CORPORATE IDENTITY

Benedict Anderson considered the standardisation of language and introduction of print-media to be essential in propagating shared values, narratives, and systems that in the modern era formed the complex moral community of the nation.Footnote ⁴ Contrary to Anderson's view of nationhood as a secular trend, scholars of sub-Saharan Africa have identified an impetus for emerging ethno-nationalist aspirations in the production of a vernacular literature and moral discourse through the translation of Christian scriptures.Footnote ⁵ Using linguistic groups – like the Yoruba, the Kikuyu, the Ganda, and the LubaFootnote ⁶  – that have been particularly successful in creating ethno-nationalism, these scholars argue that the content of the Bible is as influential as the production of a written vernacular, particularly Old Testament narratives of Israel as an archetypal nation.Footnote ⁷ This article expands these arguments in two ways. First, it provides a study of relatively unsuccessful nationalist aspirations of the Toro to balance the studies of ethnic groups who gained political leverage through their development of an extensive corpus of literature and their nation-making. Thus it shows how Bible translation produced competing ethnic-nationalisms in which linguistic groups developed cohesive heritage and moral ideals in conflict with other groups while using the same intellectual resource. Second, it deviates from the familiar trend of taking an ethnic group as the main unit of analysis and, instead, examines the work and biography of one committed individual translator. The equation of Christian adherence with the production of ethno-national sensibilities is challenged by examining Kivebulaya's translations for peoples with less central positions in the colonial state and limited literature in the vernacular. This is not a straightforward comparison of the way in which Nyoro, Toro, and Mbuti received the translation – we have substantial evidence of the nature of the Runyoro-Rutoro reception, but there is little evidence that the Mbuti translation was ever printed. The comparison is asymmetrical and is intended to show how revivalist and patriotic sensibilities were emerging from the early twentieth century and how – in the case of the Mbuti – translations had international agency.

Writing about the generation of East African Christians after Kivebulaya, Derek Peterson contrasts ethnic patriots and East African Revivalists who spoke the same languages but created different social worlds. Revivalists, Peterson says, ‘were cosmopolitans learning a variety of tongues’ while patriots ‘promoted vernacular languages as a mark of ethnic solidarity’, patriots promoted love among ‘ethnic confreres’ while revivalists worked for ‘an international ecumene’.Footnote ⁸ In a similar vein, David Maxwell claims that Luba evangelists were both cosmopolitan and patriotic: their impetus to spread Christianity, he says, ‘was animated by contradictory tendencies’.Footnote ⁹ As shall be evident, Kivebulaya's sensibilities were closest to the cosmopolitanism of the Revivalists and he had little interest in promoting his confreres. Like Revivalists, he learnt languages with the intention of overcoming difference. He translated the Bible into vernaculars to promote equal access to the community of Christian faithful. Ethnicity was for him ‘a forum of argument’ to which he did not conform.Footnote ¹⁰ In their commitment to vernacular translation as part of a transnational vision at a time when ethnic polities were emerging, Kivebulaya and his associates laid the ground for the dissent of the following generation of East African Revivalists discussed by Peterson.

The emergence of a transnational identity in translation processes is found in historical research that examines the linguistic and cultural work of Bible translation and the role of missionaries and converts in the construction of metropolitan knowledge of the colonies.Footnote ¹¹ The exercise of translation, it is argued by these studies, was a collaborative construction of language, narrative, and values rather than a contribution to a ‘colonisation of consciousness’.Footnote ¹² Following the impetus to draw metropole and colony into the same analytical field, missionary work has been studied as an encounter through which African contributions to global repositories of biological, geographical, ethnographical, and medical knowledge.Footnote ¹³ Missionaries learnt from Africans and disseminated Africans’ knowledge to scientific communities. In Buganda, the collaborative research between Rev. John Roscoe and Prime Minister Apolo Kagwa on their anthropological and historical works is a prominent example.Footnote ¹⁴ Kivebulaya was a committed but relatively minor translator. He demonstrates the agency of Africans in starting translation projects and shows how far knowledge production through translation influenced formation of corporate identity, creating a community of faith larger than that of ethnicity or nation, which developed alongside cultural nationalist ambitions.Footnote ¹⁵ Placing these distinct trajectories of historical enquiry side-by-side suggests that attention to the effects of Bible translation in sub-Saharan Africa aids an understanding that the ‘creation and development of the modern world can be conceptualised as a ‘shared history’, in which different cultures and societies shared a number of central experiences.Footnote ¹⁶ It is the locally understood nature of this world culture that Kivebulaya propounded. In believing in New Testament constructions of communities that transcend ethnicity while acknowledging linguistic and cultural difference, missionaries – both African and European – attempted to form a culture that was ‘not only a homogenising force’ but one which ‘engenders and supports diversity and differentiation’.Footnote ¹⁷ The collaboration between Africans and European missionaries facilitated knowledge production and cultural preservation and fostered international friendships. It aspired to form a worldwide Christian culture in which ‘foreign’ and ‘indigenous’ were meaningless categories. For some Africans – like Kivebulaya and the later Revivalists – it provided an alternative corporate identity to the cultural nationalist identity that has commanded the attention of scholars for so long.

