PROMISCUOUS TRANSLATION: WORKING THE WORD AT ANTANANARIVO

The recent efflorescence of studies in popular literacy and its uses in twentieth-century
Africa has brought us well along the road to appreciating some of the implications of the
three Rs in the lives of certain Africans over the last century. Still, little attention has been
directed to originary processes of literacy acquisition and vernacular textual production,
especially during the nineteenth century. Most studies of literacy today assume an existing
system of reading and writing as a backdrop to personalized or social experiments in the
written word, and most concern the twentieth century.6
The nitty-gritty business of creating orthographies and fashioning early textual transla-
tions in African speech often set foreigners and their students into a tangle of reflexive intel-
lectual and social relationships. Their complexity and messiness belie the way Evangelical
missionaries tended to interpret the world in their published writings: as the confrontation
of unmistakably disparate categories ofAfroheathen and Eurochristian. Scriptural translation
typically required European clerics and African colleague translators to struggle with each
others' tongues and intellectual outlooks, and to place their mutually constituted knowledge
into the service of textual and semantic transformation, a point Derek Peterson has empha-
sized in his study of the stakes in the debates over competing alphabets for Kikuyu texts in
twentieth-century Kenya. When it came to biblical translation, missionaries typically claimed,
as they did in Madagascar, to have translated the Christian scriptures in a straightforward
way directly out of classical Mediterranean languages into African vernaculars, representing
themselves as the primary cultural and intellectual brokers between Eurochristianity and the
languages of Africanity.
But matters of language acquisition and the production and conversion of texts are
rarely so straightforward as such bold and simplistic claims suggest. Reciprocal acquisition
of mother tongues, experiments in orthography, creative efforts at generating biblical vo-
cabulary, and multiple takes at textual translation and revision formed the base work of many
Protestant missions to Africa and elsewhere.7 And these intellectually and socially promiscu-
ous interactions, in turn, brought Africans and envoys from Europe into relationships that
confound both clear-cut claims to authorship and tidy categories of teacher and taught. In
this essay, I investigate the foundations of Roman-alphabet letters in highland Madagascar in
the interactions of slaves, students, and missionaries. The focus here is on language transac-
tions between missionaries and their enslaved interpreters, on the one hand, and on those
within the royal-LMS schools of Antananarivo between late 1820 and about mid-1824, on
the other. My concern is how these transactions helped to shape biblical translation and the
wider growth of literacy.
Rapid developments in reading, writing, and translation in highland Madagascar of the
early nineteenth century are typically explained in hagiographic fashion, with reference to
the unique intelligence, training, and dedication of several British men. Missionaries' actions
and their writings, however, reveai a complex co-authorship of scriptural translations that
foreign evangelists often strategically denied or concealed from audiences in Britain. The

91