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A TENTATIVE GRAMMAR OF THE EFE OR MBUTI LANGUAGE The reputed language of the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, Belgian Congo By EDWIN W. SMITH 1938 INTRODUCTION THERE was pleasurable exoitement at the Bible House in London when in 1930 the news came that Canon Apolo Kivebulaya was translating the Gospel of St.Mark into the ’Mbuti’ language, spoken by Pygmies of the Congo Forest. That translation is the basis of the present tentative Grammar and of the Dictionary which accompanies it. 1. The 3tory of the heroic saint who is responsible for this translation has been written by Archdeacon a.B.Lloyd. Born in Uganda about 1864, Apolo was a pupil for a short time of Alexander Mackay, but was not converted till later. Soon after his baptism in 1895, he volunteered to serve as an evangelist in Toro, some 200 miles to the west. There he had to learn to express himself in the Nyoro tongue, but appears never to have mastered it. Mr. Lloyd tells us that "the rolling R and the aspirated H absolutely defeated Apolo, and to the end of his days he had not an aspirate in ail his vocabulary and a rolling R was never heard." While he was in Apolo of the Pygmy Forest. C.M.S. 1936. Apolo, the Pathfinder. C.M.8. 2 Toro, he climbed the slopes of Ruwenzori and looked down into the country beyond, towards the great Congo river. Far away was a range of hills which his guide told him was the Mboga country where many people lived. To take the Gospel to them was now Apolo’s ambition. In December, 1896, he made his way round the mountain range to the north, crossed the Semliki river and reached the beautiful highlands of TZboga. Of his experiences there we need not write. Suffice it to say that after being beaten to the point of death at the Chief’s orders, he won the Chief for Christ and in the course of thirty-seven years built up a numerous and vigorous Church. He was a keen missionary and carried the Gospel to several other tribes, besides the Banyamboga, in the Forest or on its outskirts - to the Balega, Bambuba and others. He planted teachers among them. What is more pertinent to our purpose, he came into contact with the Pygmies, sought them out i t-he- their forest haunts, made friends with them. Says Mr. Lloyd: nHe lived with them in their tiny huts, he ate with them their weird meals of roasted antelope or monkey, supplemented with roots and fruits from the forest. His fame spread through pygmy land, and he was hailed as the friend who never failed them.... More than fifty of them were baptised by Apolo". In 1926 a small primer in the language ’Lumbuti* was printed for him by the Religious Tract Society. It contained a translation <5 of the Lord’s Prayer and of sane other passages of Scripture. Apolo was ordained deacon in 1900 and priest in 1903; and in 1922 was appointed a Canon of St•Paul’s Cathedral, Hamirembe. He died at Mboga, 30 May, 1938. The last entry in his diary, five weeks before his de?nh, read thus: "I have two cattle and the profit from these I leave to the Church at M'toga. I have no money at all**. He also left the manuscript of his translation of $t.Mark. The Rev. a.B.Lloyd, who after having retired from the C.M.S. was returning to Africa to carry on the work at Mboga till a successor to Apoio could be* appointed, was asked by the Bible Society to secure this manuscript with a view to its publication. He found it at Mboga and reported in June 1934, that he was going over it with an educated African who knew the language. In the following October he sent to London a transcription of the Gospel which he had made with his own hand. On his return to England some months later, Mr. Lloyd brought the original manuscript. 8. The manuscript is contained in two school exercise books, labelled "The Njovu” and bearing the figure of an elephant upon the cover. There are 39 pages of close writing. How it was produced is not precisely clear. My first impression was that Apolo wrote some six chapters himself and - 4 - afterwards enlisted the help of a teacher named Nasanl as his amanuensis# But Mr# Lloyd says that Apolo wrote it all with his I X own hand from dictation. Apolo, he explains, had no gift for languages. He appears never to have acquired Myoro perfectly and did not learn to speak: the language of the Pygmies with any facility. His helper was a teacher who had worked among the Mbuba people and spokej^ that language, which he declared to be identical with that spoken by the Pygmies. A study of the