UGANDA

Uganda's political history was intimately connected with the development of vernacular language Bibles. Notions of nationhood in the kingdom of Buganda were being argued over by a rising Christian elite in the country, who developed a vernacular literature as the translation of the Bible was being completed in Luganda.Footnote ¹⁸ These political modernisers were men of letters, rewriting history to develop narratives of Christian progress. Their supporters developed a high regard for literacy and owned primers and portions of scripture as a sign of personal progress. Henry Wright Duta was pre-eminent among Ganda scholars in steering first Alexander MacKay and then George Pilkington of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) towards translating the entire Bible in Luganda by 1897. A Commentary on Matthew's Gospel by Ham Mukasa, Kivebulaya's patron, was published in 1900.Footnote ¹⁹ The Roman Catholic White Fathers also introduced literacy. They translated primers, catechisms, recounted Gospel stories and published Ganda legends. Their own high view of the Bible, however, prevented its access and interpretation by all converts.Footnote ²⁰ Ganda nationhood, in vision at least, expanded beyond ethno-linguistic borders, and from 1894 to 1907 there was some appetite to continue its precolonial territorial expansion in partnership with the British Protectorate.Footnote ²¹ CMS missionaries and the Protestant Ganda who rose to power as a result of the Civil Wars in Buganda during 1888–93, had advocated for British involvement and used the vehicles of the protectorate to extend Ganda and Christian influence into the kingdoms of the west. The gospel preaching and literacy teaching of many Ganda evangelists of surrounding kingdoms has been understood, to a greater or lesser extent, to have been propelled by Ganda imperialist ambitions in partnership with British colonial and missionary interests.Footnote ²² The title of an article written by Bishop Tucker illustrates these expansionist expectations. Tucker's ‘Narrative of a journey to Toro’ was subtitled ‘The spiritual expansion of Buganda’.Footnote ²³ The Ganda became the pre-eminently influential people in the protectorate, but the polities around them developed similar skills and sensibilities and used them to improve their position in the colony. Toro had allied with the Ganda and the British in the 1890s to maintain its independence from Bunyoro and Toro's ruler Mukama Kasagama owed the Ganda his position. Toro interest in Christianity had initially been part of their appreciation of the political structure and culture of the Ganda. However, by the early 1900s, the political ambitions of the Ganda were also perceived to be intrusive in Toro. Ganda traders, chiefs, and evangelists in the area were eased from positions of influence, although Kivebulaya's ordination in 1903 was endorsed by the Toro Church Council. Buganda-Bunyoro relations were more fraught. Raids and battles between the kingdoms had been a common feature of precolonial relations. In 1899, the British captured and exiled Kabarega, the ruler of Bunyoro, whom they had defeated in a series of battles from 1893. They annexed the ‘lost counties’ of Bugangaizi and Buyaga to Buganda and deployed Ganda as chiefs in the subjugated kingdom. From 1902 Nyoro discontent increased when the prominent Protestant Ganda chief, James Miti, forced the deposition of Mukama Kitakimbwa and appointed Kitakimbwa's more compliant brother, Andereya Duhaga II.

Literacy and Bible translation played a key role in relations between the Toro and Nyoro and between these two kingdoms and that of the Ganda. The missionary scholar Adrian Hastings regrets the groundswell of ethnic pride and the missionary response of translation that prevented Luganda from becoming the lingua franca of the country. ‘Evangelically’, he says, translation into the ‘heart language’ was ‘undoubtedly the right decision; politically, however, it prevented closely related societies from being merged within a ‘Greater Buganda’ and instead hardened the lines between a series of petty societies.’Footnote ²⁴ In saying so, Hastings reformulated ideas that were current in the Nyoro debate (discussed below), some eighty years before he wrote. Competing forms of cultural nationalism challenged the cohesiveness of Uganda and caused internal competition within the state when its position would have been strengthened by possessing a single cohesive lingua franca. The debates – as will become evident – took place between Africans and between CMS missionaries.

KIVEBULAYA'S COSMOPOLITANISM

Apolo Kivebulaya was a product of the political ferment of the Ganda kingdom and its regional and international connections. Brought up in Singo province on the Buganda-Bunyoro border, an area of fluid regional identities and political alliances, he moved towards the Buganda capital about 1884 where he learnt to read and was baptised. He was one of a number of evangelists who, from 1894 onwards, were sent to the Kingdom of Toro by the Mengo Church Council, the Native Anglican Church's governing body, which included Kagwa, Mukasa, and other prominent Ganda chiefs. Yet his cosmopolitan vision of a Christian economy, forged in early reading classes, became increasingly at odds with the ambitions of a political elite who developed a sense of ethnic pride and conservation. Kivebulaya's commitment to Bible translation demonstrates his linguistically-plural perception of a worldwide Christian culture, a perception he shared over almost thirty years with the villages of Toro and Ituri and a generation of younger evangelists who came under his tutelage. It is this cosmopolitan vision that provides a critique to forms of cultural nationalism that created from ethno-linguistic distinctions first-order issues for identity.

