Language, Empire and the World: Karl Roehl and the History of the Swahili Bible in East Africa

Abstract

While German colonialism as an imperial system was once neglected by historians, this neglect was less acute in the case of the histories of individual German colonies. Yet here too, new perspectives on German colonial and postcolonial history, informed by an attention to global and transnational entanglements, might offer new insights. In this article, I take the controversy over Karl Roehl's translation of the Bible into Swahili as a case study. Viewed through the lens of a traditional imperial history, controversies during the interwar period over linguistics in general and Bible translation in particular between Britain and Germany replicated imperial rivalries; viewed from a global perspective, however, the Roehl Bible is revealing of the ways in which German colonial irredentism went alongside a continued German role in the transnational entanglements which helped to shape the modern world.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Wolfgang Apelt, archivist at the United Evangelical Mission Archive in Wuppertal which includes the archives of the Bethel Mission, for his help with my research for this article and for access to files concerning Karl Roehl and copies of the periodical Ufalme wa Mungu. I would also like to thank Jane Matowo, archivist at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania archives in Moshi where I first encountered Ufalme wa Mungu. I am grateful to Cambridge University Library for access to the British and Foreign Bible Society collection. Finally, I would like to thank Sebastian Conrad, the participants at the conference ‘New Trends in German Colonial/Post-colonial History’ and Charles West for their comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1 Karl Roehl to BFBS, 27 Feb. 1936, British and Foreign Bible Society Archives (hereafter BSA), E3/3/545/5, 1.

2 Karl Roehl to BFBS, 27 Feb. 1936, BSA/E3/3/545/5, 2.

3 Crozier, Appeasement and Germany's Last Bid for Colonies, 153–55.

4 van der Heyden and Becher, Mission und Gewalt; Ustorf, Sailing on the Next Tide; Pugach, Africa in Translation.

5 The Bethel Mission started life as an imperialist enterprise initiated by Karl Peters but after 1891 was reformed under the leadership of Friedrich von Bodelschwingh and left its overt imperialism behind. Fiedler, Christianity and African Culture, 65–66.

6 ‘Agano Jipya’, Ufalme wa Mungu, Sept. 1930, n.p.

7 Ibid.

8 Wright, German Missions in Tanganyika, 127.

9 Although Steere seems to have had a copy of Krapf's version in his possession as he worked, his own version was very different.

10 Wright, German Missions in Tanganyika, 113.

11 Pouwels, Horn and Crescent, 72.

12 Ibid., 72; Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones, 35.

13 Peterson, ‘Language Work and Colonial Politics in Eastern Africa’, 187–88.

14 Becker, Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania, 25.

15 Ibid., 44.

16 Mojola, ‘The Swahili Bible in East Africa’, 516.

17 Roehl to Trittelvitz, 8 Nov. 1924, Vereinigte Missions Archiv: Bethel Mission Archives (hereafter VEM) M 222/3, Bl. 199–200; Dammann, ‘Karl Roehl zum Gedächtnis’, 1.

18 Mojola, ‘The Swahili Bible in East Africa’, 516.

19 Whiteley, Swahili.

20 Peterson, ‘Language Work and Colonial Politics’, 192.

21 Memo from Editorial Superintendent, E.S.C. Minutes, 9 April 1938, BSA/E3/3/545/5.

22 Roehl, ‘The Linguistic Situation in East Africa’, 198–99.

23 Ibid., 196.

24 Ibid., 197.

25 While Roehl's relations with the British were tense but cordial, he more than once expressed his fury with what he saw as the hypocrisies of Belgian rule under Mandate. Roehl to Trittelvitz, 19 March 1929, VEM M 222/3, Bl. 74.

26 Dammann, ‘Karl Roehl’, 1. The New Testament was based on the Novum Testamenti in Greek by Eberhard Nestle, printed in Stuttgart in 1901, and the Old Testament on the Hebrew edition of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Letter Roehl to F. C. Smith, C.M.S. Bookshop, Nairobi, 28 Dec. 1936, BSA/E3/3/545/5.

27 ‘Auszug aus einem Schreiben von Herrn. P. Gleiss aus Vuga vom 27.3.28’, VEM M 222/3, Bl. 118.

28 Abschrift: Roehl to Wohlrab, 23 Feb. 1928, VEM M 222/3, Bl. 102.

29 Rother, ‘Referat über die Bantuisierungsversuche der Kisuahelisprache in der Übersetzung des Neuen Testaments durch Missionar Roehl’, 5, Archives of the Leipzig Mission (hereafter ALMW), 30.

30 Ibid., 11.

31 Konferenz – Protokoll, Marangu 30 and 31 July 1931, ALMW 48/1.

32 Protokoll der Nachmittagssitzung, 11 Aug. 1931, 5, ALMW 48/3.

33 ‘Votum von Martin Ganisya, über die Suaheli-Übersetzung des Neuen Testaments’, 20 Aug. 1928, VEM M 222/3, Bl. 108.

