Availability and Accessibility are not the same thing: A case study of the Ndau Bible
UPDATE 12 May: This article has been revised extensively based on input from others. Many thanks!
One of the key metrics that people look at when evaluating the potential for evangelization is the availability of Scripture. However, availability doesn’t mean that anyone necessarily has access to the Scriptures. I’m going to show how this works using the Ndau language spoken in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
Ndau of Mozambique and Zimbabwe
Demographics: 2.4 million people
The number of first-language speakers of Ndau is listed by various sources as between 2.1 and 2.4 million people. The majority of Ndau speakers live in central Mozambique from the Zimbabwe border to the coast of the Indian Ocean. There are possbily 1.6 million speakers of Ndau in Mozambique according to the 2006 census (quoted in the Ethnologue). In Zimbabwe, the number of Ndau speakers is thought to be around 800,000 people.
Scripture Availability: Full Bible (1957 and 2008), recent New Testament (1999), dramatized New Testament
The situation for Scripture availability in Ndau is quite good. A full Bible has existed since 1957. A recent New Testament was produced in 1999 followed by a full Bible in 2008. And a dramatized version of the New Testament is available for free download on the Internet through Faith Comes By Hearing.
Let’s focus for a minute on the 2008 Ndau Bible. According to representatives of the Zimbabwean Bible Society, 5,000 copies of the New Testament were produced. As a way of visually representing this printing consider the following grid:
This grid is 48×48 squares, each representing 1,000 speakers of the Ndau language in Mozambique and Zimbabwe*. In the bottom right corner you can see just five red squares representing all the known copies of the Ndau Bible.
* This is just an approximation equaling 2,304,000 people.
So as you can see that the actual availability of the Ndau Bible is really low. It’s worse than that actually because according to a report by Beth Wood in February 2011, her mission was able to purchase only a single copy of the 2008 Ndau Bible. UPDATE 12 May/2011: Since then, their mission has succeeded in purchasing 2,000 copies although they haven’t received delivery at the time of writing.
Scripture Accessibility
While the Scriptures are in principle available in the Ndau language, it is almost impossible to get a copy. Consider these factors:
- The most recent printing of Ndau New Testaments was 5,000 copies. Copies are available for purchase at a Christian bookstore in Mutare and the Bible Society in Harare.
- The dramatized version of the New Testament in Ndau is available in only two cities in Mozambique: Beira and Dondo and at the time of writing they don’t have any players to put the recordings on.
Now the reality is actually much worse and much better than the statistics imply. First, the reality is much worse because supposing that every speaker of Ndau magically had a copy of the Bible it is highly unlikely that the majority of them would be able to read it. That’s because the Ndau-speaking people of Mozambique are largely illiterate. For those that are literate they are probably literate in Portuguese or possibly Shona. And to make matters worse, the variant of Ndau used in the 2008 Bible is different from that of the majority of Ndau speakers in Mozambique. Although the various variants of Ndau have more than 80% lexical similarity, that 20% is just the area where most technical and religious vocabulary tends to differ.
Now I said in the last paragraph that the situation is actually better than it appears. What did I mean by that? Well, in many cases, people attending churches in Ndau-speaking regions are likely to have access to some sort of Bible in either a related language like Shona or a language of wider communication like Portuguese.
Finally, a brief note about the dramatized New Testament available from Faith Comes By Hearing. As I mentioned above, the Mozambican Bible Society makes the recording available in only two cities: Beira and Dondo. But these recordings were done with Zimbabwean speakers of Ndau and that is a big problem for the large concentration of speakers of the Mozambican coastal variant of Ndau for the simple reason that Zimbabwean Ndau is tonal but Mozambican coastal Ndau is not. A tonal language conveys all sorts of grammatical and lexical information simply by the pitch of a particular word. The result being that a speaker of coastal Ndau who doesn’t differentiate tone would not have access to all sorts of meaning in a tonal recording.
I’m leaving the preceding paragraph up for reference but it is incorrect on several points. First, the recording was done in Beira with speakers of the coastal (non-tonal) variety of Ndau. Beth Woods states that while this would sound “funny” to speakers of tonal variants of Ndau she doesn’t know of any major grammatical distinctions based on tone.
Summary
In this example we have seen how the Scriptures can be availabie in a language without being accessible. Obstacles to access include:
- Scarcity: A limited print run
- Illiteracy: Print Bibles for illiterate speakers
- Lack of distribution: Only one source of audio Scriptures (and no players currently available)
- Linguistic variation: Key word choice and tonality
So, what should we learn from this? Don’t equate statistics or statements about Bible translations being available in a language with anyone actually being able to have access to those Scriptures. In the case of Ndau, we’ve seen that Availability does not equal Accessibility.
Information sources:
Ethnologue: Ndau: A language of Mozambique.
Presentation by Beth Wood at the Escutai 2011 conference in Beira, Mozambique (February 2011).
Email correspondence with Beth Wood, May 2011. (Many thanks to Beth for patient correction of this article)
This raises a point that I have long wondered — why the big push to translate into languages where there is either (a) no written literature; or (b) the population is largely illiterate? Such a Bible is likely to be of interest only to linguists, or to the elite (who in most cases are probably literate in a second major world language — for which Bible translations exist).Moreover, it also seems that teaching literacy in a language such Ndau for which there is essentially only one book (the Bible) is a bit absurd — better to teach a major language such as Portuguese (Mozambique) or English (Zimbabwe).