Kivebulaya engaged in early orthographical work, the writing of a primer and the first attempts at gospel translation in Runyoro-Rutoro from 1895, and for the Mbuti language in the 1920s. He also lent support to other translations. In 1900, the Runyoro-Rutoro translation of St Matthew's Gospel was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society. In the same year, Kivebulaya provided the first recorded petition for the entire Bible to be translated into Runyoro-Rutoro in a letter he wrote to the CMS secretaries in London, his ‘fellow missionaries’.Footnote ²⁵ H. E. Maddox, the CMS translator, was not yet convinced by Kivebulaya's argument: he argued that ‘Christian maturity’ was required before ‘the historical development of the two testaments’ could be understood and properly interpreted, so converts would not emulate the polygamy or violent warfare among nations described in the Old Testament.Footnote ²⁶ When Maddox was eventually persuaded to undertake the project, he translated the historical books of the Old Testament last.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, Maddox enabled Kivebulaya to make his own appeal by translating his petitionary letter from Luganda to English.Footnote ²⁸ In writing directly to London, Kivebulaya attempted to circumvent the opposition of Mengo Church Council and the current CMS policy in Uganda to promote Luganda and only translate portions of Scripture in other languages. He propounded a straightforward Protestant Biblicentrist view, unencumbered by other considerations. Bibliocentrism refers to the conviction that everyone should have access to Scripture in their ‘heart language’ because the Bible, regarded as the Word of God, is not only the primary religious authority but also an agent in conversion – a view best articulated by the British and Foreign Bible Society that supported both translations discussed here. Vernacular translation was, therefore, a religious imperative. It was a vital element in the conversion and instruction of individuals and thus a foundation for creating a godly community, the Church. In the letter to the CMS, Kivebulaya, using his own experience of trying to read the Bible in Swahili before it was available in Luganda, explained that literacy in one's own language was easier to achieve and was necessary for proper spiritual engagement. In 1901 Kivebulaya's argument was supported by some CMS missionaries who considered that CMS policymakers were overly concerned about the specialised and time-consuming nature of the work, and engrossed in debates over Luganda as a vehicle state and ecclesiastical unity, rather than attending to the needs of ordinary converts.Footnote ²⁹

New Testament literature inspired African Christians with notions of worldwide mission, in which Christian belonging is considered to transcend national boundaries. Mukasa's interpretation of Matthew's Gospel grafted its readers into wider Christian tradition by providing examples from church history. Reading and discussing the Bible opened wide vistas of geography and history to be owned by converts. Kivebulaya appears to have followed this particular interpretive lead and promoted vernacular translation so that all peoples could be part of a global Christian community his identified in biblical passages.

Kivebulaya shared the international missionary ideal of Matthew 28:19: ‘Go to all nations (ethnos) and make them my disciples’ that was rooted in the comprehension of the unity of human nature (Acts 17. 26) and the belief that all people are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–7). He considered it part of his missionary vocation to evangelise extensively and to pray for the world (munsi), peoples (abantu), and nations (bamawanga) so they would inherit the Kingdom of God, locally accessible through small vernacular Bible-reading congregations.Footnote ³⁰ Kivebulaya was praised by the Mengo Church Council for carrying out Matthew's ‘Great Commission’ when his decision to work more permanently in Ituri from 1916 became known to them.Footnote ³¹ On meeting a diviner he claimed the Bible as his divining tool and read John 3:16, a passage beloved by evangelicals throughout the world, which says that God's love for the whole world provides universal access to eternal life through belief in Jesus.Footnote ³² In 1900 he took two missionaries, recently arrived in Toro, to meet some of the peoples for whom he prayed. One reflected that Toro is ‘God's country, God's territory … a King who reigneth in Africa as in England’, as she noted the importance of learning languages in order to know African peoples.Footnote ³³ A consciousness of linguistic pluralism was accompanied by a belief in human unity through conversion to Jesus Christ. Kivebulaya's bibliocentricism was evident in his enactment of biblical passages. He paralleled his own itinerations with the missionary journeys of St Paul, sought guidance on running of churches from the epistles, and expected the Holy Spirit to work through native tongues.Footnote ³⁴ Other evangelists operating in the Great Lakes admired Kivebulaya for his success in relinquishing custom and kin.Footnote ³⁵ Aberi Balya, a member of the Runyoro-Rutoro translation team, noted, ‘[Kivebulaya] was a Christian. He had no clan of his own, only called himself a Christian. He did not select people but loved all Christians. He was gifted in changing people to be Christians.’Footnote ³⁶ Kivebulaya and his colleagues promoted Christianity as the primary identity and the Kingdom of God as a universal spiritual polity.Footnote ³⁷

Petitions by Kivebulaya and others enabled the translators to proceed with the translations of the New Testament. The official team comprised of Maddox, Balya, Yosiya Kamuhiigi, and Zac Musana. However, in 1903 the work of translation involved a much larger group of people with no specialist language training, including a number of Toro chiefs, a missionary nurse, a girls’ school teacher and Kivebulaya, who met to discuss a text after the day's activities had ended.Footnote ³⁸ These evenings aided the development of collegiate relationships through regular and sympathetic discussion on the process of comprehending the biblical passage, presumably in Luganda and English, and searching for an approximation in Runyoro-Rutoro. An abridged version of the Book of Common Prayer, used in daily corporate prayer, and teaching materials for the popular schools developing at the Kabarole mission station were also translated.

