Tribute to Professor Lamin Sanneh
The late Prince Nico Mbarga in his song “O Death,” sings, “if person die, I dey think of myself, the day when I go die, God bless me…” We are going to be remembered only for what we have done…”
I want to remember this great African guru who has been translated into the land of the beyond. At moment I am the National President of the National Committee for the Mungaka Bible Revision Project funded by the American Bible Society through the Cameroon Bible Society and with the collaboration of the Bali Community. The Mungaka Bible was published in 1958 and is the second complete Cameroonian mother tongue translation after the Douala Bible.
Unfortunately some of the alphabets used included biblical Greek and German alphabets. The revision will be a deviation from that so that anyone who knows the English phonetics can just pick up the Mungaka Bible and read fluently; even if without knowing what one is reading.
Thanks to people like Lamin Sanneh who has pointed out that translating the Bible into African languages using Africans, employing African cultures, languages, customs and worldviews helped to take the gospel to dimensions not hitherto reached through its Hebraic, Aramaic and Greek languages and cultures.
To cite Professor Andrew F. Walls, “The incarnation was God translated into humanity…” and every other translation is a retranslation of that original translation.
To cite another guru of blessed memory to whom translation theology was a passion, Professor Kwame Bediako, that the geometrical spread of Christianity in the African continent is a surprise element generated by translation as the people first heard the gospel in their mother tongues.
In the introduction to his book, “Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture,” Sanneh writes: “The central thesis of this book is that Christianity, from its origins, identified itself with the need to translate out of Aramaic and Hebrew, and from that position came to exert a dual force in its historical development. One was the resolve to relativize its Judaic roots, with the consequence that it promoted significant aspects of those roots. The other was to destigmatize Gentile culture and adopt that culture as a natural extension of the life of the new religion. This action to destigmatize complemented the action to relativize…”
Sanneh argues that “translatability is the source of the success of Christianity across cultures. The religion is a willing adoption of any culture that would receive it, equally at home in all languages and cultures, and among all races and conditions of people.”
His approach combines “the theological and the historical method to describe translatability as a religious theme.” By this he seeks to present another option other than the popular biased view that the missionary enterprise was “colonialism at prayer” and that the missionaries were “surrogates of colonialism.” Far from this, through translation some African cultures were thus preserved which would have been lost.
When time permits I will pen the tribute. This is just a prelude to the tribute. For now I can only say, “Dzid la ni boni ngò nti’ ngañ ma’ u!” (Travel in peace to go and meet your creator)!