THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS IN AFRICA

Africa was host eighty translations of Bunyan’s book and so provides a useful site to examine how the book was changed as it traveled into new spiritual communities.

One respone to The Pilgrim’s Progress was conditioned by African appropriations of Protestantism more generally. One tenet of Protestant theology that never proved portable was the idea of original sin. Concepts of social sin certainly existed, but the idea that, whether one liked it or did not, one was sinful never caught on among African  readers, translators, or missionaries. Those aspects of the text that discussed these ideas were generally edited out, a feature that depended on the material practices of mission translation. Translation was generally pursued in teams made up of second-language missionaries and first-language converts. Missionaries were also inveterate experimenters having to try out bits and pieces with their new audiences to see what would work. Between the Africa translators and the pressure of popular taste, the sections of the text expounding ideas of original sin were edited out. Where these could not be removed, the meaning of original sin was changed. The most famous image of Bunyan’s story, namely, the burden on Christian’s back, stood for original sin. In many Africa editions, this meaning was erased, and instead the burden came to stand for colonial rule itself (Hofmeyr 2004: 76-97).

One further theme that African translation highlighted pertained to themes of orality and literacy. In the paraliterate world in which Bunyan’s story unfolds, documents are not everyday objects, and they tend to stand out either as items of great religious significance or as agents of state oppression, like the pass that Christian, a masterless man, must carry. This ambivalence around documents resonated with the experience of many African Christians seeking religious advancement but kept back on the one hand by the colonial state with its network of documentary control and on the other, by the white-controlled structures of the mission churches. In the final scene of Part I of the book, Christian arrives at the gates of heaven but first has to produce his certificate to get in. Ignorance, who is text in the queue, has no certificate and is unceremoniously pitched down into hell. This scene of difficult and select entry into the portals of power proved popular with African Christians and made its way into illustrations, novels, hymns and songs (Hofmeyr 2004: 137-50).

Important is that African Christian used The Pilgrim’s Progress to project their concerns into a broader international arena. By using the internationally recognized story of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which came to acquire African illustrations and hence African characters, African Christians could project themselves into an international area, often seeking to go over the heads of their various oppressors-the colonial state, white settlers or royal chiefly lineages who persecuted commoner converts-to appeal to an international public.

However, what were the limits of the text’s circulation? When did the text cease to be itself? In some cases, the text disappeared as part of a political decision to eschew the white-dominated world of mission and colonial state. In one case, Simon Kimbangu, who broke away from the Baptist in the central Congo region, probably picked up some symbols from the book, in all likelihood from illustrations. One of them shows Christian emerging dripping from the Slough of Despond. In his hand is a Bible that is dry. Kimbangu traditionalized this image of fetching a book from the next world, a process that involved passing through a body of water. Kimbangu “poached” from the text but disavowed the source (Hofmeyr 2004: 28-9).

In other cases, the text disappears not because of difference but because of similarity. Here the story evaporates into African oral traditions that share many similarities with Bunyan’s storytelling techniques that emerge from a paraliterate world, Bunyan himself being a first-generation literate. Both The Pilgrim’s Progress and African oral narrative traditions share folktale motifs such as the use of dramatic dialogue, two characters to a scene, proverb, riddles, formulaic phrasings, and onomastic strategies. Particles of Bunyan’s story could hence be elided into African literary traditions. In these circumstances, texts disintegrate, not through political resistance but rather under systems unaware of, or indifferent to, their supposedly “correct” and “original” meaning (Hofmeyr 2004: 30).