Kivebulaya was originally influential at the Toro court and his bibliocentric views were appealing to the ruler, Mukama Kasagama (c. 1870–1928), who also found initial inspiration in the Bible's cosmopolitan outlook and, increasingly, in its narratives of nationhood.Footnote ³⁹ In 1896 Kasagama was baptised and took the name Daudi after the Old Testament King who restored the fortunes of Israel when the country was threatened by its neighbours. Kasagama renamed his capital Bethelehemu, after the biblical town where David (and Jesus) were born. In the same way, the Ganda had used ‘kabaka’, the Runyoro-Rutoro word adopted for the kings of the Old Testament, and the ‘King of Kings’, the creator God, whom they were required to obey was that used for their pre-eminent ruler, ‘omukama’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In April 1897 the Toro Bethlehemu gained its own river Jordan when, with the approval of Kasagama, 14 people were baptised by crossing from one bank of the Mpanga River to the bank just below the palace. New converts placed themselves into biblical stories of baptism while biblical sites were created in Toro in close proximity to political power.Footnote ⁴¹ In 1897 Kasagama wrote to the CMS in apostolic tones, addressing his letter to the ‘Elders of the Church in Europe’ and telling them ‘God our Father gave me the Kingdom of Toro to reign over for Him.’ He ends his letter, ‘we are all One in Christ Jesus our Saviour … I am your friend who loves you in Jesus.’Footnote ⁴² The establishment of a Christian Toro nation was an international endeavour in Kasagama's eyes, in which his Christian friends with whom he was united in faith, would be glad to assist. He wished to create a strong centralised kingdom from a collection of smaller political entities, some of which had little desire for his rule.Footnote ⁴³ In the first years of his reign Kasagama was assiduous in his attempts to use Protestant moral codes and biblical narratives to influence societal cohesion. As far as possible, Kasagama elected chiefs who supported his view. The fervour for literacy that gripped Kasagama and his court at Kabarole became an opportunity to learn about a particular model of corporate identity. Old Testament interpretations that placed Israel at the centre of God's divine plan as ‘a ‘Holy People’, divinely chosen but enduring all the ups and downs of a confusing history’ offered an ideal of nationhood.Footnote ⁴⁴ The theological notions of kingship and nation, which Hastings identifies as influencing medieval Europe, also provided ideas for the kingdoms of Uganda.

The call for the translations of the whole Bible – springing originally from Kivebulaya's cosmopolitan perspective – became a spiritual and political focus of the ruling elite of Toro in their attempt to maintain their own purchase on power within the colonial state.Footnote ⁴⁵ Bible translation engendered for Kivebulaya an interest in transnational collaboration and notions of belonging but even the interpretations that inspired him could take others in a different hermeneutical direction. Mukasa's commentary on Matthew, for example, uses Ganda proverbs and customs to explain its message. Communication in familiar idioms became a form of domestication, which was increasingly evident in the writings of political elites.Footnote ⁴⁶ For the Toro and the Nyoro, debates about translation became enmeshed in political considerations within the British Protectorate and the Ganda polity. The discussion below of the 1907 protest against years of British-Ganda allied intrusion into Bunyoro known as the Nyangire Uprising allows an examination of Bible translation as a site of competition when the formation of political corporate identities collided. This development was at odds with Kivebulaya's missionary readings of expectations of borderless, multilingual communities that saw Christianity as supra-national in essence. Kivebulaya had become a catalyst for a project of little interest to him.

RUNYORO BIBLE TRANSLATION

Arguments about the Runyoro-Rutoro translation provide a nexus of interlocking issues in a particular politics of place: the formation of Protestant identity, the alteration of mission policy, and the assertion of nationalist claims in a competitive environment where the colonial centralisation of power was contested. To adapt Peel's phrase about the Yoruba in Nigeria, ‘what it has meant to be [Ugandan], to be [a Nyoro speaker] and what it has meant to be Christian have evolved in continuous interaction with one another’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The connection between the political and the spiritual can be seen in the events surrounding the Nyangire uprising of March to May 1907. One of the demands of the Nyoro was that the Old Testament as well as the New Testament be translated into Runyoro-Rutoro.Footnote ⁴⁸ The alteration of the CMS policy that resulted in the translation and publication of the Old Testament by 1912 has long been acknowledged as has the role of competing nationalisms in this decision.Footnote ⁴⁹ The influence of translation in the formation of alliances and corporate identity has been less well observed.

The uprising began early in 1907 when Nyoro chiefs and subchiefs began evicting Ganda from their positions, and culminated in a largely peaceful and well-organised protest in Hoima in May 1907. The British and Ganda forces retaliated in a manner generally regarded as disproportionate to its damage or threat.Footnote ⁵⁰ Among 54 men arrested were 2 members of the Bunyoro Church Council and, in the words of A. B. Fisher, CMS missionary in Hoima, ‘some of our best Xtian [sic] men.’Footnote ⁵¹ They included Paulo Byabacwezi (d. 1912) the senior chief of Bugahya who funded the construction of Hoima church, and Daudi Bitatule (1884–1963), a subchief.Footnote ⁵² Fisher, himself, supported Ganda rule. Shane Doyle considers that Fisher's failure to acknowledge the legitimacy of Nyoro claims adversely affected the growth of the mission in Bunyoro.Footnote ⁵³ As shall be demonstrated, however, Fisher represented only one side of an argument within the CMS in Uganda. Equally significant is the division of opinion among his missionary colleagues, which may have influenced the continued support of the Church by Byabacwezi and Bitatule.

