Read an Excerpt
Africa in Translation
A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814—1945
By Sara Pugach
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2012
University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-11782-6
Chapter One
Before the Fact: The Beginnings of African Studies on the Mission Field, 1814—87
In 1806 Gustavus Reinhold Nyländer, then twenty-nine, arrived in Georgetown, Sierra Leone, to begin work for the Church Missionary Society (CMS). Prior to joining the London-based CMS, Nyländer, who was an ethnic German from Lithuania, had studied at a Berlin seminary. He started his missionary career in Georgetown but by 1812 had moved to an area called the Bullom Shore, on the opposite bank from the city, and founded his own mission station. While there, he learned the local Bullom language, transcribing its vocabulary and noting its grammatical structure. What resulted was the Grammar and Vocabulary of the Bullom Language, which appeared in 1814. Nyländer also compiled a spelling book with scriptural exercises for the students he taught in the mission field, and he translated parts of the New Testament into Bullom. Despite his linguistic and evangelical efforts, Nyländer was pessimistic about his assignment. He did not believe that his proselytization had much effect on the Bullom speakers. "I have sown tears," he said, "labouring in hope—encouraging myself with this, that God's word would never return void." Nonetheless, Nyländer remained in Sierra Leone for almost nineteen years, until he died from an illness that swept through the missionaries in the village of Kissy, where he had ultimately relocated to evangelize among freed slaves.
Nyländer's work on Bullom is notable because it was the first African-language grammar and dictionary published by a German Protestant missionary in the nineteenth century. Other German missionaries soon followed Nyländer's example, accumulating vocabulary from African languages across the continent. Nyländer's insistence on the centrality of God's word to his vocation echoed through the pages of his successors and was similar as well to that of eminent German philologists such as the word in divine revelation. Missionary linguistics was, indeed, tied to academic philology through a similar pietist heritage that stressed the significance of a deep, personal affiliation with Christ over rigid adherence to strict theological doctrine.
This chapter will trace the history of those nineteenth-century German missionaries who, like Nyländer, became involved in linguistic transcription and laid the foundation for the discipline of Afrikanistik. These missionaries straddled two worlds. On the one hand, they were Germans who came from loosely affiliated states that were struggling to unify but still very much politically divided. They belonged as well to a German Kulturnation defined not by geography or politics but by cultural, intellectual, and linguistic commonalities. In the nineteenth century, comparative philology, which had such a marked influence on missionary work, was largely a German enterprise and therefore an important facet of the Kulturnation. Since the Kulturnation extended everywhere Germans were present, reflecting their sophistication and Bildung, German-speaking missionaries literally became its first envoys in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the early to mid-nineteenth-century linguists also came from either Prussia or Württemburg, which were the main seats of German Pietism. Although the missionaries lived after the apogee of the pietist movement in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they lived through the age of Germany's early nineteenth-century Erweckungsbewegung (awakening) and the "new" pietism. The expressly German pietist milieu was thus formative.
On the other hand, however, missionary linguists were deeply religious Christians who identified themselves with an ecumenical church that transcended national boundaries, including those of the Kulturnation. They worked primarily for English missionary societies, not German ones, and spent much of their lives overseas; many died there. Their pietism was cultivated in a German setting but, as Andrew F. Walls has argued, also had a critical impact on the Great Awakening in Britain, which meant that German and British missionaries shared a similar belief system. Where the Germans were imperial representatives, it was for the British Empire in territories such as Sierra Leone, which was founded in 1787 by English abolitionists as a safe haven for 400 freed slaves, and became a crown colony in 1808.15 When Prussia suffered humiliating defeat by Napoleon and the Holy Roman Empire collapsed in 1806, Nyländer had already been in London for over a year and was preparing for his trip to Georgetown. Later, as revolution swept across Europe in 1848 and Germany attempted unification at the Frankfurt Parliament, Nyländer's successors were still in Africa, far removed from the tumult of that year, the Parliament's ultimate failure, and the reassertion of conservative dominance. Instead, they inhabited a pluralistic world where it was their Christianity and not their Germanness that mattered; while academics with university appointments such as Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and J. G. Fichte debated the significance that German language had to the unique spirit and essence of the German people, the missionaries labored on remote stations in West and East Africa, sometimes as the only German speakers for miles.
