Missionaries in Bengal helped usher into being new social identities with familiar lexical material. This section traces how missionaries turned a single concept, ‘ancestor’ (modimo, pl. badimo), into God, and looks at the reverberations of this translation. The account here differs from previous scholarship, not least in contextualizing the particular interactions through which translation happens.
Today the word ‘Tswana’ denotes both a language and an ethnic identity. Originally the term (-chuana) appears to have meant to be ‘similar’. As in Kikuyuland and Yorubaland, a common field of comprehension meant a common field of conflict. Tswana patriarchs fought to keep their populations in ‘proper Bechuana towns’ where authority and production could be recoupled. They made alliances through marriages, including with Korana, the Khoe-speaking people of the Orange River. They rustled cattle, killed one another in raids, and absorbed their scattering peoples, always seeking to establish themselves—with their penumbral genealogies—as rulers. At the end of the eighteenth century cultural, new religious, and racial pluralisms entered Tswana territory from the colonized parts of the Cape Colony. Tswana people often outnumbered the metis people they joined for military protection, who often spoke seTswana. Records show also the interpenetration of ex-slaves, Korana, and San (Bushmen) with Tswana, and the existence of markets in ivory, beads, captives, and iron involving foreign partners. Dutch-speaking ‘bushmen’ (with cattle) accompanied Tswana leaders on diplomatic missions. Christianity flowed through these various patriarchies like electricity as they vied for guns and trade, legitimacy, safety, and wealth.
In 1813 John Campbell of the LMS, together with a party of local evangelists and Griqua ‘captains’, including Adam Kok, arrived at Dithakong. They came to parley with Mothibi, the Tswana ‘chief’ of‘the Bachapees’ (meaning thus: ba- (people of) Tlhaping, the eponymous kingly ancestor), and the ‘Bastard Captains’ living under his authority. As Mothibi was away hunting, Campbell decided to talk to some royal women.
Mahooto the queen... was averse to our going away [before Mothibi returned] ... we explained to her the nature of a letter. Mr. [William] Anderson showed her one he had got from his wife... that Adam Kok had brought it, yet did not know anything that was in it... by the use of the wax[.] The bible was lying on our table, which gave rise to our explaining the nature and use of a book, and particularly that book. That it informed us of God who made all things; of the beginning of all things which seemed to astonish her very much, and many a look was directed toward the bible.
In the complex multilingual conversation that followed, missionaries may have noticed someone speaking the word ‘moreemo’ (ancestor: modimo), because Campbell henceforth used it to name God. So did the Revd James Read, who had consecrated the status of many of the region’s most powerful evangelists. Read held up the Book and said gravely, ‘The people that lived in darkness have seen a great light; light has dawned on those who lived in the land of death’s dark shadow,’ and again all this, even ‘death’s dark shadow’, had to be (doubly) translated. Mahutu posed questions that had ‘previously occurred to her’. She asked, ‘Will people who are dead rise up again? Is God under the earth or where is he?’—showing clearly that she too viewed the matter under discussion as concerned with ancestors and death.
As late as 1827 it was not established that this Tswana term (modimo) would become the regional signifler for God. Korana and ‘Bastard’ or ‘Griqua’ (metis) power brokers on the high veld saw no profit in the translation; in 1812 a Khoe-speaking interpreter equated ‘mooleemo’ with the Dutch word for ‘devil’, and Mothibi himself spoke the Kora native to his mother and his wife. The Griqua accompanying Campbell made Mothibi nervous, who greeted Campbell by saying, ‘you needn’t have brought Captain Kok with you for safe passage’. Metis people were the dominant power on the high veld. Jan Hendricks, for instance, besides being a deacon and pastor for the LMS, was a magistrate of the fledgling Griqua polity. Mothibi was nonetheless persuaded to receive ‘the teaching’ by the following exercise. The Revd Anderson asked Mothibi the names of his ‘predecessors in government’, wrote them down on a scrap of paper, and read them aloud, ostensibly to demonstrate the power of writing. From Mothibi’s point of view, the recital was a public inscription of his own descent from legitimizing ancestors back to the recognized founder-king, Tlhaping, and logically, to the very ‘ancestor’ that Anderson offered as the greatest king of all. Mothibi reiterated his position in the new lineage in his response: ‘Let the missionaries come. I will be a father to them.’
