A couple of months ago a paper of mine, From the Qur’an to Christianity. Ethnolinguistic contact and religious conversion in West Africa, was pubished by Cahiers d’Études Africaines (n 239 (2020), p. 235-262, https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.31573). This piece of research is a very unusual experiment for me, it is an attempt at reconstructing ethnolinguistic contact in the domain of religion and cultural practices accompanying it by using data in Mano, Kpelle and Manding (all Mande, spoken in Guinea). The conclusion I draw is that the language of Islam as practised by the Manding influenced the “traditional” religious language of the Kpelle, which in turn was incorporated in the Catholic religious register. Given a particular ethnolinguistic dynamics in the Catholic church in Guinea, the Catholic register of Kpelle came to influence the Catholic register of Mano (to the point of some prayers being word-by-word translations).

It is curious to look back at where I came from with this research. I took interest in Mano as it is used in the Catholic church during my first postdoctoral project at Berkeley, when I was inspired by the work done in colonial settings (especially William Hanks’ “Converting words”, 2010). In 2015-2016, I collected a substantial corpus of recordings of religious ceremonies, trying to find traces of influence of French as the language of the former colony, of the missionaries who worked in the region until the Guinean independence in late 1950s, and of the Bible as it is read and orally translated in church. To my great disappointment, I could hardly find anything of interest, beside a handful of loanwords such as korowaa ‘cross’ (from French croix). I grew so desperate that by the time I got to Helsinki in 2017 and started to prepare for fieldwork, I decided to switch focus and do some good old dialectal study of Mano, for which reason I took a short trip to Liberia just for a couple of days in January 2018.

My guide in Liberia, who took me to several villages in different dialectal zones, happened to be of Catholic faith (I do not mention his name here, since this is personal information, but I am immensely grateful) and introduced me to fellow Catholics. So in addition to collecting wordlists and narratives, I decided to collect prayers and visited a Sunday celebration. And this was that oomph and breakthrough moment.

It turned out that three of the core Catholic prayers, Our Father, Hail Mary and Confession, are almost the same in Guinea and Liberia, while the Creed is markedly different. When I tried to explain the similarities and differences, I turned to the Catholic prayers in Kpelle in Guinea, remembering that I heard it many times in the church. What a surprise; all the four prayers in Guinean Mano were word-by-word translations from Kpelle, while the Liberian Creed seemed to be an independent innovation! The story behind was that the Catholic missionaries from the White Fathers missionary society came to work first among the Kpelle, in 1914, and only about a quarter century later did they come to dwell among the Mano. Because the two languages are structurally and lexically very close, they translated the prayers from Kpelle into Mano. Then for various reasons the only missionary working among the Mano left Guinea and went over to Liberia, where he remained the rest of his professional life. Naturally, he brought the prayers with him. For some time the Catholic community of Mano fell apart, until one day a young man born in Guinea but who went to study as a catechist in Liberia came back to Guinea in the wake of Liberian civil war. He brought the same prayers back. Only the Creed, which is the longest and hardest prayer to learn – and which is hardly ever recited by the way, a chant is usually sung instead – was composed independently in Liberia, while in Guinea, again, a word-by-word translation from Kpelle was composed instead.

In addition to studying different versions of prayers, a key piece of evidence about the Kpelle influence came from a book called “Nzérékoré. Evangile dans la forêt guinéenne”. Its author, Father Lelong, was a prolific writer who visited many African missions and composed very informative (and beautifully written) reports of his travels. He reports the following conversation between himself and the first missionary among the Mano:

[Father Massol:] The missionaries of Liberian Mano […] had translated “Holy Spirit” with a word which means “a spirit of the forest.” One should say kili mésia.

[Father Lelong:] I will say kili mésia, my Father.

And indeed, up until now the commonly used term in the language of Mano Catholics in Guinea is kílí mɛ́síà (spirit – pure). In Liberia, just as Father Massol observed, gɛ̀ɛ̀ púlú (spirit [of a dead person] white) is used. Note that in Kpelle, the expression is “kílí màahèɣeɛ,” where kílí is largely synonymous with Mano, meaning spirit, intelligence and màahèɣeɛ means pure. The similarity between Guinean Mano and Kpelle terms suggests that, given that there was another term available, the term that Guinean Mano ended up adopting was a calque from Kpelle.

This is just when it comes to the Mano – Kpelle puzzle. Another curious thing to notice was the abundance of borrowings from Manding (which ultimately can be traced back to Arabic) in the religious language of both Mano and Kpelle Catholics. The aforementioned word kílí is of this kind: it is borrowed from Manding hákili which was in turn borrowed from Arabic ‘aql, intelligence. The most telling example is the word kalan, meaning prayer and Christianity in Kpelle, which has the same root as Qur’an. While there can be several reasons for it, including a long-term (and not always peaceful) contact with the Manding (look at the recent news from Nzérékoré, where violence bursts out quite regularly…) and the fact that many Mano and Kpelle speak Manding (check our forthcoming paper with Masha Konoshenko in the International Journal of Bilingualism). But a particularly important fact is that the early missionaries working among the Kpelle were aided by a translator who also spoke Manding, which in fact seemed to be their working language.

The paper is based on data collected systematically every Sunday in the church, but mostly by happy accidents in many different settings: such as a traditional name-giving ceremony organized for my language consultant’s youngest son, a Muslim name-giving organized for a child of my consultant’s wife’s friend, visits of relatives and friends and the like. For a field linguist by training, used to sitting side by side with a consultant for hours eliciting boring stuff, or making targeted recordings of natural speech, this is a happy confirmation of how much social life and language opens up when you just allow yourself to be dragged wherever members of your hosting family happen to go to.

This is one of my first experiments at the language – culture – history nexus, and I am very happy it was so successful. I haven’t received a better review – let me quote an excerpt from it: “Il s’agit d’un travail qui apporte une contribution tout à fait originale et importante à plusieurs domaines de recherche : non seulement la linguistique de contact, mais aussi les études sur les rapports entre les différentes communautés confessionnelles en Afrique subsaharienne ainsi que sur l’influence de l’islam au sud du Sahara au sens large, au-delà du cadre strictement confessionnel. L’anthropologie linguistique s’avère, à ce propos, un outil précieux en vue de renouveler les perspectives sur ces problématiques. Il est temps que les historiens et les anthropologues s’ouvrent à la linguistique et vice versa ! ».

And one last thing: Father Lelong is the very same R.P. Lelong whose book Pierre Bourdieu quotes (or, rather, misquotes!) in Le language autorisé : les conditions sociales de l’efficacité du discours rituel. The book in question is called Le livre blanc et noir de la communion solennelle, quoted by Bourdieu as Le dossier noir de la communion solennelle. It is a central piece of data in his argument about the symbolic efficacy of religious language; and since I sort of feel I have a privileged relationship with Father Lelong (when you know somebody from his young adventurous years, and not when he became old and undoubtedly famous), and since I am very interested in performativity, I want to revisit both the book and the argument.

Check a draft of my paper here, and email me for the final version!