German Missionaries, British Missionary Societies
It is not a coincidence that Nyländer, the first CMS missionary to publish an African dictionary, was German. The German predominance in African language scholarship was part and parcel of a larger German monopoly in the newly burgeoning field of comparative philology, as well as of a German longing to explore and understand the wider world. Although Germany had no official colonies in Africa or elsewhere until the 1880s, Germans were very receptive to the world around them in their "precolonial" phase. Zantop and others have amply demonstrated that German fantasies of colonialism and otherness expressed themselves in literary and philosophical publications throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and indeed even before. Such fantasies also made their way into philological scholarship, where they emerged in weighty discussions on the relationship among different languages and peoples. German intellectual concern for the "Orient"—the Middle East, but also the Indian subcontinent—was especially keen. The Western discovery that Sanskrit belonged to the Indo-European language family, and was indeed the parent of that family, drew substantial attention in Germany. Although an Englishman, Sir William Jones, first observed the relationship between Sanskrit and its cousins, from early on it was Germans like Herder who were the most actively engaged in its interpretation and classification.
Africa, too, attracted increasing German attention in the nineteenth century, both in philology and elsewhere. Scholars with a focus on Africa included Wilhelm Bleek, the first "professional" Africanist linguist and immigrant to South Africa, and renowned ethnologist Adolf Bastian, who first voyaged to the continent in 1873. Völkerkunde museums—museums of ethnology—proliferated later in the nineteenth century, offering the public a glimpse of African culture. These were complemented by Völkerschauen, or "people" exhibitions, in which members of so-called exotic ethnic groups or races—African and otherwise—were ushered from city to city and paraded around for the amusement of European visitors.
The general focus on Africa reflected in museums and at Völkerschauen was primarily a phenomenon of the postunification era. Missionary engagements with Africa, however, well predated more general public awareness of ethnological artifacts and tribal displays. Nyländer may have been the first German to publish on African languages, but he was not the first Berlin-trained candidate to arrive in Sierra Leone. Seventeen of the first twenty-four missionaries that the CMS sent to Africa had studied in Berlin. Once in Sierra Leone Nyländer was, moreover, surrounded by other fledgling missionary philologists. C. F. C. Wenzel, a missionary from Breslau who joined the CMS the year after Nyländer, had begun work on an "English-Susoo dictionary," which he had "completed ... to letter U" by 1809. Indeed, most of the early CMS German missionaries in Sierra Leone were involved in some form of linguistic transcription and translation.
The CMS recruited many of its best missionary linguists from Germany; Walls has remarked that Henry Venn, secretary of the CMS from 1841 to 1873, "got his commercial advice from Manchester but his linguistic counsel from Germany." From 1804 through around 1860, the CMS sent Germans to most of its primary African fields. In West Africa this included not only Sierra Leone but also Nigeria, while in East Africa the main CMS mission was in Kenya. By midcentury august scholars such as Egyptologist Richard Lepsius and Max Müller were also advising the CMS on linguistic issues. Nonetheless, missionaries were in the field meeting Africans and transcribing African languages earlier than almost anyone else. Moreover, the missionary rationale for pursuing linguistics only occasionally corresponded with that of their academic counterparts. The German interest in language has often been associated with the German quest for independence and a stable, unified national identity. George Mosse and Leon Poliakov have argued that Germans took such an interest in linguistics largely because of the early nineteenth-century Romanticism that connected a Volk—a people—to the soil on which it lived as well as to the tongue that it spoke. For intellectuals such as Herder, language represented the spirit, or soul, of a nation. Jakob Grimm's fascination not only with the German language but with German literature shows that he too came to associate culture with language and see the two as inseparable.
To a certain extent, missionaries and philologists did share common concerns about language. Both were inheritors of the seventeenth-century German pietist tradition that stressed a personal bond with Christ. Pietism was a movement emphasizing reflection, inner spirituality, and Christian rebirth. Born in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, pietism arose to counter what was seen as the rigid nature of orthodoxy and to downplay doctrinal differences between Lutherans and Calvinists. Walls indeed suggests that it was this pietist spirit, born in continental Europe in general and Germany in particular, that sparked the Protestant missionary movement and the Great Awakening. Halle and Herrnhut—the former the base of pietist progenitor August Hermann Francke, the latter the home of the Moravians—were the first two poles of pietist missionary action. The missionary belief in the deeply mystical, revelatory power of language stemmed as much from pietism as did that of individuals like Herder and Hamann. As Williamson has remarked, some of the most significant German intellectuals of the nineteenth century, including David Friedrich Strauss, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Friedrich Hölderlin grew up in the same Swabian milieu, and with a similar pietist upbringing, as the CMS missionaries.
