Postscript

Dr. Andy Alo, a graduate and lecturer at Africa International University (AIU)* speaks five languages. However, it is his mother tongue, Lugbarati, that holds a valuable place in his heart.

From generation to generation
Andy was raised in the village of Abedju, which grasps the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda and holds them together at DRC’s northeast corner. Andy’s grandfather, one of the first Lugbara believers in DRC, became part of the Lugbarati translation team, which finished the Bible translation in 1966.

Andy’s father became an active proponent for Bible translation in the region as well. And, as the third generation in his family to follow Jesus, Andy also experienced the difference the translation had on his family and how it helped the church in the Lugbara community.

“This was the evidence for me, that once we had the Bible [in our first language], people started to move forward in their spiritual lives without the church being weakened by anything,” said Andy.

Getting involved in Bible translation
Andy pursued a degree in education with a major in teaching languages in Bunia, a city in northeastern DRC. While studying there, he met a young woman, Yvette, in the church choir, who would eventually become his wife.

Soon after finishing at university, he began teaching French with the conviction that education was the best way to help people to live more meaningful lives.  However, a friend studying at AIU in Nairobi, Kenya, told Andy about the Master’s degree program in Bible translation at the university.

“Then, I realized that the Word of God was the true light people needed for an everlasting joy and life,” said Andy who decided to enroll in the program at AIU.

After graduation, he and Yvette returned to Congo where Andy worked as a translation advisor on Congolese Bible translation and language projects. He also taught an introductory course in translation principles to other translators and linguists at a local teacher training college.

“Being an African gave me the ability to explain things from the inside,” he said. “Because I speak [those languages], as well as share the worldviews, I was able to help translators solve some of the challenges they face.”

Multiplication
After five years, they felt motivated to do something more:  multiply themselves. They returned once again to Nairobi and AIU.  This time Andy did doctoral level studies in translation and research. In a few short years, Andy was encouraged to join the teaching staff in AIU’s Translation Department. He is now one of several lecturers in the department.

One of the courses Andy teaches is program planning—a course designed to help students understand how to plan a Bible translation and language development program.

In one of his recent classes, his students engaged in a discussion regarding the methodology of entering a new people group who did not yet have the Scripture in their mother tongue.

Many people in Africa speak at least three languages. Those who attend school learn a national language like French or English, in addition to the trade language of their region and their mother tongue. However, Andy and his students all agreed that when the Bible is only offered in a national or trade language, it is deficient.

“Many people may be multilingual,” Andy said, “but their level of knowledge in those languages is not as deep as the knowledge they have in their mother tongue. The Word of God is more successfully communicated when it’s done in the native language.”

Through teaching, Andy is multiplying his knowledge and experience by helping people to have a meaningful part in Bible translation projects. His knowledge of language and personal experience with Bible translation make him an excellent fit for his role at AIU and an important part of Bible translation.

“It is one thing to lament over the spiritual and socio-cultural misery of the marginalized ethnic groups who do not have the privilege of reading the Word of God,” said Andy.  ”It is another thing to get involved, one way or another, in taking the Word to them. I have chosen the second option because I know that reading the Word and living by it will make a difference in their lives.”

* AIU was formerly known as Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST)

Photos by Taylor Martyn

Read a longer version of this story 

Content and photographs for this article were provided by staff from African Inland Mission’s On Field Media team (AIM-OFM). See more of their stories on www.aimstories.com.

This story was written for the Wycliffe News Network.

Thomas Elvis Guenekean was once an atheist, an eager student of humanistic philosophy firmly set against Christian faith.  It was the process of translating Scriptures into his own language and the persistent prayers of his wife that God used to bring Elvis into a relationship with Jesus.

From unbelief to belief
“When my wife would return home from prayer meetings, I would mock her, asking her a series of philosophical questions,” he remembers.

After completing his studies and training as a teacher, Elvis’ further academic plans were blocked by lack of finances. In answer to his wife’s prayers, this roadblock became a turning point in his life.

He decided to look for opportunities to use his skills to benefit the local community. He even approached the pastor of a local church and offered to start literacy classes for people in the church who could not read or write.

