In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

learning African languages was part of a missionary’s basic responsibilities , whether in the active sense of gathering and transcribing, or the passive one of learning from what had already been gathered and transcribed. In 1861, for instance, J. F. Schön of the CMS remarked that “while we would never make the Missionary a mere linguistic inquirer, we would still recommend to him to devote some time to the collection of a native literature [emphasis in original], to think no story told by a native in his own way and manner too unmeaning or unimportant to deserve committing to paper .”114 Schön was one of the most proli‹c missionary linguists of the nineteenth century, since he worked on the West African languages of Hausa, Igbo, and Mende. Born in 1803 in Baden, Schön studied in Basel and at the CMS college in Islington. The CMS sent Schön to Sierra Leone in 1832, and in 1841 he accompanied the future African bishop, Samuel Crowther, on what was known as the Niger expedition.115 The expedition was an antislavery crusade funded by the British government and was also meant to open up new ‹elds for evangelization.116 For Schön, linguistic knowledge was crucial to the dissemination of Christianity, and his career was dedicated to its acquisition. He believed it was a missionary’s duty to copy out African languages and even suggested that, if too many European and native missionaries were uninterested in linguistic work, the CMS should “appoint, in every new Mission, one European and one Native, to be devoted exclusively to linguistic labours, for at least some years.”117 His conviction that missionaries needed to devote at least some attention to linguistic and cultural pursuits was echoed by most of his missionary linguist colleagues and became dogma for Meinhof and his followers.118 There was also a more strictly theological reason for missionary interest in African languages. According to Birgit Meyer, missionary philology was motivated by “reference to a myth connecting the Old Testament narrative about the building of the Tower of Babel and the New Testament account of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit of Pentecost.” In the ‹rst of these allegories, the well-known story of Babel, humanity was united through one language. After men started to build a tower with the express purpose of reaching heaven, though, God knocked mankind back to earth and, as punishment for its misdeed, shattered the one language and condemned humanity to speak myriad, mutually unintelligible tongues. The Hamites come into play here: They had originally orchestrated the plot to build the tower and thus were situated the furthest away from God after the disaster. At this point, the second allegory, that of the Pentecost, takes 38 Africa in Translation over. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was sent to Jesus’s disciples, who were imbued with the power to “communicate in all languages once only.” The meaning behind this story is that God was instructing his followers to learn all the world’s languages in order to bring the lost peoples of the earth back into his fold.119 Most German missionaries had a pietist upbringing, and it was this pietism that informed their conduct in the ‹eld.120 The allegories of the Tower of Babel and the Pentecost, stressing the signi‹cance of language to man’s fall and redemption, must have resonated very loudly with them. Krapf, the CMS missionary who is best known for being one of the ‹rst Europeans to reach Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, is a good example of a pietist who took the appeal to preach in native languages to heart. He was reared in pietist Württemburg, trained in Basel, and believed strongly in the transformative powers of language. This led him, as M. Louise Pirouet points out, to misunderstand Christianity as it manifested itself in other cultures, particularly the Ethiopian.121 Krapf was a missionary in Ethiopia for ‹ve years, from 1837 to 1842, before he and his partner, C. W. Isenberg, were expelled from the country.122 During that time, Krapf’s main goal was to produce a Bible that would contain both Ge’ez, Ethiopia’s ancient church language, and Amharic, the modern vernacular .123 Yet he was frustrated by the Ethiopian response to his work, and commented that “the (Ethiopian) people of Shoa . . . do not like very much the Amharic. They like the Ethiopic (Ge’ez) more. We endeavour to prove that as the...

Share