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: [ ])
We were looking at this in African Development. For us it was looking at where the cultures came from and how they developed. The huge impact that religion had on Africa is both impressive and scary. It reeks of all that makes colonialism a terrifying force to be reckoned with and leaves me wondering whether Christian missionaries continue to do this today. Christian aid agencies in many cases have almost invented systems of justice that they like to think of as indigenous but which are just as imposed from above as the traditional Western forms. It’s likely that this is part of your readings but if you’re interested and it’s not already on your list, take a look at Tim Allen’s work on justice in Northern Uganda. He writes well and it’s fascinating reading.
I must admit to being a tad biased, he taught parts of both my Complex Emergencies and African Development papers and was my supervisor for the first two terms.
your blog is very nice !