Elvis Guenekean with his pastor, Georges Gonire.

The pastor encouraged him to instead enroll in a translation training course.  It was being offered to the community so they could begin translating the Bible into Gbeya, Elvis’ own mother tongue.

At first, Elvis saw translation as just a challenging intellectual exercise. Yet, as he sought the meaning of each passage of Scripture and grappled with the best way to express it in Gbeya, he began to discover the God of the Bible.

“As I became immersed in the Word of God I began to understand the incredible love and grace which He freely gives each one of us,” he recalls. “My deep intimacy with God is one of the most amazing things I take from this ministry.”

Soon Elvis went from being one of the translators on the Gbeya translation team to being the coordinator for translation and literacy projects in the Bossangoa region.

New responsibilities provide new opportunities and challenges
Elvis’ responsibilities in translation expanded two years ago when became the Language Program Manager (LPM) for ACATBA*. He now oversees language development, translation and literacy projects across all of CAR.

“My overall objective is to help make the Word of God come alive for the people of CAR,” Elvis explains.

Elvis and his colleagues are eager to do much more. A greater number of churches and communities are requesting ACATBA’s assistance in beginning translation and literacy projects.

Because of a lack of financial support, however, many existing projects have been significantly scaled down or stopped completely. Elvis also sees the importance of more human resources.

He is praying for two colleagues to join him to help coordinate projects at the national level. The needs also include linguists, translators, translation consultants and anthropologists to join the team. He would love to see more Central Africans fill some of these roles.

Despite the challenge of limited resources, and in the face of widespread needs, Elvis perseveres in faith that God will accomplish his work in his way. Elvis himself, after all, is living proof of God’s work through His Word.

* Association Centrafricaine pour la Traduction de la Bible et l’Alphabétisation or Central African Association for Bible Translation and Literacy.

Story by Beth Wicks
Photos by Zeke Du Plessis

Read a longer version of this story

Beth Wicks is a writer for YWAM AfriCom, a network of communicators that serve YWAM in Africa. Learn more about them on their web site: www.ywamafricom.org.

This story was written for the Wycliffe News Network.

other African languages

Afrikaans

Arabic

English

French

Portuguese

Spanish

Swahili

This map shows the official languages of the countries in Africa.

I used to think that a national or official language of a country was the language that everyone in that country knew.  What I’ve learned since I started working for Wycliffe is that the reality is much more complicated.  Below is some of what I’ve learned from our linguist colleagues about language use.

In Africa the main official languages are French, English, Arabic and Portuguese, but for the most part African countries host a multilingual environment where different languages are used by different people in different contexts. Sometimes the language listed as the official language of a country is only spoken by 20% or less of the population.  Often other languages are used in the home and maybe even another language or two for trade.

Let’s take Kenya as an example. More than 50 different languages are spoken there.

• Most of these languages would be considered home languages, or languages that people use with their family or with other people from the same ethnic group. It’s often a language people use to express their deep feelings with the people with whom they are closest.  For some people, particularly in rural and remote areas, it may be the only language they know or the only one for which they have an extensive vocabulary.
• Trade languages are languages that different ethnic communities in a geographic zone use to conduct business and communicate with each other.  One of the trade languages used all around Kenya and in many other parts of East Africa is KiSwahili.  However, sometimes other languages are used for this same purpose in smaller geographic areas.
• The official language of Kenya is English (KiSwahili was recently added as another official language).  Official languages are the languages used by the government–in the courts, in official documents, and in other government contexts.  Official languages are often the languages used by the elite and those with the highest levels of education and in areas with a high concentration of ethnic diversity (like large urban slums) where another trade language is not the primary means of communications. In a big city like Nairobi where not only are there many different Kenyan ethnicities coming together but also people from other parts of the Africa and the world, English is more widely spoken than in other cities in Kenya.  Trade languages and official or national languages can be referred to as languages of wider communication or lingua francas because they serve as bidges that allow diverse groups of people to talk to each other.

People in highly urban areas may regularly use three or more languages even in the course of one day. In contrast, someone who lives in a remote or rural area may only know one language well and may have limited vocabulary in another one or two languages.

