# The Swiss Mission and the Invention of Tsonga Literacy

Jehanne Denogent

Translator: Saskia Brown

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**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/8652

DOI: 10.4000/1451k

ISSN: 1760-849X

**This article is a translation of:**

La Mission romande et l'invention d'une littératie tsonga - URL : https://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/8427 [fr]

**Publisher**

Musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac

**Printed version**

Date of publication: October 15, 2024

ISBN: 978-2-35744-157-6

ISSN: 0764-8928

**Electronic reference**

Jehanne Denogent, "The Swiss Mission and the Invention of Tsonga Literacy", Gradhiva [Online], 38 | 2024, Online since 01 June 2025, connection on 23 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/8652 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/1451k

This text was automatically generated on July 23, 2025.

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# The Swiss Mission and the Invention of Tsonga Literacy

Jehanne Denogent

Translation : Saskia Brown

## From French to Tsonga: Transcription and Translation

<footnote n="1">1 Missionaries, despite being neither linguists nor folklore experts, were nonetheless important agents in recording in writing and transferring the arts of spoken language from Africa to Europe. They built a vast corpus of African “oral literature,”¹ transcribed and translated. This activity of collecting can be explained by their commitment to evangelization, education, and ethnographic documentation, for which they learned and wrote down the local languages. They thus developed a set of linguistic tools such as grammars and lexicons, and also volumes of folklore. The anthropologist and linguist Joseph Errington considers that “missionaries count as the group which has produced the single largest body of knowledge about linguistic diversity around the world” (Errington 2008, 13), and that they considerably enhanced the circulation of texts between the two continents. This movement of texts actually went in two directions: the missionaries imported African verbal arts into Europe, but they also imposed a writing system and a text on the continent. The set of documents presented here² will be the basis for our examination of the material conditions of the circulation of texts. It comes from the activities of the Mission romande (the Swiss Mission) in South Africa and Mozambique,³ and testifies to the implication of Swiss missionaries in consigning to writing the Tsonga language and “orature” (Ngugi 1998), as well as their role in imposing a new order, that of information literacy.⁴</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 This copy of the New Testament in “Thonga,”⁵ which was published by the Lausanne-based printer Bridel, shows how missionary work was intrinsically linked to information literacy. Translating the Bible into an indigenous language was a key step in the missionary’s program, particularly in Protestant missions, since access to the text itself was crucial for the Reformed Church. As historian Patrick Harries explains,</footnote>
"Literacy allowed a personal interpretation of the Bible without the mediation of a caste of clergymen" (2007, 165). And indeed, the Protestant missions were more involved in learning African languages than were their Catholic equivalents (Samarin 1984, 436). The latter considered their role to be that of mediating between the text in Latin and the new converts, whereas "faith and literacy were constantly joined in the work of the Protestant missionaries," as Joseph Errington writes (2008, 96-97). Moreover, in Calvinist French-speaking Switzerland, the ability to read was particularly important because it was at the basis of "a Church that was at once independent of government, democratic in its composition, and unencumbered by cramping" (Harries 2001, 407).

The Swiss Mission exported this culture of information literacy into Southern Africa by working to "create a literature"—that is, a Christian literature—in Tsonga, as the missionary Arthur Grandjean (1860–1930) reported in 1917 (Grandjean 1917, 233). For the missionaries, literacy was synonymous with progress, and the translation of the Bible was at the heart of this mission. This immense task meant, first of all, learning Tsonga. But the language was not studied by linguists, strictly speaking. "Termed 'linguistic' work (Spracharbeit) to stress its practical nature [...], it was goal-orientated" (Eichholzer 2012, 72): evangelization. Yet the linguistic work that missionaries carried out in the field was also used by administrators and scholars, such as Maurice Delafosse, who, for example, republished certain texts transcribed by the missionaries in his Âme nègre (1922).⁶