Thanks, Theophrastus. I’ll answer the second question first. Many studies have shown that children learn best in their mother tongue. That’s an easy one, and in fact Ndau is being used for primary education if Ethnologue is to be believed. And that could in theory work pretty well in a country like South Africa with only 12 major languages. In practice it doesn’t actually work even in a country like South Africa. Now head north to a place like DRC where there are more than 200 distinct languages. “Literacy” as we envision it will never happen.In regard to your first question, the Welcher Scale mentioned on this blog is an attempt to look at your (a) and say that if the language is only used in one narrow domain it is in danger of not thriving even in that one. And as far as “illiterate,” the sociolinguists would shoot me for having written that. They like to talk about local literacies, indigenous arts and wisdom, etc. You can read about OneStory, onestory.org, “orality” is being recognized by many traditionally “print” organizations as not a bridge to literacy but an end in itself.
[Typos fixed so I won't look so illiterate]I would argue that Bible is sufficiently complex (with its elaborate references across a lengthy text, its complex arguments, its lengthy lists) that an attempt to understand the Bible purely on an oral basis is necessarily limited. It might work for specific narratives (e.g., “the Jesus story” or individual psalms ) but can you imagine meaningfully listening to, for example, the book of Numbers, with any degree of comprehension?One would not think, for example, of trying to teach calculus or chemistry or cooking by audiobook — does it really make sense to teach the Bible by audiobook?One of the things I learned in Haiti (which has the lowest literacy rate in the Western Hemisphere) was that literacy is correlated to many different skills. One should not, for example, ask an average Haitian to draw a map when one asks for directions lest it embarrass him — somehow the geometric skills necessary to draw a map are correlated with literacy.In the same way, I find it hard to believe that someone who cannot read would be likely to have the logical or rhetorical skills necessary to meaningfully understand Romans or Galatians, for example.And, of course, literacy (especially in a major language) is useful for many more things besides Bible reading.For oral teaching from the Bible, wouldn’t the reasonable organization be the local church, which would presumably offer Scripture readings during services and Bible education classes (and where the minister would hopefully speak the same dialect as the parishioners)?Even in the US, where literacy rates are fairly high and there is pretty much universal access to Bibles, there is ample statistical evidence and anecdotal evidence that most Americans have only limited knowledge of the Bible. If this is the case in a highly literate and wealthy society, how much more true must it be of less literate and less affluent societies?
You wrote: [Typos fixed so I won't look so illiterate]Online publishing offers myriad ways to look illiterate!
Theophrastus, I share your concern about storying for conveying meaning of non-narrative. One thing that I mention briefly in this post is that “the Bible” exists in a church context where some form of the text is available as well as someone with a level of sophistication to pass on teachings, doctrines, etc. Still, Tyndale’s ambition was not without merit: “If God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the scriptures than thou dost.” I have known personally Mozambicans who in terms of academics are unsophisticated but could easily give me a thrashing in any contest on Bible knowledge.
I’ll speak from the Cheyenne experience with Bible translation. There is no widespread literacy in Cheyenne among the Cheyennes. However, since the early 1900s there have always been a handful of Cheyennes who somehow bridged the literary gap in their own language. Their motivation was to read the translated Cheyenne scriptures. They would read it within the church context, as you have noted, Theophrastus.Audio and audiovisual packaging of the Cheyenne Bible translations has made the Bible accessible to the majority of Cheyennes who are not literate in their first language. But you are right, Theo., that audio format for parts of the Bible doesn’t seem like it would work very well. OTOH, many, perhaps most, of the people for whom the different parts of the Bible were written were not literate either. It was often the case that a scribe or someone else who was literate would read from a scroll or parchment to groups of listeners. Wider literacy was not universal for a long time. It sure wasn’t in England when Beowulf and other early pieces were written. And even today, the U..S. does not have the highest rate of literacy in the world, even though we have some of the most advanced technologies. We are, in the U.S., an “uneven” population with a fair amount of illiteracy (not just in the Bible) and semi-literacy.So, even though there are complex logical arguments in the Bible and inter-textual and intra-textual themes, somehow the content of the Bible does still get communicated to people, even within societies which are largely illiterate in their first languages. Even though the Bible was written (after much of the Torah, anyway, was orally preserved for generations), it often got communicated orally to those who were themselves illiterate. That is still happening around the world. Bibles are being accessed in a variety of formats, sometimes by a group of people listening to a solar or battery-powered player. It is rather amazing how well illiterate people can comprehend and retain materials. These are oral societies and they have learned to pass on history, legends, proverbs, instructions, etc. without the print medium. It’s not ideal for “personal study”, going back to a particular passage and drilling down in it. But it still works and works far better than I would anticipate coming from my own highly literate background (but my recent ancestors were essentially illiterate).
JeDene commented on this on Facebook:Interesting discussion. But when you say widespread MT literacy in the DRC will never happen; actually, until the 1970s when the gov’t took over all schools, many (not all) people were taught either in their MT or a closely related language… (Lingala, for ex., is Bantu as was the area where I did fieldwork). It was striking to me that people who had grown up in the 50′s and 60′s, when universal primary education was a push, first by the Belgians and then succeeding gov’ts, were far more likely to be literate than people who grew up in the next couple of decades. It is not an impossible goal; it does require gov’t will for policies and a portion of funding, and philanthropical and other orgs. willing to complete the funding. But never should the Bible be the only piece of literature produced in a language; the leap from primer to Romans is just too great!