These become important factors to consider in Bible translation projects and generally in determining what languages to use in ministry.  African church leaders as well as non-African foreigners who have ministries in African countries must carefully consider several factors:

• How well do their audiences know different languages?
• What kinds of vocabulary do they know in each language?
• How do they use each one?
• In which language do they express feelings, ideas or deep truths?
• Does one language have more status than another, and what implications will choosing one language over another have in a given context?

Multilingualism isn’t new. We know from the Bible that Jesus knew several languages: Aramaic (likely his home language), Hebrew, and Greek since it was the trade language of the eastern Roman empire. He probably didn’t know the official language of the Roman empire (Latin) because it was not widely spoken in the eastern part of the empire.

Helping people use and actively engage with Scriptures is an essential part of Wycliffe’s ministry.  However, Wycliffe is not the only organization that is passionate about and involved in Scripture engagement.  Some friends of ours in Nairobi just produced a video about how some AIM (Africa Inland Mission) staff are helping the shepherds of Lesotho engage with God’s Word.

Lesotho [lih-SOO-too] is a small, land-locked and mountainous country located in the south eastern part of South Africa.  It is not part of South Africa, but an independent country of about 2 million people.  At least five languages are spoken there. Wool is one of it’s exports, and boys can be set apart to be tend flocks of sheep from a very young age.

While Lesotho has a high literacy rate, shepherds have a strong oral culture and many are not literate.  AIM staff are helping some shepherds learn to read and write which gives them access to God’s word in their language.  Staff are also hoping to launch a Bible school which will transmit all of its teaching and Scripture orally and through audio.  This will allow shepherds to engage with God’s word and learn to teach others about God’s Word without having to learn to read.

Learn more about orality and ministry to peoples from oral cultures.

Learn more about Scripture engagement ministry.

…that’s the distance, according to Google, between where we lived in Nairobi to the town where we live now.  Oh, and that’s the precise distance…if you walked the whole way.  According to Google, it would take 43 days (24 hours straight) and 15 hours to walk the whole distance.  Their directions include a caution that there may be areas without sidewalks…and there could be some tolls .

We contemplated driving this several times before we made our move.  At first, it seemed like an easier way to transport our luggage.  In the end, it just got too complicated with boarder crossings, multiple transit visas, car insurance for every country, and the possibility that we wouldn’t be able to import our Kenyan car into South Africa.  Alas, it was such an interesting idea in our minds, and I had a whole plan for visiting projects the whole way down and blogging about them.  Instead we just pasted over by air–faster but not nearly as interesting.

Map of the Bantu expansion – created by Mark Dingemanse

This journey has been done, and it was done before the age of airplanes and cars. The Bantu peoples of Africa moved from the areas of modern-day Nigeria and Cameroon east and south to modern-day Kenya and down to South Africa.  The Bantu migration took about 1000 years.  Their language and cultures changed along the way, creating a large group of related Bantu languages and a collection of distinct peoples with some similar and shared cultural characteristics.

Today, there are more than 500 different Bantu languages spoken by more than 200 million Africans in 17 African countries spanning from the equator to South Africa.  About 250 of these languages have no scripture representing about 14 million people.  Most of the Bantu languages without scripture have not been written down.  Many remaining without scripture are located in Tanzania and Uganda.  Learn more about Bantu language projects in Tanzania and Uganda.

The needs for scripture translation into Bantu languages extend beyond Tanzania and Uganda into Kenya, Congo, Angola, Mozambique as well as other countries.  A team has been working on tools to help scripture translation projects in all these languages.  One tool, the Bantu Orthography Manual, seeks to provide some standardization to alphabet creation in Bantu languages that have not been written. A Bantu literacy tool assists with the creation of Bantu literacy primers.  Another tool, PTEST, was developed to assist with the analysis of the sounds in Bantu languages. Each of these tools is increasing the speed at which scripture translations can be made available to Bantu languages.

This macro approach to scripture translation and language development was spurred in part by Vision 2025– a vision to see a Bible translation program in progress in every language still needing one by the year 2025.

View the Bantu language family tree.