Translating the Bible also required putting the language into written form. As Paul Berthoud, a founding member of the missionary station at Rikatla (today's Mozambique) and a driving force behind the translation of the Old Testament, along with Ernest Creux and Henri Berthoud, asked: "According to what system? What alphabet should be applied?" Berthoud 1896, 35). For transcribing African languages raised the question of which system of transcription to adopt. The Swiss Protestant missionaries eventually decided on Karl Richard Lepsius's *Standard Alphabet*, published in 1855. This system, based on Latin, contained many diacritical signs with which to transfer "the sounds they heard [...] into writing," as Arthur Grandjean observed in 1917 (Grandjean 1917, 233). But, as the historian Patrick Harries maintains (2007, 166), "the reduction of local speech sounds to an alphabet of twenty-nine written signs imposed rather than reflected a phonetic orthodoxy and logic." In writing the language down, the missionaries constructed as much as they described. For example, one of the tasks was to produce "an appropriate vocabulary, capable of transmitting the Christian doctrine," notes Cécile Van den Avenne, who describes "the different forms of linguistic 'tinkering'" that French missionaries had to perform, and their inventions, in West Africa (Van den Avenne 2017, 106, 110).

Transcribing Tsonga thus implied a series of choices that crystallized political issues in this region under Portuguese control. At the time when Paul Berthoud set up the first mission in Rikatla, the choice of the language to transcribe, for example, was eminently strategic. It resulted in demarcating a particular area and strengthening a zone of influence. Among the many languages spoken in the region of the Bay of Delagoa (today's Bay of Maputo)—Zulu, Venda, Pedi, Tsonga, Ronga, Tswa, and Hlanganu—the Swiss missionaries settled on the transcription of Tsonga, which affected the local linguistic zones. The very idea of a language that is homogeneous and circumscribed is an invention "culture specific notion associated with the rise of European nation states
and the Enlightenment” (Makoni and Pennycook 2007, 18). Making a language group homogeneous played a tactical role for the Swiss mission when other missionary societies were present in the region, for example the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which had had a base at Inhambane since 1883. By writing Tsonga down, the Swiss could claim that the territory on which they had settled had a cultural unity, and this contributed to giving an “ethnic”⁷ substance to colonial space.

Thus in giving Tsonga a written form, the local dynamics were altered and the missionaries became normative authorities, controlling and validating the use of this language. Printed text had become an important stake, as the capitalist system dominated with colonization. Printing created a new community, a market of readers who shared a common language,⁸ as Benedict Anderson has shown. Whoever mastered this system of communication was in a position of strength. Whether intentionally or not, the missionaries made the Tsonga language and oral literature into a “print-capitalism” (Anderson 1996 [1983], 49) they could possess. As Henri Berthoud stated in 1899, “Thonga was ‘our’ language with ‘our’ spelling” (Berthoud in Harries 1988, 43).

Printing was another object of rivalry between the missionaries. Unlike the *Société des missions évangéliques de Paris* in Lesotho, which had set up a press there in 1841, the Swiss missionaries did not have a printing press in their missions, and books were published in Lausanne. “In this way, mission headquarters could prevent disputes within the church by strictly controlling what Africans read” (Harries 2007, 167). However, sending manuscripts back to Europe to be printed took a long time and exasperated the missionaries in the field, who were in competition with the Americans. The latter had set up a press not far from there, thanks to which they could publish a guide to reading Tsonga in 1886. In order to short-circuit the control from Lausanne, the missionary Henri-Alexandre Junod (1863–1934) paid out of pocket for the publisher Georges Bridel to print a reading guide in 1894, *Sipele sa Sironga: abécédaire et livre de lecture en dialecte ronga*.⁹ Writing down and printing were thus instruments of power in the missionary context, as Kasereka Kavwahirehi comments: “To write is to take possession, to master ambiguity, ‘homogenize,’ in order to bring in a specific historical order” (Kavwahirehi 2004, 797).

So it was Lausanne, Switzerland, that saw the first printed translation into Tsonga of the New Testament, as well as grammar and vocabulary books and readers. Georges Bridel and Co. had cast special type characters for this, in order to give written notation to the Tsonga sounds that had no equivalent in French. This publisher was closely linked to missionary activities in Africa because its director, Auguste Bridel (1856–1917), was a member of the Swiss Mission's advisory board between 1887 and 1912.¹⁰ The books printed in Tsonga in Lausanne were then sent back to the missionary station as educational material. By an ironic reversal, these publications were therefore used to teach a standardized Tsonga to its native speakers. However, the missionaries also “succeeded in making them social facts among their literate converts” as Joseph Errington (2008, 116) argues.