In the complicated politics of the frontier, the mixed Cape-descended ‘Captains’ living nominally under Mothibi subsequently raised objections, probably to the Christian ‘Basters’ who would come with any missionary. Over the next three years Mothibi stalled the LMS, but a fresh band came to implore Mothibi to keep his promise, including a West Indian (Corner), Cupido Kakkerlak, at least one Tswana Christian, and several of Kok’s men. In 1816 Jan Hendricks and James Read settled beside Mothibi’s town with twenty-nine parishioners and their families from the Griqua town of Bethelsdorp. During one of his early services Read discovered that many of the ‘chiefs’ (dikgosi) thought ‘modimo’ was a way for Read to refer to himself. Thereafter Hendricks took over the preaching.
As Christianity expanded, ‘modimo’ developed further usages. Not only could it signify a missionary, but also power, past kings, the station of one’s ethnonym, or even a living king whose rule united a nation. Ancestors involved the powers of collective action and patrimony, so ‘a cow with a wet nose’, a breeder that might produce wealth and (therefore) human dependants, was ‘ancestor’. A woman who married among Mothibi’s people claimed to speak to modimo daily, demanding gifts of livestock for her blessings. A freelancing preacher, Stephanus, disseminated what missionaries called a ‘false’ theology in advance of their own work. (See p. 144.) ‘Modimo’ became a contested notion in common speech. A woman caught stealing meat from a Kora captain explained herself by saying, ‘she could not help it, as modimo told her to’. By this did she mean ‘ancestor’ or ‘The Ancestor’ (God)? How could one know, with no definite article ‘the’ in the Tswana language? In time it became clear that Mothibi’s alliance with ‘teachers of the message of (the) ancestor’ had not paid off. While guns helped him in battle, he remained vulnerable to guerrilla attacks and in 1820 had to repair to the Griqua statelet of Andries Waterboer, who superintended his own version of an LMS church.
A Methodist missionary, Samuel Broadbent, brought further complications, coming from Ceylon, where he felt he had seen ‘diabolic ceremonies’ and ‘demon-worship’. As he travelled through the disturbed frontier zone of the Dithakong (‘Lattakoo’) region, patriarchs threw themselves at his feet, begging his party to keep close by, holding hostages, taking their cattle. His colleague Thomas Hodgson even witnessed cannibalism born of starvation. Although virtually all his papers were incinerated in 1824, a lexicon survives. Relying on a metis Dutch-speaking interpreter, Broadbent rendered ‘Badeem’ (badimo, ancestors) as ‘the Devil’, and, as he had in Ceylon, he diabolized South Africa’s ‘heathendom’, shaping antitheses of his own prescriptions into ‘naturally occurring’ instances of traditional religion. Broadbent altered the spelling of the root (-dimo) from its appearance in ‘God’, which was ‘Mulimo or Mudeemo’ in the same list, to ‘-deem’ as if ‘badeem’ were a one-off singular on its own. The LMS missionary Robert Moffat initially agreed, commenting that ‘badimo’ had no plural. (In the Pacific ‘atua’ had embraced a competitive pantheon before becoming God.) Broad- bent’s first attempts at public preaching in Tswana avoided the word ‘modimo’ itself. Instead he read out his version of the Lord’s Prayer, with its deployment of ‘father’. He asked a group ‘of the more intelligent’ villagers to repeat after him, a rote recitation without any evident content:
Hara oa rona u mo ligudimong (‘Father, our, who art above.’) I then asked, whether they knew who was meant by our Father above? No, was the general answer; we do not know who you mean. Addressing one of our cattle watchers by name, Roboque [‘Broken’], don’t you know who it is we speak to in these words? He burst out in laughter; no, said he, I have no father above!
