In Our Own Language

“And how hear we, every man in our own language wherein we were born?” — Acts 2:8 (ASV)

When Crowther was born, Yoruba had almost never been written down. It was full of proverbs, poetry and praise-songs, all of it living in memory. By the time he died there was a Yoruba Bible, a Yoruba Prayer Book, grammars, dictionaries and schoolbooks. He wasn’t the only person behind that change, but historians call him its principal influence.

He had started collecting Yoruba words in the 1830s. His Yoruba vocabulary, published in 1843, was the first such work by a native speaker. Writing the language down was hard: Yoruba is tonal, so the same syllable on a high, middle or low pitch can mean completely different things, and it has sounds English letters can’t spell. In the 1850s a team settled a common spelling system, with marks under some letters and tone marks over vowels. The full Yoruba Bible, a team effort over forty years in which Crowther did the largest share, came out in 1884. Popular accounts sometimes say he translated it alone. He would have been the first to correct them.

Why did it matter so much? A Gambian historian, Lamin Sanneh, made the point well: when the Bible is translated into a people’s language, that language is being declared worthy to carry the word of God. Nobody has to become someone else to become a Christian. For Crowther, the gospel was not an English possession that Africans had to learn English to receive. It could speak Yoruba.

In November 1851, on a visit to England, Crowther went to Windsor Castle to talk with Prince Albert about Africa. While they bent over a map, a lady came quietly into the room. “She did not come in state,” he wrote, “but simply like any other lady.” It was Queen Victoria. When the lamp went out, the Queen lit the candles herself. Someone asked Crowther to say something in Yoruba. He gave a proverb, and then, so she could hear the language properly, the Lord’s Prayer. She said it was “soft and melodious.”

That story is often inflated into a former slave summoned before the throne. The real version is better: a quiet room, a lamp going out, and a Yoruba clergyman praying “Our Father” in his mother tongue to the Queen of England by candlelight.

There is a less comfortable side. Prince Albert, looking at the map, said Lagos “ought to be knocked down.” A month later the Royal Navy attacked Lagos to end its slave trade, and ten years later Britain annexed it. Crowther, like most African Christians of his day, saw British power as protection against the trade that had wrecked his childhood. He was right about the slave trade. He couldn’t see what colonial rule would become.

At Pentecost, the first sign of the Spirit was that people from all over the world heard God’s works “in our own language wherein we were born.” Christianity has been a translated faith from day one. God isn’t asking you to pray in a special holy dialect. He hears you in the words you actually think in.

One thing to do this week: pray this week in the language you think in, however casual. If you speak more than one language, try praying the Lord’s Prayer in your heart language, the one you grew up hearing at home, and notice whether it feels different.