## From Tsonga to French: Using Oral Literature

In the reading books published in Tsonga, apart from extracts from the Bible and vocabulary, there were Tsonga folktales (Junod 1894). These excerpts from “folklore” were also published in a bilingual French-Tsonga format “like an appendix to [a]
grammar book,” as Junod indicates, with “a conversation manual and a short vocabulary list” (Junod 1896, 27). This sort of addition often appeared in the works of missionaries and anthropologists, placed after grammatical descriptions. In Maurice Delafosse’s *Essai de manuel de la langue agni* (Outline of a Manual of the Agni Language) (1900), for example, the chapters on nouns, adverbs, and adjectives were followed by a “chrestomathy,” that is, a compilation of texts useful for learning the language.¹¹ In Cécile Van den Avenne’s words, the oral corpuses which the missionaries collected thus gave access to “a more formal language, and certain turns of phrase and idiomatic expressions characteristic of this genre, which could easily be transposed for translating, particularly parables” (Avenne 2017, 107). Both types of publication—in Tsonga and in the bilingual French-Tsonga format—used oral literature to help teach the language, and they generated a double linguistic movement, back and forth, between Africa and Europe.

For the Tsonga texts were not imported into Europe solely to get them printed: they were used to address a European scientific and evangelical readership. *Les Chants et les Contes des Ba-Ronga de la Baie de Delagoa* (1897) (The Songs and Tales of the Ba-Ronga of Delagoa Bay), in which Junod had compiled many tales, legends, and riddles,¹² was destined for “scholars, ethnographers, and folklorists” (Junod 1897, 13). These extracts from “folklore,” the missionary goes on to say, “may render a service to learning [...] it is only by comparing the tongues and traditions of diverse tribes that it is possible to shed some light on their past” (Junod 1897). The nineteenth century was the heyday of folklore studies (Thiesse 2001) and Junod employed the folklorists’ comparative method to assess the value of Tsonga folktales (Harries 2007), which he thought would lead him back to an originary cultural source.

Excerpts of Tsonga spoken art forms were published in academic journals such as *Folklore* and *Anthropos*, but also in Romandy missionary periodicals, which informed their followers there about the activities of the African missions. Missionary work was immensely popular at the time, well beyond scholarly circles. Indeed, at the turn of the century, the question of missions in Africa was part of the everyday life of Romandy people, whether through missionary journals, Sunday school, or public readings. It may indeed be the case that the writer Blaise Cendrars, who was from the Canton of Neuchâtel, heard of Henri-Alexandre Junod in this context before publishing his *Anthologie nègre* (1921), a collection of African stories; Cendrars’s poem *Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles*, completed in 1914 but not published until 1918, at the Éditions de La Sirène, referred to a certain Junod who was living in Africa.¹³ Beyond the case of Cendrars, “parishioners were made particularly aware [of this literature] due to the readings performed by missionaries who were back in Switzerland on leave” (Harries 2005, 232). These readings by missionaries, which provided distraction over the winter months, included Tsonga oral literature accompanied by instruments imported from Africa. They sought to draw the public’s attention to the Mission and to justify its actions in order to obtain financial support. For David Lindenfeld, “these tales were often written with a European public in mind, with a view to maintaining and increasing the funds for missionary operations” (Lindenfeld in Maccotta 2011, 62).

The tale *L'Homme au grand coutelas* (The Man with the Large Cutlass) is a good example of how the African spoken arts were instrumentalised for the missionary cause. First published in the anthropological volume *Les Chants et les Contes des Ba-Ronga*..., it was later adapted for the stage by H.-A. Junod, and printed by the community center of
Saint-Blaise, in the Canton of Neuchâtel. The play was performed for the first time in Neuchâtel in 1910, for the benefit of the French Protestant Mission. This was how Junod intended to “create and develop interest in missionary work,” as he stated several years later in his *Théâtre africain* (Junod 1928, 3). The folktale was altered so as to address a Romandy Protestant readership. For the importation into Europe of tales, riddles, and songs in Tsonga implied a series of transformations, if only due to their being written down, which made them accessible, from a cultural as much as a material viewpoint, to a Swiss readership. The operation of selection implied another transformation, shaping the corpus by leaving out texts that did not conform to Christian morals, as did the theatrical form, the structure of acts, which corresponded to a familiar genre for the European public.