For pietists, the Bible also played a critical role. The biblical translations that German pietists produced led to a profoundly new way of envisioning the book itself, as Jonathan Sheehan has suggested. Pietists saw the Bible as a text for general consumption, and not the personal provenance of the learned elite. Consequently, the Bible was the crux around which pietist life turned for all believers, regardless of social or class status. For instance, in the formulation of Philipp Jakob Spener, another father of pietism and Francke's teacher, family time was to be spent in contemplation, reading and reflecting on the Bible. In addition, even prior to the birth of comparative philology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—generated by Jones's announcement that Sanskrit was the parent of all Indo-European languages—philology was central to pietist scholarship. Textual analysis was an integral part of university study for Francke and Spener, and was the raison d'être of the former's Collegium Orientale theologicum at Halle, where theology students learned a wide range of languages and engaged in critical biblical translations, including ones into Ethiopian.
The kind of profound affiliation with God that the Pietists advocated could, moreover, only be achieved if the Word touched a person's heart in his or her native language. No other language would truly be able to provide the same flash of insight and lay the foundations for belief; only an individual's native tongue could communicate the essence of the Christian message. This concept—that only a person's first language was suitable for conveying Christian truths—is similar to the nationalist idea that each language was unique to a specific ethnic group. The reasoning behind the missionary belief that the native language alone could engender conversion also shared common attributes with the conviction that language was an external projection of the nation. Native languages were so effective at transmitting the Christian message precisely because it was the mother language that structured a person's mental patterns and thought. In a foreign language, Christianity would appear foreign; in a native language it would be trusted, known.
The objective of missionary language study in the earlier nineteenth century was nonetheless not principally the creation of discrete ethnic communities or nationalist sentiment; rather, it was to usher potential converts into an international Christian community. On the face of it, this missionary ideal was universalist. Most of the German Protestant missionaries who were active from approximately 1800 to 1870 did not assume a particularly "German" identity. Missionary identity was instead tied to either an individual missionary's home region, such as Württemburg, or to a supranational Christianity. This meant that German-speaking missionaries joined English societies such as the CMS or London Missionary Society (LMS), whose primary field was in South Africa. They wrote mainly in English and often published with English imprints such as the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS).
In their capacity as employees of the CMS, German missionaries also represented the British empire and on occasion even identified themselves with the British. Adrian Hastings has pointed out that J. L. Krapf, a German missionary for the CMS, proposed in 1841 that British political authority be established in Ethiopia to help secure the country for Christ when missionary endeavors were failing, very specifically tying the success of Christianity to that of British colonialism. In an 1862 Hausa grammar, Krapf's CMS colleague J. F. Schön went a step further, quoting English abolitionist T. F. Buxton's assertion that "from the slave trade itself, a nation has been reclaimed, and now enjoys, in comparison with Africa, a blaze of light, liberty, religion, and happiness. That nation is Great Britain."
The largest concentration of missionary linguists in the early nineteenth century belonged to the CMS. Yet there were some linguists in Ger man-speaking missionary societies during this era. Jakob Ludwig Döhne, a Zulu specialist, and Albert Kropf, whose focus was Xhosa, were both members of the Berlin Missionary Society (BMS), which was founded in 1824 and had its first field in South Africa. As late as 1846, however, the BMS was still considered more of a supplier for other missions than an independently functioning society. The Rhenish Missionary Society (RMS), founded in 1828 and headquartered in Wuppertal, produced F. W. Kolbe, J. G. Krönlein, Carl Hugo Hahn, and, most significantly, Carl Büttner. 46 Since the main fields of the RMS were in South Africa and Namibia they mainly specialized in languages of the region. The Seminary of the Basel Mission was established in 1815 and sent many of its candidates to the CMS, LMS, and other Dutch and German missionary societies. In 1828, however, the Baselers opened their own station on the Gold Coast, in what is modern-day Ghana. J. G. Christaller was their most prominent missionary linguist. The most famous representative of the North German Missionary Society, Diedrich Westermann, was only born in 1875 and not really active until the turn of the twentieth century, but the NGMS itself was founded in 1836. Originally the NGMS did not send missionaries to Africa, but in the late 1840s it opened a station in Eweland, in what is now Togo. Like their peers in the BMS most NGMS missionaries came from Württemburg and were steeped in the pietist tradition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Africa in Translation by Sara Pugach Copyright © 2012
by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
