JAMES DEXTER TAYLOR

One of the earliest steps in the initiation of Mission work has always been the establishment of the primary school. The school has usually come into being before the church. It has been felt that little progress could be made in the instruction of the Africans in Christian truth until they were able to read, at least in their own language. More advanced schools have usually quickly followed, the Missions feeling that there would be little real advance in character building unless it were based on advancing intelligence. Strangely enough, while there has been a good deal of praiseworthy system and planning about the development of the institutions of education, there has been little of either about the production of the reading matter to supply the appetite for reading which the schools were trying so eagerly to stimulate. A good many reasons could be given for this fact. In the first place there was no written language ready to hand, but the missionaries had to reduce the language to writing, laboriously, bit by bit, while engaging in every form of pioneer labour, manual as well as intellectual. Then there was the central religious purpose of all their work, which made it inevitable that first attention in translation, after the Bible, should be given to hymn and service books and then to certain classics of religion, such as the Pilgrim's Progress , or to tracts. In some fields close contact with English speaking people and progress in the learning of English has made the preparation of any considerable literature in the vernacular seem of doubtful value. It is however a mistaken view that more than a very few of the vanguard of the educated Natives will take quickly to the reading of the treasures of English literature. The early missionaries began well with the translation of portions of the Scriptures. The rapidity with which even the entire Bible has appeared in the tongues of most of the tribes amongst whom Mission work has been established for a quarter of a century or more is worthy of the highest praise. But, beyond the translation of the Scriptures, the necessities of the situation rather than the possibilities seem to have been the guiding star of further literary production. Primary education demands primers, so they were produced in the form of ooklets or wall-charts. Sometimes there was an urge even for a second reader, but as soon as enough progress had been made to make possible the use of English school text-books recourse was had to these and vernacular development lagged. Ecclesiastical necessity gradually led to the production of hymn-books (in South Africa almost exclusively collections of translations of English hymns) and service books, manuals of order for Native ministers and catechisms for the instruction of beginners in Chistianity.

James Dexter Taylor “Vernacular Literature in South Africa ”, in Christianity and the Natives of South Africa , compiled and edited by James Dexter Taylor, Lovedale Press, 1928.