13

The plays were staged using white actors and actresses, with faces made up to look black. They played the roles of Masingué, Magougou, and Mayiwane, and interpreted the Tsonga tale in their own way. Junod even rented out to others the sets needed to stage *L'Homme au grand coutelas* (a hut, an elephant tusk, a stuffed bird, etc.) for a fee of CHF 251, an initiative that reveals both his wish to make this cultural heritage available, and the way in which it was appropriated. The missionaries' transcriptions and translations of Tsonga spoken arts effectively gave them control over the written forms and their uses; the Tsonga people themselves could play no role in the changes accompanying this cultural transfer and the media selected. Besides, Elias “Spoon” Limbombo, one of Junod's main informers, who provided information on Tsonga botany, insects, nature, culture, and spoken artforms, was himself unable to read. Junod refers to him in his *Chants et Contes des Ba-Ronga...*:

> Several young people brought me valuable materials: first and foremost *Spoon*, a man of thirty-eight years, I would suppose, a former seer, and one of the most interesting of our neighbours in Rikatla, from whom I heard the curious and picturesque epic of the Rainette [...]. (Junod 1897, 72)

14

Although Junod cites his sources, there is relatively little information on the conditions of the collecting. Did, for example, Junod have a sufficient grasp of the language to dispense with a translator? Did he write from memory, and did he interrupt his informers? Above all, were the informers aware of the uses to which their stories would be put?

15

Less well known today than the missionaries, those who participated in the operation of transcription of Tsonga language and oral arts included Calvin Matsivi Mapopé, Spoon, Tobane, Mankelo, Manganyélé, Kouézou, Loïs, and Chiguyane.¹⁴ The missionaries relied on the linguistic skills of local people for their transcriptions. If one can speak of a “team effort,” as Robert Fraser (2008, 39) does, this should not conceal the context of extreme inequality; rather, it should enable us to challenge the heroic civilizing narrative of the literacy brought by the missionaries. For African speakers too contributed to information literacy.

16

The Swiss Protestant Mission thus played an important role in transcribing the Tsonga language and spoken arts, while also monopolizing their uses and interpretation. Yet it also encouraged learning and using Tsonga, unlike the Portuguese colonial policy, which forbade the use of indigenous languages on its territory, and imposed Portuguese. Although the Catholic Portuguese government generally tolerated the activities of the Romandy Protestants, as the Berlin Conference had decreed, the latter's commitment to disseminating Tsonga sometimes generated tensions,
particularly after the Portuguese government introduced new legislation in 1929: it was designed to limit “the use of the vernacular by forbidding its use in schools and restricting its use in religious instruction” (Cruz and Silva 1998, 225), whereas the Swiss Mission’s education was based precisely upon information literacy in Tsonga. Thus, when confronted with “the eradication of centres of indigenous culture and resistance,” schools and missions became “first of all refuges, then centres of political resistance” (Ngoenha 1998, 428). Indeed, it was missionary schools that trained many of the new local elites, not least Eduardo Mondlane, a founding member of the FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) and Samora Machel, who became the first president of the People’s Republic of Mozambique, in 1975. According to Mary Bill and Isaac Mathumba, these schools fostered an African leadership (2001, 361). The linguistic involvement of the missionaries in Mozambique is thus rather ambiguous. It doubtlessly helped foster Mozambican nationalism, insofar as information literacy in Tsonga generated an awareness of a non-Portuguese identity and encouraged demands for cultural independence. On the other hand, the Tsonga linguistic identity that replaced the Portuguese one was partly a product of the missionaries, at least at the time when Tsonga was being written down, and was thus dissociated from local cultural realities. Initially imposed, Tsonga information literacy was later appropriated for the benefit of a project of emancipation.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Testamente Le Yintšha yi nga Evangeli ya Yesu Kriste. Lausanne, Publisher Georges Bridel & Cie, 1894. The Vaud Cantonal Archives, DM-échange et mission. PP 1002 W 0017.</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. L'Homme au grand coutelas. Ronga tale, collected and adapted for the stage by H.-J. Saint-Blaise, Foyer Solidariste, 1910.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

Collection particulière.
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4. Portrait of Élias Spoon Limbombo, Ricatla, Mozambique, circa 1896-1911.</figcaption></figure>

Photo Arnold Borel. Archives cantonales vaudoises, DM-échange et mission. Cote PP 1002 T 1 NV 001/001.003.
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5. Writing lesson. Missionary Arnold Borel's class. Ricatla, Mozambique, 1908.</figcaption></figure>

Photo Arnold Borel. Archives cantonales vaudoises, DM-échange et mission. Cote PP 1002 T 1 NV 001/003.032.