The uprising was the culmination of local organisation and of regional diplomacy. Nyoro leaders had sent envoys to Toro, Ankole, Busoga and the lost counties to form an alliance of peoples who were disenchanted by relationships with the Ganda. The relationship with Toro was particularly significant because they shared the same language although the two kingdoms had had a conflictual relationship since Toro had ceded from Bunyoro in the 1830s. A. B. Fisher connected Nyoro belligerence with their alliance with the Toro and a desire for further work on a Runyoro-Rutoro Bible. In a letter to Bishop Tucker, giving details of the uprising, Fisher writes,

The fact that possession of the entire Bible in Runyoro-Rutoro became a focus of demands can be understood as the instrumentalisation of the Bible for cultural cohesion and communication with allies intent on greater autonomy within the colonial state. The Bible was doubly useful because it had cultural currency among their antagonists. The ability to read it was considered a sign of civilisation among the Ganda and the British. Thus it became a symbol of cultural equality with Ganda and a sign that other polities could be also regarded as African kingdoms. The Bible's agency, however, in developing nationalist aspirations is to be found in the commitment to the contents of the biblical texts themselves, as demonstrated by Kasagama.

Communication between Toro and Nyoro chiefs developed after the publication of the Nyoro New Testament in 1904.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Toro Church Council meeting at Christmas 1905 galvanised further contact with the Nyoro. Maddox read to the meeting a private letter from Fisher which argued that Luganda be the lingua franca for the Native Anglican Church affairs. The council transmitted the news swiftly to the Nyoro chiefs.Footnote ⁵⁶ Maddox's decision to make public Fisher's point of view was no doubt considered underhand by CMS colleagues. In this instance, however, Maddox's priority was whole Bible translation (of which he was now convinced) and his primary loyalty lay with the Toro as their missionary-translator and not with his fellow British missionary. In November 1906, there was a further meeting called by Kasagama and held in the home of G. R. Blackledge. About 150 ‘chiefs and leading Christians’ gathered to petition Bishop Tucker and the CMS Translation Committee for the whole Bible in Runyoro-Rutoro. Blackledge was persuaded by their ardent arguments that the whole Bible should be accessible in their own language.Footnote ⁵⁷ Cultural sympathies and alliances among those with a shared language and history were reactivated through vernacular translation.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, the Toro and Nyoro elites, having achieved governance wished to maintain their political distinctiveness within the colonial state: performing biblical kingship also prevented the kind of closer political or ethnic unity that had developed among the Yoruba and Kikuyu. The two kingdoms remained distinct polities unable or unwilling to unite further against the Ganda or to meld themselves to her influence. Through the acquisition of literacy and via the process of Christian conversion, these elites attempted to maintain what they construed as traditional power. Arguably what they actually achieved was what John Lonsdale calls ‘ethnic patriotism’, a respect for rights of ‘household heads’.Footnote ⁵⁹

The resistance by Fisher, the Ganda Protestant chiefs and others to a whole Bible in Runyoro-Rutoro also stemmed from a recognition of the power of language and biblical narrative to unify. For many European missionaries, the comprehension of ethnos was overlaid with notions of European nation-states, themselves influenced by Judeo-Christian concepts of political articulations of moral community. Whereas Kivebulaya subscribed to a view of the Church as able to transcend national boundaries, Fisher and others emphasised the role of the Church in uniting a nation. They propounded a hegemonic form of unity in which church and state operated in tandem. The impetus towards vernacular translation was often tempered by a concern for its apparent role in division. They regarded the cohesion of the colonial nation-state as more valuable than smaller units of corporate identity and they assumed that greater unity could be achieved if the Christianisation of the Nyoro took place within the Luganda medium. Prominent individuals on the Mengo Church Council were wary of the self-determination of other peoples whose cooperation was considered necessary to Ganda influence for a cohesive colonial state.Footnote ⁶⁰ The belief of most CMS missionaries that, whatever its ills, colonialism assured stability through the introduction of larger geographical areas of governance, was intertwined with theological concerns about ecclesiastical unity.Footnote ⁶¹ F. Rowling, the senior Luganda translator for the CMS, identified the superiority of Luganda and the Ganda as conductors of Christianity to other parts of the protectorate. Assuming a hierarchy of languages, he considered that proper teaching should be carried out in a ‘superior’ language that becomes the national lingua franca. He also focused on unity to carry his argument and appeals to a colonial ideal: ‘The true imperial idea is unity, both in the Church and in Civic life, and the more that is promoted by a common language the stronger will both the Church and the country become.’Footnote ⁶² Arguments for the prominence of the Luganda Bible, Ganda, and British influence were supported by ecclesiological ideas familiar to Protestants in sixteenth-century England, and at a time when the close association between church and state had become a point of debate in England.Footnote ⁶³ One may also speculate that Fisher, a proud Irish Protestant, brought some of his native political assumptions of unionism to bear.Footnote ⁶⁴ A number of CMS missionaries considered that the protectorate could be a cohesive nation-state and a Christian state only through the use of the language and customs of governance of the Ganda. Hastings's arguments in the 1990s for the prominence of Luganda were current in 1907. In 1930, it was still assumed that Luganda would ‘assimilate’ the language groups around it.Footnote ⁶⁵

For the Toro, meanwhile, the arguments about Bible translation were more than a device to gain cultural leverage. The theological engagement with the text by Mukama Kasagama and the chiefs informed the creation of emerging elites and their political arguments. The Nyangire uprising represents a tipping point, after which Kasagama shifted his strategy of Christianisation. This was epitomised by one event. On 16 August 1908, Kasagama held his first empango, a traditional biennial ceremony to commemorate the accession of a mukama, to demonstrate largesse and accept tribute offered as an assurance of fealty. Rev. Blackledge placed a traditional crown upon Kasagama in a church service, a sign of accepting the authority of the Christian God. Kasagama, having attempted to establish his claim to rule Toro and bring stability to the region through the introduction of a religious system that demanded significant change to personal and social behaviour, now performed a revival of tradition, reinterpreting a familiar ceremony with Christian rites.

