahili for the Christian gospel, but also made substantial contributions toward the systematic study of the language (Mazrui and Mazrui, Political 74).

Because Swahili was already spoken widely as an additional language among non-Muslim Ea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Language, Identity, and Translation: Between the Bible and the Qur’an
• 2 Translation and Foreign Relations: Between Tradition and Modernity
• 3 Translating Fanon in Socialist Tanzania: Between the Wretched and the Damned
• 4 Translation Post-9/11
• 5 Translating the Law: Reflections of a Linguistic Activist
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Linking Text and Context: Ali Mazrui and Translation Studies in Africa
• Bibliography
• Index