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6. David Paul Lenoir, « L'homme au grand coutelas. Lemana de Neuchâtël ! », cira 1910. the Lausanne Cantonal and University Library, Lausanne/CIV - Lenoir fonds, CIV LEN 2.1206.</figcaption></figure>
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NOTES

1. Walter Ong has mentioned the huge difficulty he has with the expression “oral literature,” which points to “our inability to represent to our own minds a heritage of verbally organized materials except as some variant of writing, even when they have nothing to do with writing at all” (Ong 2002 [1982], 11). What I mean here by “oral literature” is the spoken word written down, what Ong calls “a second orality,” that is, an orality “based permanently on the use of writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation of the equipment and for its use as well” (Ong 2002 [1982], 133).

2. The documents, which all relate to the activities of the Swiss Mission, are preserved in different archival fonds in Switzerland: *DM-Échange et mission*, the Lenoir fonds (the Lausanne Cantonal and University Library), and the Swiss National Library.

3. As from 1884, the Swiss Mission encompassed the different missionary societies of the Free Churches of Romandy. It grew out of the Vaud Mission, which concerned only the Canton of Vaud, although initially, at its foundation in 1871, this Mission had come under the aegis of the Paris Mission. It became independent in 1875, when the Vadézia mission station was set up in the Transvaal, South Africa. For different reasons, and especially due to the instabilities caused by the Boer Wars, Paul Berthoud founded another mission station on the coast, at Rikatla, in 1887.

4. Ever since his founding article written with Ian Watt in 1963, “Consequences of Literacy,” Jack Goody has endeavored to describe the social and intellectual consequences of the emergence of a system of alphabetic writing. The notion of *literacy* refers to a written culture and not simply the ability to decipher an alphabet (Goody and Watt 1963).

5. The term “Thonga,” used by the missionaries, was abandoned in favor of “Tsonga,” which is the generally accepted term today. On the history of this designation, see Harries 2007, 160.

6. Carole Maccotta has described how transcribed African texts are recurrently re-used in anthropological works—what she calls the “citational aspect of the sources.” After their first publication, they often reappear in other literary and scholarly compilations (as with Blaise Cendrars and Carl Einstein) (Macotta 2011, 49).

7. On the notion of “ethnicity” and its construction, see Amselle 1985.

8. On the phenomenon of linguistic standardization and uniformization in the colonial context, see Harries 2007, Fabian 1986, and Makoni and Pennycook 2007.

9. The Ronga language is of same family of languages as Tsonga. The two languages, which are very close to each other, are generally mentioned together insofar as they are historically linked. On their distinction, and the issues raised by it, see Harries 2001; Bill and Mathumba 2001.
10. Georges Bridel and Co. was specialized in publishing works on religion, historical works on Switzerland, and textbooks, apart from writings by missionaries (Ardia 2011).

11. See on this subject Vincent Debaene's article in this issue.

12. Henri-Alexandre Junod's archives are not in the Swiss Mission collections, in Lausanne, but in Pretoria. This presence of missionary archival documents in South Africa shows the two-way textual movement we described earlier in this article. Most of the missionary archives relating to Lesotho, however, are not in Morija, but are centralized in Paris, at the Archives of the Paris Society of Evangelical Missions (Société des missions évangéliques de Paris).

13. On Cendrars's *Anthologie nègre* and its sources, see Le Quellec Cottier 2005.

14. On this woman storyteller, see Andreas Schmid's article in this issue.

## ABSTRACTS

L'ensemble de documents d'archives présentés dans cet article, tous liés aux activités de la Mission romande en Afrique, vise à mettre en lumière le rôle des missionnaires suisses dans la transcription de la langue et de l'« orature » (Ngugi 1998) tsongas au tournant du xxᵉ siècle. Ils décrivent un double mouvement, du français au tsonga, et inversement, lié à la littératie et à la culture de l'imprimé. À partir de cet ensemble, il s'agira de réfléchir aux conditions matérielles de circulations textuelles.

## INDEX

**Mots-clés:** missions, Mozambique, littératie, linguistique, folklore, orature, imprimerie

## AUTHORS

JEHANNE DENOGENT

Université du Cap

jehannedenogent[at]hotmail.com