The empango gained patriotic traction during the reign of Kasagama's son and heir. George Rukidi (1928–65) explained the value of the empango in his history of the Kingdom as an event in which ‘old things were done as in the times of the old kings’,Footnote ⁶⁶ and in the narrative he invokes the stories of the Old Testament to demonstrate the wisdom of obedience to kings.Footnote ⁶⁷ Theologically-inflected notions of nation, kingship, and unity shaped cultural nationalism in western Uganda and provided momentum for a common cause, which was to continue to appeal during the nationalist debates surrounding the political independence of Uganda.

INTERNATIONAL IMPACT OF MBUTI BIBLE TRANSLATION

The second translation project instigated by Kivebulaya demonstrates how his commitment to bibliocentrism and vernacular translation was motivated by an expectation of an unbounded Christian community. It also demonstrates the role of translation in an accumulation of scientific knowledge of value to the metropole and to many Africans in their identity construction. It concerns Kivebulaya's partial and largely unsuccessful attempt to translate the Bible into the language of the Mbuti. As will become evident, the historical evidence reveals little about the identity formation of the Mbuti themselves. The ‘cultural flexibility’ of the Mbuti and other foragers identified by contemporary anthropologists including a lack of centralised authority, close relationships with farming neighbours, and their marginalisation within the colonial state, all make the ethno-nationalist claims – like those of the Toro and Nyoro – highly unlikely.Footnote ⁶⁸ Kivebulaya's attempts to replicate his Runyoro-Rutoro translation work by producing a primer and Gospel of Mark in the Mbuti language had quite different ramifications for the politics of identity for the Mbuti, re-examined as it was through transnational linguistic and ethnographic networks.Footnote ⁶⁹ This vernacular translation raises questions about identity resulting from international linguistic work. It also highlights the sense of transnational belonging of Christian translators, like Kivebulaya, and the way in which translation work was facilitated through international networks of church and mission.

While Protestant elites of Toro settled down to the business of maintaining their hold on the kingdom and providing an account of themselves in the colonial-state through reworking biblical and Toro kingly traditions, Kivebulaya continued his long itinerations. He spent the last 17 years of his life in the Mboga area on the western Semeliki escarpment in Congo, preaching and planting churches among Giti, Lese, Konjo and Mbuti, as well as the Nyoro speakers of Mboga (Hema).Footnote ⁷⁰ By 1921 he had inspired young people in the Mboga school to join him on his journeys, creating a band of devoted followers.Footnote ⁷¹ They preached that God loved all, Christ died for all and gives life to all.Footnote ⁷² Kivebulaya became internationally renowned for his familiarity with the Mbuti. The Mbuti had a particular place in the imagination of Ugandans and European missionaries: their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and distinctive diminutive stature rendered them curious, supposedly primitive, and challenging to reach. A. B. Lloyd, Kivebulaya's first biographer, described Kivebulaya's journeys in ‘pygmy and cannibal country’. For Lloyd, the exotic appeal of the Mbuti drew attention and, potentially, funds to mission work. Kivebulaya's diary suggests he developed a fondness for the Mbuti and a curiosity about their way of life. Young evangelists and the first Mbuti converts helped him to prepare a primer and translate the Bible.Footnote ⁷³

Kivebulaya replicated the policy he articulated in the 1900 letter to CMS for a politically marginalised group, but one considered ethnographically exotic. On 6 September 1930, Kivebulaya wrote to inform the Editorial Superintendent of the British and Foreign Bible Society in London, Rev. Robert Kilgour, that, following the publication by the Religious Tract Society of a primer in 1926, he had completed St Mark's Gospel in ‘Lumbuti’.Footnote ⁷⁴ His letter is written in response to one from Kilgour that encouraged Kivebulaya in his endeavours and articulated to him the Bible Society's conviction that, ‘The Christian Church cannot grow except on the foundations of the Scriptures in the mother tongue. This is one of the strongest foundations not only for advance but for the teaching of the young Church.’ The urgency with which Kilgour pressed Kivebulaya to complete the gospel demonstrates his conviction of the importance of the task and the identification of Kivebulaya's role as indispensable: ‘it really is worthwhile to lay aside other work’,Footnote ⁷⁵ exhorted Kilgour, with a conviction that CMS missionaries often failed to muster. The Bible Society provided portions or complete translations of the Bible and their operatives believed in a pure form of bibliocentrism, the power of the text alone to convert readers. The issues of ecclesial or political unity that exercised Anglican missionaries in Uganda were of much less concern to the multidenominational Bible Society.

