In her piece on the usurpation of the Shona peoples’ God Mwari, Mbuwayesango, brings up an interesting point about the blurring of lines between colonization and evangelism by missionaries during the “scramble for Africa”. Mbuwayesango comments that in Shona interpretations of the Bible the word Mwari, which was orignially a specific word for a Shona God, was hijacked by English interpreters seeking to incorporate and replace a previously understood God, with the Christian God. This is a thought-provoking point, but one that must be probed further beyond a mere agitation with Western evangelical revision. I believe the difficulty in transliterating the word for God in the Old Testament, into Greek, and ultimately into English is the real culprit in this situation. To merely attack English missionaries for something that had been taking place since the inception of the canon, as well as the Septuagint, one must first analyze the fact that the English word “God” was taken from a Greek understanding for God which was clearly different from the word the Hebrews used to denote their monotheistic deity. This has always happened in the art of translation, instead of reading an underlying theme of oppression into these translated texts, one could also see the art of attempting to use a word that exists outside of a language, explain this word to those that have never spoken it, using words that do not exist to them. When I read about missionaries attempting to incorporate a previously held understanding of God by a native people, it seems to me rather progressive, much more progressive, I would argue, than say a tract explaining “God” to people here in America, while completely avoiding all relative language to said people.
