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Consuming a Colonial Cultural Bomb

Translating Badimo Into 'Demons' in the Setswana Bible (Matthew 8.28-34; 15.22; 10.8)

Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Botswana, P/Bag 0022, Gaborone, Botswana

This paper investigates how native languages were used by colonizers to subordi nate the colonized. The paper uses an example from the Setswana language of Botswana to investigate the colonial translations of the Bible and compilation of the first dictionaries and to show how they were informed by their time. It focuses on the translation of Badimo (Ancestral Spirits) and other related words to show how the Setswana language was employed for imperial ends in colonial times. The paper also examines how the subsequent versions of the Setswana Bible and dictionaries reflect the growing spirit of decolonization as colonized subjects became involved in writing their own languages. Given that colonial translations remained in circulation beyond the period of colonization, this paper also documents how native readers developed strategies of resistance by reading the Bible as a divining text to get in touch with Badimo, thereby subverting the colonial translations that equated the latter with evil powers.

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