Ni Kinidi/Making Book: Textual Mobility in 1830s Cape Palmas, West Africa

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• Ni Kinidi/Making Book:Textual Mobility in 1830s Cape Palmas, West Africa
• Marie Stango (bio)

In December 1835, John Leighton Wilson carried a stack of writing paper some 800 kilometers up the coast of West Africa, from his Cape Palmas mission station called "Fair Hope" to Cape Mesurado, where the largest settlement in Liberia, called Monrovia, was located. Wilson, a white missionary from South Carolina sent to West Africa on behalf of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), arrived at the Monrovia offices of the Liberia Herald, the first newspaper established in the American settlements comprised of freeborn and formerly enslaved Black Americans that came to be known as "Liberia." There, Wilson commissioned the Herald's printer, James C. Minor, to produce a primer in the Grebo language, a West African language spoken in the vicinity of Cape Palmas. Encouraged by news that a few Black American children in Liberia had been able to learn multiple West African languages, Wilson had been at work creating a written form of Grebo, using Roman letters, since his early days in Cape Palmas.¹ Wilson, like many Anglo-American Protestant missionaries of his generation, was intrigued by the languages spoken by the individuals around him. After initially hoping to teach Grebo-speakers English, Wilson eventually concluded that it would work better to teach his pupils to read religious texts in their own language—a language Wilson had to codify first.²

Like many Protestant missionaries of the early nineteenth century, the ABCFM missionaries in Cape Palmas hoped to offer the Word to would-be converts in the vernacular.³ Embedded in the ABCFM's mission was the fervent wish that their work could bring the trappings of Western-style civilization—including education, literacy, and printed texts—to peoples they viewed as less civilized. Both the Fair Hope missionaries and the Black American settlers in Cape Palmas viewed the Grebos as unsophisticated and illiterate people. In his attempts to create a written Grebo language and [End Page 51] print books in it, Wilson assumed that they had no knowledge of written languages nor of print. While indeed the ABCFM did eventually finance the transportation of the first printing press to Cape Palmas, the Grebos that Wilson met in Cape Palmas were not newcomers to the concepts of written texts.

This article explores how the meanings of print were complicated in Cape Palmas. While Wilson and the Fair Hope missionaries believed that they were bringing a new technology to the Grebo, Wilson's own observations reveal a more tangled story. As coastal people with centuries of trading relations with Europeans before the arrival of the Americans in Cape Palmas, Grebos brought prior understandings of both manuscript and print writing to bear on their interactions with the missionaries. Wilson disparagingly observed that Grebos only had one word to describe both manuscript and print: ni kinidi. He determined that the term meant "to make a book."⁴ What Wilson missed, or refused to see, was that the Grebos he spoke with understood "books" in two ways. While "book" was used to refer to the physical object of the printed text, "book" also referred to a written agreement signed between Grebos and Europeans or Americans. As Meredith McGill has explained, attention to format might help us understand the "signifying capacities of different aspects of books."⁵ Similarly, in her work on the mobility of Paul Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Isabel Hofmeyr explains that examining the book "as a material object" offers one way to examine mission-produced translations.⁶ In a complex society such as the one that emerged in Cape Palmas in the 1830s, format took on expansive meanings for the audience envisioned in the production of the Grebo texts. I maintain that the second Grebo definition of "book"—as a written agreement—also inflected the printed matter that came off the Fair Hope press. In this sense, the book-as-object, regardless of actual content, stood in for a tacit understanding that, by giving someone a book, the missionaries were establishing a relationship with the recipient. Instead of revealing unfamiliarity with printing, as Wilson argued, the dual meaning of ni kinidi...