Kivebulaya's manuscript was retrieved from Mboga by A. B. Lloyd only after Kivebulaya's death in 1933 and given to the Bible Society's new editorial superintendent Edwin Smith, the renowned anthropologist of African religions.Footnote ⁷⁶ Bible Society policy insisted that all translations should be checked before publication and, since Smith was unable to find anyone with the knowledge of the language, he undertook the work himself. From Kivebulaya's manuscript he produced on 7 September 1938 a ‘tentative’ ‘Grammar and Dictionary’, with a lengthy introduction, and an article for the Journal of the Royal African Society in which Smith expresses both the palpable excitement of the ethnographer and the enthusiasm of the missionary.Footnote ⁷⁷ He also demonstrates the craft of the linguist by carefully enumerating the challenges he faced in making sense of Kivebulaya's manuscript and the notes supplied by an assistant from Mboga, identifying the language group, reducing the text to norms of written language, acknowledging the divergent theories in the field, and engaging with other scholars.Footnote ⁷⁸ Before receiving the manuscript Smith had sent a copy of Kivebulaya's primer to SVD missionary anthropologist and sometime editor of Anthropos, Father Paul Schebesta.Footnote ⁷⁹ Smith attended Schebesta's presentation on the pygmies at the ‘Congress in Paris’ in 1932.Footnote ⁸⁰ Smith consulted the well-known linguist at the School of Oriental and African Studies, A. N. Tucker, before concluding that the language was related to the Logo-Meru-Madi group. In collaboration with these two scholars Smith facilitated the puncturing of contemporary common assumptions of Mbuti inferiority. The Mbuti, they concluded, were homo sapiens and not an ancient subspecies or degenerate version of humanity.Footnote ⁸¹ Smith and Tucker asserted that, far from the Mbuti learning the language of their neighbours, they possessed a sophisticated language of their own, which was adopted by the Lese and Mbuba farming peoples with whom they traded. Smith also knew Lloyd's first biographies of Kivebulaya, which claim that the Mbuti were ‘maligned’ by those, like H. M. Stanley, who described them as ‘treacherous and vicious’.Footnote ⁸² Smith's thorough and careful work makes of Kivebulaya's contact with the Mbuti and his ‘Lumbuti’ translation a tool in the production of ethnographic knowledge and in the politics of racial hierarchy, providing evidence for a new scholarly narrative on pygmies.

The primary purpose of Smith's work was to facilitate the evangelisation of the Mbuti. He was also eager to have the translation published ‘as a memorial to the translator’, whom he described as ‘a very gallant Christian gentleman’, a ‘heroic saint’, and ‘an African for whom I cherish a deep admiration’.Footnote ⁸³ The correspondence from 1928 surrounding Kivebulaya's translation in the Bible Society archives expresses heady excitement about the initiative of a ‘native’ Christian to translate a language of a people perceived to be particularly exotic. Kivebulaya met the gold standard of vernacular Bible translation as upheld by the Bible Society: providing a biblical text to those who appeared most marginalised and thus allowing them an opportunity to join the Christian church. W. J. W. Roome, the Bible Society's representative in East Africa, also wrote a biography of Kivebulaya for children, Apolo, Apostle to the Pygmies (1934), which relies heavily on Lloyd's work and is indebted to Paul Schebesta and his book Among Congo Pygmies.Footnote ⁸⁴ A network of missionary-oriented individuals promoted the Mbuti as human beings with their own language and culture, in order that the Mbuti could become part of a different culture, a Christian world culture.

The impulses for vernacular translation that propelled Kivebulaya to plead for the entire Bible in Nyoro remained with him thirty years later. Indeed, it seems likely that he used the Nyoro Bible, not the Luganda one, as his ‘original’ text, from which he translated the Mbuti.Footnote ⁸⁵ His earlier conviction of the importance of the Nyoro translation permitted him to work with Nyoro speakers (among them some Mbuti) on the Mbuti translation. Without it, it is unlikely that he could have successfully organised a translation team; few Ganda knew the Mbuti language. Furthermore, few of the Nyoro speakers in Mboga, who collaborated with Kivebulaya on the translation, would have done so without the conviction that God ‘hath made of one blood all nations … that they should seek the Lord’. The people of Mboga more often disparaged the Mbuti.

Smith's ‘Grammar and Dictionary’ of what he designated the Mbuti's ‘Efe’ language was intended to be sent to northeast Congo to aid further research. As far as I am aware, the work did not take place, the Efe-language gospel was never published and it remains little more than an ethnographic footnote in the history of Bible translation. However, there were about fifty baptised Mbuti before Kivebulaya's death and a number were baptised immediately after his death who all took the name ‘Apolo’.Footnote ⁸⁶ There are Mbuti Christian congregations today who trace their origins to Kivebulaya's evangelism but they currently use the Swahili texts widely available in Ituri.Footnote ⁸⁷ The available historical evidence for the influence of this second translation does not tell us how the Mbuti saw themselves or whether they leveraged biblical hermeneutics for their own perceived advantage. Rather, it demonstrates the role of translation in knowledge construction and categorisation of the Mbuti: International networks of Bible translators and ethnographers, often collaborating ecumenically and across disciplines, used the academic tools at their disposal and the experience on the ground in order to construct the identities of others. It also gives evidence of the prominence of a global biblical hermeneutic in the self-understanding of Kivebulaya and his African associates as members of a global Christian community: the multilayered collaboration between Europeans, African church leaders, and the people among whom they worked shows how the transnational movement they considered themselves to be part actually functioned.

TRANSLATION AND CORPORATE IDENTITY

Examining the rationale of African missionaries shows the extent to which Bible translation was an impetus for the formation of both national identities and of creating a transnational imagined community. While assertions of the potential of Bible translation to aid the construction of national identity are demonstrably true, there are other, sometimes overlapping, forms of corporate identity constructed with reference to the biblical text. The familiar argument that linguistic work of vernacular Bible translations created ethno-nationalist ambitions is compelling in the Nyoro case.Footnote ⁸⁸ It makes little sense, however, in the Mbuti case. Furthermore, it overlooks the fashioning of Christian identity as primary by Kivebulaya and his associates and later Revivalists.