One did have fathers, not above, but below, where the dead were buried. Yet Broadbent would not say, ‘Our father who art below’. Instead he propounded a kind of camouflaged genealogy:
I was at a stand for a moment, but soon replied, You know that we exist, and descended from our progenitors, and they from theirs, and so on to the first of human kind; but who gave them being?’ Several voices answered, ‘Mudeemo’. I then spoke of the earth and heavens, and remarked they also had a beginning and must have had a producing cause, for you know, from nothing, nothing can proceed; who then, I further asked, is the great first cause of all? Again they replied, Mudeemo.
‘Who had the most power, the most long ago?’ elicited the answer, ‘An ancestor!’ Having orchestrated a comprehensible dialogue, how far would Broadbent go in making God more like an ancestor? He and his colleagues were already alarmed by the word’s variety of uncontrolled uses. A visitor called the Revd Hodgson ‘Modimo’, clapping his hands, in appreciation of how he had drop-forged lead shot in a water bucket. It was not clear whom missionaries were talking about when they spoke of Modimo. ‘Has he hair as we have?’ people asked Moffat. ‘Have you seen him?’ ‘Modimo’ was shouted in pain, said of clever people, even fast horses. Most troubling, conWded Broadbent in his diary, was that people made the ‘traditionary [sic], though inconsistent statement of Mudeemo proceeding from beneath some mountain’, though it is unclear if one ancestor or one of many might so proceed. Broadbent preached mostly about ‘father’, ‘king, and ‘king of kings’, and he hoped missionaries would adopt the term ‘Jehovah’. But if people said ‘tell me about a/the ancestor’, one necessarily obliged, while stressing that ‘there was, and could be but one, Mudeemo, [and] that He is Eternal...’.
The dominant personality among South African LMS agents in the field was Robert Moffat, who, at the time he sent Broadbent his translation of John 1, seemed well on the way to a definitive version of the rest of the Gospels. Moffat used ‘Modimo’ to mean God, although he nursed doubts, seeing the indigenous idea (not his comprehension of it) as ambiguous, an ‘unknown force’ below ground. Further he considered using a word built
on ‘great’, possibly ‘mogolo’ or ‘mogologolo’ (a doubling for emphasis), which would have made God a cognate of the term chosen by Nguni speakers (unkulunkulu). Broadbent felt Moffat still lacked sufficient command of Tswana, a judgement confirmed by Mrs Moffat even in 1827; that year Moffat went to remedy his deficiency by moving up-country for four months, living in the company of non-Christian Tswana companions in a remote cattle-post settlement. The following year he finished the translation of Luke, completing the initial phase of missionary endeavours to refer to God with Tswana concepts.
In the end, the term for ancestor indeed came to mean God. Future missionaries would supply narratives for this Modimo, displacing specific lore about Tswana pasts in favour of a history common to everybody (but known best by Christians). Henceforth Tswana people would read their own ancestral histories as versions of the Bible’s stories of Ancestor’s reign, in Exodus and Acts, and in terms of texts such as The Pilgrim’s Progress. The relationship between Modimo and historical kings ceased being denotative and became metaphorical. Modimo was the ‘greatest king’. Missionaries and new Tswana Christians agreed there would be no plural for ‘Modimo’, which received its own special noun-class (1a); ancestors (badimo) became the plural ‘demons’ (pl., cl. 2, not 2a) and had no singular form. As Toril Moi remarks, ‘the power struggle intersects in the sign’. In retrospect, the ‘pre-colonial’ Tswana ‘modimo’ became the imperfect version, a ‘remote’ and ‘half-known’ god.
The appearance of Moffat’s 1839 New Testament in ‘Sechuana’ was a watershed also in another sense. As the first African-language Bible it opened the way for dozens of others which disseminated Christianity and alphabetic literacy throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. And although subsequent ‘South African Tswana’, Sotho, and Pedi Bibles appeared, the Moffat ‘Sechuana’ version remains in use today. The Bible became a source book for the ethnic identity ‘Tswana’, which would grow to number in the millions, and supplied the basic vocabulary to Isaac Schapera’s reuvre of genealogies, in which ancestor names become tribes, and ancestor rites a depoliticized religion.