What makes me foreign

As a white person living and working in Sub-Saharan Africa, I am immediately identified as a foreigner by the color of my skin. When I first came to Africa, the organization I world for was staffed almost exclusively by white people coming from North America and Europe. We hired some local staff for low-level jobs, but all the missionaries were white. It was very obvious that the organization itself was foreign. Over the years the situation has changed radically. Most of the staff in the offices, on the translation centers and in the translation projects are Africans.

But it’s still a foreign organization.

I’ll illustrate this with an example. Let’s say that a foreign government sets up an office in Washington DC to lobby for its interests. It hires an American lobbyist and sets him up with other American staff – a receptionist and so on. The lobbying office is still a foreign thing even though all the staff are Americans. What makes it foreign is who it represents, and where it gets its orders.

Image courtesy of Superyoyo

What continues to make Bible translation foreign in Africa is no longer that it is staffed with foreigners. It is that the shots are still called somewhere else. One of my African friends likens what is happening to a conveyor belt. Money, people and ideas about Bible translation are put on a conveyor belt in the West and conveyed to Africa where offices staffed by Africans receive the ideas, add little by way of African ideas or resources then deliver the packages throughout the continent in the form of translation programs guided and resourced by the ideas and money put on the conveyor belt somewhere else.

As long as this situation persists, Bible translation will stop when those in the West stop putting their ideas and money on the conveyor belt, it will be reduced they they reduce what they put on – just like a delivery office (such as Fedex) can only deliver the packages it receives. It will go bankrupt if no one sends packages. The real work of making Bible translation less foreign is more radical and more difficult than changing the staffing of the delivery office. Someone will have to change the delivery service into a factory producing its own product to deliver. The next step in removing the foreignness of translation in Africa is having churches and Christians in Africa owning and shaping translation to fit their reality.

By the way, in this scenario Westerners still have a role to play because the issue is not where the staff comes from but rather who defines the vision and calls the shots. I see my primary focus, whatever my role, in facilitating a process where Africans and their churches design and implement their own translation programs.

I am fascinated to watch how this is starting to happen – here and there, slowly at first, picking up speed.