manuscript appears to confirm these statements. There are signs of dictation and very clear indications of imperfect understanding of the Nyoro version from which it was made. These imperfections were, of course, hidden from me when I began to study the translation. I was eager to have it printed, first because it would be of service in the evangelisation of whatever people coula r-ad and understand it, and, second, as a memorial to Canon Kivebulaya, a very gallant Christian gentleman. It is, however, the practice of the Bible Society not to issue a version unless it has reliable assurance that the translation is accurate and otherwise acceptable. In the normal course this version would have been submitted to people competent to pass judgment upon it. But in all the world (so far as we could ascertain) there was no person capable of giving an opinion. Mr. Lloyd himself, who had gone over the manuscript with a man who knew the language and had laboriously copied it, professed himself unable to judge of its fidelity. Two alternatives 5 presented themselves: either to keep the manuscript in the strong-room until some expert should come forward; or to attempt to form some jud^nent upon it myself, I began to examine it. The first verse read: Vohipa ( 1 ejiri Yesu Kris to. baiya, Magu feugu bayi. Ejiri, I conjectured, was the Swahili and Arabic injil, ’Gospel’. Our Lord’s name was easily recognisable. The last three words evidently stood for ’Son of God’; but which of the two words in capitals was ’Son’ and which ’God’? A reference to other verses in which God is named left it certain that Kugu is ’God’, and I inferred that, being unable to find a satisfactory equivalent for the divine name, the translator had borrowed the Swahili klungu, - in fact the name was spelled thus once or twice. Incidentally this gave the first indication that there might be no ng in the language. If Kugu was ’God’, then Magu must be ’Son*. I looked up the other 33 passages where ’Son’ or ’son’ occurs and found magu in most of them, either standing alone or embedded in a phrase like mama^u or ubibamaguai. The exceptions were fom* in number: magu was not there. (I found out later that other words atdi and kagbwi ’child’, were used instead of magu). In looking at the passages where I expected to find a rendering of ’Son of man’, I repeatedly found abi, which I provisionally fixed upon as ’man’• But at 8.38 I found the words Magu Mugubaimba. I had no means of knowing what the .alter syllables of the second word (-baimba} might mean, though by this time I had the suspicion that bai 6 stood for ’of’; but the presence of Mugu surely indicated that the phrase meant ’Son of God’ and not ’Son of man* as it should mean. Here was an evident mistranslation. And if a first scrutiny revealed an error, how many more errors would a more rigorous examination bring to light? After some hesitation I decided to embark upon that thorough examination. The first step was to prepare a complete concordance of every word. This I hoped would enable me to assign a meaning to each word and enable me to determine the construction of sentences. Once this were accomplished I should be able to judge fairly well whether the translation were good. It sounds simple enough; but I soon became aware that.I had undertaken a very difficult task. If the reader will glance at the photostats which accompany this exposition, he will begin to appreciate the difficulties. In places the i^riting was extremely illegible. Look,for instance, at the word at the end of the fourth line from the bottom of I4o.2. As this is the only time the word occurs I am still in doubt as to the spelling: I imagine it to be si-ba-walalata ni lai? ’Is not this the carpenter?’ There are many similar puazles. I had not proceeded far with the concordance when I discovered that the spelling was very erratic. Indeed, in the title the word for ’Gospel* was written EhJiri and in the first verse Ejiri. Evidently Apolo had tried to write phonetically but he was far from - 7 - consistent. He could never, for one thing, decide between r and X; the same word would now be written with 1 and now with r. (We find the same thing in printed Nyoroj. Knowing that he always dropped h|a ’aitohes’, I was not prepared to find so many h’s In his transcription; it seemed to me that if sometimes he left them out he sometimes put them in unnecessarily and almost haphazardly: I still cannot be sure whether ha should not sometimes be a, or e.

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