ABSTRACT
Introduction Chapter 3 showed how the European Judaeo-Christian tradition, and the Bible in particular, built on the Greco-Roman period by using ‘black’ both categorically to describe and categorise people and symbolically to connote a range of negative traits. This chapter addresses the question of how this tradition was translated into an African culture via the introduction of Christianity and its sacred texts. Bearing in mind that English versions of the Bible are themselves translations from ancient languages, I compare the passages in which the English Bible, and particularly the King James Version, uses the concepts of blackness and whiteness – passages already analysed in Chapter 3 – with the same passages in the Ewe Bible. Since these passages are not strictly translations of the English text, I refer to them as ‘renditions’ of that text, by which I mean translations of the same source. Do these latter passages replicate the categorical and symbolic uses of black and white found in the English Bible, introducing into Ewe society the same pattern of identifying some people as ‘black’ and of using ‘black’ for a set of negative attributes, thereby associating these people with these negative characteristics? Or have the translators taken steps to avoid this pattern? The chapter begins by discussing the symbolic use of ‘black’ and ‘white’ among Ewes in Ghana before considering Ewe renditions of the symbolic uses of ‘black’, ‘white’ and cognate terms, of their descriptive uses, and of ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Ethiopian’. It concludes with reflections on the role of translation in reproducing Christian colour convictions.
