CHAPTER 41

Lamin Sanneh

Lamin Sanneh was D. Willis James Professor of World Christianity at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. He authored the books Disciples of all Nations: pillars of World Christianity, Summoned from the Margin: homecoming of an african, and Whose religion Is Christianity?

Abridged from “Christian Missions and the Western Guilt Complex” by Lamin Sanneh. The Christian Century (April 8, 1987): 331–34. Used by permission.

Editor’s note: Lamin Sanneh was born in Gambia as a part of a Muslim African royal family. After becoming a Christian, he pursued studies in several universities, eventually becoming a professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale University.

When at the age of eighteen I approached a Methodist church in Gambia with a request for baptism, thus signaling my conversion to Christianity from Islam, the resident senior minister, an English missionary, responded by inviting me to reconsider my decision. After some time, I returned to the English missionary. He agreed in principle to receive me into the church.

At that stage of my life, I would have joined the church on almost any condition, for I had this absurd idea that the gospel had marked me out for something, whether for reward, rebuke, or ridicule I did not know. Whatever it was, I felt inexorably driven toward it. On the night of my baptism, I was overcome with emotion, finding it hard to believe that my wish was being fulfilled. Not even the thousand tongues of Methodist hymnody could have given utterance to the avalanche of thoughts and feelings that erupted in me.

My business in this piece is to confront directly the guilt complex about missions that so often prevails in liberal counsels. I believe that the liberal claim to open-mind-edness about missions would be strengthened by a closer examination of what actually happened—and may still be happening—in the encounter between Western missionaries and non-Christian peoples.

Missionaries of course went out with all sorts of motives, and some of them were clearly unwholesome. Instead of examining motives, I propose that we focus on the field setting of missions, where local feedback exerted an influence all its own. And what stands out in particular about the field setting is the emphasis missionaries gave to translating Scripture into vernacular languages. Most Protestant missionary agencies embarked on the immense enterprise of vernacular translation with the enthusiasm, urgency, and commitment of firsttimers, and they expended uncommon resources to make the vernacular dream come true.

The importance of vernacular translation was that it brought the missionary into contact with the most intimate and intricate aspects of culture, yielding wide-ranging consequences for both missionary and native alike.

Often the outcome of vernacular translation was that the missionary lost the position of being the expert. But the significance of translation went beyond that. Armed with a written vernacular Scripture, converts to Christianity invariably called into question the legitimacy of all schemes of foreign domination—cultural, political, and religious. Here was an acute paradox: the vernacular Scriptures and the wider cultural and linguistic enterprise on which translation rested provided the means and occasion for arousing a sense of national pride, yet it was the missionaries—foreign agents—who were the creators of that entire process. I am convinced that this paradox decisively undercuts the alleged connection often drawn between missions and colonialism. Colonial rule was irreparably damaged by the consequences of vernacular translation—and often by other activities of missionaries.

The project of translation contains implications about the nature of culture itself. Translation destigmatizes culture—it denies that culture is “profane”—and asserts that the sacred message may legitimately be entrusted to the forms of everyday life. Translation also relativizes culture by denying that there is only one normative expression of the gospel. It results in a pluralism in which God is the relativizing center. The Christian insight into this phenomenon carries with it a profound ethical notion, for it opens culture up to the demand and need for change.

The impact of the translation process is, indeed, incalculable. Suddenly hitherto illiterate populations were equipped with a written Scripture for the first time, and from the wonder and pride of possessing something new that is also strangely familiar, they burst upon the scene with confidence in the whos and whys of their existence.

For example, the Luo tribesman Matthew Ajuoga was helping missionaries translate the Bible into his native language. He discovered that the missionaries translated the Greek word philadelphia (“brotherly love”) into Luo as hera, and this experience caused him to protest, saying that “love” as the Bible explained it was absent from the missionaries’ treatment of Africans. He subsequently founded an independent church, the Church of Christ in Africa, in 1957, which gained a considerable following across tribal divisions.

Thus it was that, confronted with the bewildering fact of Western intrusion, local populations used the vernacular to avert ultimate disenchantment, in this way utilizing the gains of mission to offset the losses to colonialism.

Obviously, missionaries wanted to proclaim the gospel because they believed it to be superior to any message others might offer. But it is really not consistent to blame missionaries for believing in what they preach. And we must note this salient, consistent feature of their work—namely, that they confidently adopted the language and culture of others as the irreplaceable vehicle for the transmission of the message. Whatever judgment missionaries brought with them, it certainly was not about the fitness of the vernacular to be the hallowed channel for communicating with God.

Colonial rule was irreparably damaged by the consequences of vernacular translation—and often by other activities of missionaries.

The modern religious map of Africa reveals in a striking way the close connection between the growth of Christianity and the widespread employment of the vernacular. The converse also seems to hold: Christian growth has been slightest in areas where vernacular languages are weak—that is, where a lingua franca such as English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, or Swahili has succeeded in suppressing mother tongues.

Christian missions are better seen as a translation movement, with consequences for vernacular revitalization, religious change, and social transformation, than as a vehicle for Western cultural domination. Such an assurance should help alleviate some of the Western guilt complex about missions.

GO TO THE BEGINNING OF LESSON 7: Eras of Protestant Mission History