All your base are belong to us
Here’s a random page that was on the front of one of my course readings. It’s about a missionary’s troubled efforts to translate John 1:1 into the Luo language:
‘Who Created You (or Who Are You)?’
But the Luo language does not have an independent concept of Create or Creation, hence the question was rendered to mean
‘Who moulded you?’
Still, this was meaningless, because human beings are born of their mothers. Therefore, the elders told the visitor they did not know.
The missionary was not satisfied with their answer and instead insisted that they must give a satisfactory answer.
Then one of the elders remembered that, although a person may be born of his mother normally, when he is afflicted with tuberculosis of the spine, then he loses his normal figure, he gets ‘moulded’.
So he said, ‘Rubanga is the one who moulds people’.
Rubanga is the name of the hostile spirit, which the Acholi believe causes the hunch or hump on the back.
The missionary, not knowing what Rubanga meant to the people, started preaching that it is Rubanga (the hunch or hunchback spirit) who created the Acholi people.
Also, the Acholi did not think metaphysically. The Greek concept of logos does not even exist in their thinking. So, [Word] was translated to mean News or Message.
Moreover, the Acholi are not concerned with beginning or end of the world. Thus, ‘In the beginning’ was rendered ‘from long long ago’.
Thus, when the famous, already problematic, passage from the Gospel of John 1:1 was translated into Acholi, it read:
‘From long long ago there was News, News was [with] the Hunchback Spirit, News was the Hunchback Spirit’.
- Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2, 1999, p. 354. (the page had two obvious typos, which I have corrected in the passage above - in the parts with these brackets: [ ])
