Africa in Translation

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

“…Pugach suggests that linguists like Carl Meinhof and Karl Roehl worked with British and French mission societies only reluctantly, and her chapter on the period after 1920 focuses on the growing nationalism of Carl Meinhof and other linguists which ultimately led Meinhof to membership of the NSDAP. 43 While Roehl's Bible translation is mentioned only briefly in Pugach's book, on one level the episode might similarly be seen as a case of nationalist and imperialist concerns persisting into the interwar period and strengthening as the 1920s gave way to the 1930s. 44 Although we now think of the story of German colonialism as having come to a fairly abrupt end after the First World War, this was not how it seemed at the time.…”

“…In her book, Pugach argues for the centrality of missionaries to the imperial endeavour and seeks to demonstrate how 'vital they were to the development and maintenance of empire, both German and otherwise'. 41 She argues that, while before 1885 the need for Germans to work for non-German mission societies ensured that they prioritised a universalist mission above a nationalist agenda, this changed after 1885 as the missionary enterprise in general and missionary linguistics in particular became increasingly tied to the imperial enterprise. In her analysis, the argument against close co-operation with the German government articulated by Gustav Warneck was gradually eclipsed by the loud voices of those like Friedrich Farbi and Carl Büttner who saw a role for German missionaries in empire building.…”

Revocalising human geography: Decolonial language geographies beyond the nation-state

“…In doing so, I adopt a 'coloniality of power' (Mignolo, 2000a(Mignolo, , 2000bQuijano, 2000) approach to questions of race, arguing that although forms of language standardisation and control and imperialist expansion of course existed prior to the fifteenth century (see Lane et al (eds), 2017;Bohata, 2004), modern categories of racial difference emerged in the colonial context of this period as part of a complex strategy of appropriation and domination of people, lands and languages. Building on work in linguistics on the discipline's colonial history and more recent decolonial efforts (see, for example, Blommaert, 2008Blommaert, , 2014Deumert et al, 2020;Errington, 2008;Irvine, 2008;Makoni, 2013, and2007 with Pennycook;Pugach, 2012), I outline the racial underpinnings of the 'monolingual paradigm' (Yildiz, 2012) and the 'coloniality of language' (Veronelli, 2015), whereby some forms of expressivitytypically languages with grammars, dictionaries and standardised national formsare codified as Languages capable of efficiently conferring meaning, while colonialised others are disregarded as meaningless sound, wasted words, phonic matter 'out of place' (see Pickering and Rice, 2017). Concluding this section and leading into Section Two, I suggest that both the 'monolingual paradigm' (Yildiz, 2012) and the 'coloniality of language' (Veronelli, 2015) rely upon abstractions of language(s) into disembodied, possessable objects.…”