Postcoloniality, Translation, and the Bible in Africa

Dube, R. S.

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498295154
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book is critically important for Bible translation theorists, postcolonial scholars, church leaders, and the general public interested in the history, politics, and nature of Bible translation work in Africa. It is also useful to students of gender studies, political science, biblical studies, and history-of-colonization studies. The book catalogs the major work that has been undertaken by African scholars. This work critiques and contests colonial Bible translation narratives by privileging the importance African oral vitality in rewriting the meaning of biblical texts in the African sociopolitical, political, and cultural contexts.

Part I

The Colonial Discourse and African Bible Translations

1

Consuming a Colonial Cultural Bomb

Translating Badimo into “Demons” in the Setswana Bible1

(Matthew 8:28–34; 15:22; 10:8)

Musa W. Dube

The domain in which the encounter with the mission made its deepest inroads into Setswana consciousness was that of literacy and learning. Those who chose to peruse the Setswana Bible learned more than the sacred story, more even than how to read. They were subjected to a form of cultural translation in which vernacular poetics were re-presented to them as a thin sekgoa narrative—and their language itself reduced to an instrument of imperial knowledge.2

Introduction: Language and the Art of Colonizing Minds and Spaces

Because colonizers tend to install their languages among the colonized, thus displacing the local ones, the subject of language is central to Postcolonial debates.3 Questions such as why do the colonizers give their languages to their subjects? What happens to the languages of the colonized? What is lost when the colonized begin to speak, read and write in the colonizer’s language and neglect own language? What strategies are adopted by the colonized to resist the imposition of the colonizer’s language? These questions remain central to postcolonial debates. Frantz Fanon, a postcolonial critic of the sixties, addressed the issue of language back then. Fanon opened his book, Black Skin, White Masks, with a chapter on “where he stated that he “ascribe [s] a basic importance to the phenomenon of language,”4 for to speak a language is not only to use its syntax or to grasp its morphology, but it is ‘above all to assume a culture, to support a civilization.’5 Thirty years later, Ngugi wa Thiongo, one of the present-day postcolonial critics, echoes Fanon when he maintains that ‘language carries culture, and culture carries the entire body of values by which we come to perceive our place in the world.”6 Their statements speak for themselves insofar as the imposition of the colonizer’s language on the colonized and the loss of their own languages are concerned. The colonized, who speak, read and write in the colonizer’s language, adopt the culture of their subjugators. They begin to perceive the world from the perspective of the subjugators. In this way, the colonizer takes possession of the geographical spaces and the minds of the colonized. The imposition of the language of the colonizer is thus an effective instrument for colonizing the minds of the subjugated, for it alienates them from their own cultures. On these grounds, Ngugi holds that:

The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance [of the colonized] is the cultural bomb. The effect of a bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.7

Ngugi describes colonization as a violent undertaking that proceeds by demolishing the cultural world views of the colonized. The suppression of their cultures “makes them want to see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland.”8 Describing the violence of colonialism on native cultures, Fanon holds that “Every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by death and burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nations.”9 Fanon equates colonization with the “death and burial” of one’s culture. Fanon also regards the suppression of colonized cultures as a means to an end: it leaves the colonized confronted by the culture or the language of their subjugator. It serves, therefore, to clear the way for the implantation of the colonizers’ language or culture.

Evidently, the explosion of the colonial cultural bomb shatters and alienates the colonial subjects from themselves, their lands and their cultures. But, more importantly, cultural colonization has ensured that the colonizers remain in power regardless of whether geographical and political independence has been won by colonized, or not. It ensures that the institutions of the colonized are generally permeated by the colonizer’s world view, for the colonized subjects themselves embody the values of their subjugator and become the instruments of their own colonization. Language which is the crucible of culture is the effective instrument that constructs the colonized subject, as imitators, devotees and ambassadors of their oppressors, but, of course, not as equal subjects. This structural construction of the colonized subjects has indeed ensured that long after the colonizer’s departure and absence from the former colonies, their domination is freely furthered by the colonized on themselves. It is also this aspect of colonialism that makes Postcolonial reading of texts a necessary exercise in what seems to be a largely post-independence era.

In this paper, I will examine the use of language to colonize from a slightly different angle. Most postcolonial debates focus on the imposition of the colonizer’s language on the colonized, its impact on the colonized and the strategies of resistance, but I will examine the use of the language of the colonized to subjugate them. I will be examining “the colonization of local language[s]”10 such that they no longer serve the interest of their original cultures, but indeed, become weapons that victimize the original speakers. This examination will look at the translations and definitions of words in the Setswana Bible and dictionaries, which were first carried out by London Missionary Society (henceforth, LMS) agents between 1829 and 1925. The first Setswana Bible and dictionary were subsequently revised by many other LMS agents and church missionaries of other societies. This paper will limit itself to the LMS work, for it was the most influential among Batswana who reside in the present-day Botswana. Although this paper will be specific to Botswana, I believe that such an investigation will be of interest to many other former co...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Silenced Nights, Bible Translation and the African Contact Zones
• Part I: The Colonial Discourse and African Bible Translations
• Part II: Gender, Postcoloniality, and African Bible Translations
• Part III: Savage Readings of Colonialized African Bibles