Runyoro-Rutoro speakers appeared able to control and utilise vernacular translation in ways they had chosen, albeit with limited long-term political success. The wider purposes of translation were shaped by the enthusiasms of a literate political elite. Even though these elites understood themselves to be marginalised within the colonial system, they were able to marshal support and action. The Runyoro-Rutoro case also indicates the competing national sensibilities that existed within the colonial state. Biblical texts and their vernacular translations were not simply used by the Ganda and their colonial and missionary supporters to exert wider influence – they were also appropriated by the Nyoro and Toro and their missionaries for their own ends. The Nyoro and Toro already shared the cultural and religious novelties of their antagonists and used them to assert their greater autonomy within the colonial state. They were not as severely marginalised as other groups in the colonial state and could utilise concepts of kingship shared by the Ganda and the British.Footnote ⁸⁹ The extent to which the Nyoro and Toro elites perceived themselves to gain relative forms autonomy is connected to the extent to which a bibliocentric form of Christianity took hold among them. Toro, where Kivebulaya's work of translation had started and which had originally benefited from close relations with the Ganda, developed a larger Anglican Church than the Nyoro, who became Catholics in larger numbers or did not convert at all. Compelling though the nationhood argument might be for Runyoro-Rutoro speakers, they obtained only an ethno-nationalism within a wider colonial state in which demands for the whole Bible were one of the few concessions that Runyoro-Rutoro speakers gained.

J. D. Y. Peel's assertion that missionaries worked with models of nation-states that operated around notions of the ethnos as linguistically distinct were put to the test in colonial Uganda.Footnote ⁹⁰ Ideologies of translation were compromised in competing notions of how different ethnic groups might exist in the same state and what conditions were necessary for church and state unity. Centralised forms of unity espoused by Fisher, the Mengo Church Council et al. were attempts to replicate a Ganda Protestantism in governance, language, and society which could neither be countenanced by their recent allies, the Toro, nor their long-standing adversaries, the Nyoro. They claimed for their own the national theologies of the Old Testament by demanding its translation.

The evidence provided by Kivebulaya's Mbuti translation suggests that it encouraged the formation of Mbuti identity by others and on an international level. It contributed to scholarly work that removed assumptions of subhumanity, childlikeness, or degradation of pygmies and therefore their linguistic and cultural inferiority and paved the way for Colin Turnbull's romanticised portrayal of a pure and harmonious forest life.Footnote ⁹¹ However, it did little to overcome the exotic identity bestowed upon them or their continued marginality. The Mbuti members of the Anglican Church in Congo, like the other people groups in the area, used the Nyoro Bible and Prayer Book until translations in Swahili became available.Footnote ⁹² The people of Mboga, on the edge of the Ituri forest, spoke a form of Nyoro and so gained influence in a Church that still benefited from its connections with Uganda while they remained marginal within the Congo state. At least in the trajectory of this study of translation, the political space of the Mbuti continued to be largely circumscribed by others around them through the circulation of knowledge about them.

Yet Kivebulaya's ‘Lumbuti’ translation cannot simply be used to nuance the argument that assumes that vernacular translations must promote collective political aspirations. The process of translation from the encounter between Kivebulaya and the Mbuti, to published primer; from primer to the manuscript of a Gospel; from manuscript to Smith's painstaking linguistic study and scholarly collaboration allows a view of international Christian networks that held a regard for both the local and the vernacular. These networks also demonstrate the missionary theology of a universal church that simultaneously glories in ‘cultural pluralism’ of the local and particular. Kivebulaya and Edwin Smith were, in their self-understanding, part of the same global community. They also understood that Bible translation was an initial step in making the universal community accessible to the Mbuti.

Kivebulaya and other translators worked within a Protestant bibliocentrism for ‘all nations’. The religious change that Kivebulaya propounded was part of a process internal to the indigenous societies he knew. It took place, however, within negotiations about the merits of external influence, and within an ideology of universal Christian belonging propagated by missionaries like Kivebulaya, who operated in an intensely local way but held within themselves a much wider perspective, informed by their Christian belief, that influenced their actions and caused them to seek connections beyond any given locality. Many transcended borders both physically, mentally and spiritually, living at a translocal level and believing they inhabited a community of transnational scope. Unlike Maxwell's Luba evangelists, Kivebulaya was uninterested in either Ganda or Toro patriotism. Kivebulaya's tenacious commitment to a single, linguistically plural global Christian identity during a period of ethno-nationalist creation has produced contested legacies in popular memory. Early East African Revivalists, like Blasio Kigozi and Simeoni Nsibambi, were inspired by Kivebulaya's evangelistic journeys across the boundaries of ethnic affiliation, state borders, and linguistic divides.Footnote ⁹³ The ethnically diverse Anglican Church in Ituri remembered Kivebulaya as a great missionary. However, Ganda patriots in the 1950s also laid claim to Kivebulaya's memory, writing about him as an example of Ganda paternal responsibility for all Uganda.Footnote ⁹⁴ Among the Toro he is remembered as the missionary to the Mbuti, not as the first translator of the Runyoro-Rutoro Bible nor as a significant of Toro's religious change. In the kingdom where later revivalism was to be tempered by patriotic loyalty to territorial boundaries, Kivebulaya is remembered as only acting outside those boundaries.Footnote ⁹⁵