34 ‘Votum von Andreas Ndekeja, DSM’, included in letter from Roehl, 28 Sept. 1928, VEM M 222/3, Bl. 107.

35 ‘Auszug aus einem Brief von Andreas Ndekeja’, 16 Oct. 1936, VEM M 222/4, Bl. 130.

36 Broomfield, ‘Re-Bantuization of the Swahili Language’.

37 Kilgour to Haig, ‘Swahili’, 7 March 1929, BSA/E3/3/45/3.

38 Haig to Kilgour, ‘Swahili’, 15 March 1929, BSA/E3/3/45/3.

39 Marcia Klotz, ‘The Weimar Republic’, 141.

40 Mojola, ‘The Swahili Bible in East Africa’; Topan, ‘Swahili as a Religious Language’.

41 Pugach, Africa in Translation, 13.

42 Ibid., 11. In 1885, Gustav Warneck spoke out against the missionary movement becoming a ‘handmaiden in the service of colonial policy, a mulch-cow to the fatherland’. Wright, German Missions, 8.

43 Pugach, Africa in Translation, 164, 168–71.

44 Ibid., 243, n. 15. Pugach's account of the trajectory taken by missionary linguistics echoes similar accounts of a shift in German anthropology from a liberal and cosmopolitan outlook in the nineteenth century to a concern with race and nation in the twentieth century. Penny and Bunzl, eds, Worldly Provincialism, 1–2.

45 Letter from Msabahi, ‘Wadachi kutaka Tanganyika’, Kwetu, 4 Nov. 1937, 14.

46 ‘Habari za Kwetu’, Kwetu, 7 Dec. 1937, 12.

47 Editor, Mambo Leo to E. E. Sabhen-Clare, 15 Nov. 1938, Tanzania National Archives, 12871/3, 607–08.

48 Haig to Smith, ‘Swahili’, 2 Oct. 1935, BSA/E3/3/45/5.

49 ‘Memorandum zum Druck der Suaheli-Bibel, Roehl’, ALMW 30/3.

50 Roehl to mission directors Knak, Ihmels and Ronicke, 29 May 1937, VEM M 222/4, 83.

51 ‘Eine deutsche evangelische Tat für Ostafrika’, VEM M 222/3, Bl. 30.

52 Roehl to members of the former Roehl Committee, Berlin, Leipzig, Bethel, 6 June 1936, VEM M 222/4, Bl. 163–64.

53 Benoît de L'Estoile, ‘Internationalization and “Scientific Nationalism”’.

54 As Canon Broomfield wrote in 1937, ‘We must recognise that many people besides C.M.S. and U.MC.A. are concerned in the movement towards standardisation of Swahili’. Canon Broomfield to Edwin Smith, ‘The Bible in Standard Swahili’, 2 April 1937, BSA/E3/3/545/5. German mission societies were forced to depend on international co-operation in this period also as a consequence of the difficulties they experienced in sending money overseas in the early 1930s. See Hogg, Ecumenical Foundations, 269–70.

55 Trittelvitz to Roehl, 25 March 1929, VEM M 222/3 Bl. 72–73.

56 The Rev. H. Scholten to Dr. E. Smith, 30 Oct. 1937, 2, BSA/E3/3/545/5.

57 Ballantyne, ‘Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State’, 112–16.

58 Burton, ‘Introduction’, 5; Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 81.

59 Ernst Johanssen, ‘Karibuni watu wote’, Ufalme wa Mungu, March 1927, 1–2.

60 M. Ruben, ‘Mkutano wa Mission Mamba’, Ufalme wa Mungu, Dec. 1930, 187.

61 Diedrich Westermann, ‘Swahili as the Lingua Franca of East Africa’, 28.

62 Hoyt and Oslund, ‘Introduction’, 13; Smith, The Continuities of German History, 50.

63 Trittelvitz to Roehl, 25 Nov. 1927, VEM M 222/3, Bl. 121.

64 Trittelvitz to Roehl, 7 March 1930, VEM M 222/3, Bl. 46.

65 Rother, ‘Referat über die Bantuisierungsversuche der Kisuahelisprache in der Übersetzung des Neuen Testaments durch Missionar Roehl’, 5, ALMW, 11.

66 John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 344–41, 405–17.

67 Cited in Glassman, War of Words, 89.

68 See, for example, a debate in the pages of the Swahili newspaper Ngurumo in 1965 over the correct spelling of Swahili words. Letter from J. C. Mbelwa, ‘Fadhaa na Fazaa’, Ngurumo, 16 Jan. 1965. On racial thought in twentieth-century Tanzania, see Brennan, Taifa.