Description

A catechism (from Ancient Greek: κατηχέω, ‘to teach orally’) is a summary of Christian doctrine used in teaching coverts, both adult and juvenile. Beginning in the mid-19th century, missionaries in Africa published catechisms in native languages (often mixed with European languages) to indoctrinate local people in the faith.

The present work is a seemingly unrecorded catechism in both the Ronga language, the tongue of the indigenous people of far southern Mozambique, and Portuguese, published by the prominent missionary António Lourenço Farinha. Forging cultural and religious ties with the Ronga people was especially important for the Portuguese, as form 1898, Lourenço Marques (today Maputo) was the capital of Portuguese Mozambique.

The work features many sections in Ronga, and other others in Ronga-Portuguese parallel text, as well as some Latin passages.

The present example of the work bears the ex-libris of Fernando de Mello Mendes (1925 – 2019), a respected Portuguese civil engineer, who worked for some years in Africa. He was also a noted art collector and bibliophile.

Ronga (sometimes ShiRonga, GiRonga, or XiRonga) is a Bantu language of the Twsa-Ronga branch spoken by the Ronga people of the Delgoa Bay (Maputo) region of far southern Mozambique and some adjacent parts of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The Ronga today number almost a million people, of which around 650,000 in Mozambique speak Ronga as their mother tongue, while there are about 90,000 speakers in South Africa. The Ronga language is like, and intelligible with, Tsonga and Tswa. Ronga is sometimes referred to in old works as ‘Landim’, an archaic Portuguese term.

Like many Sub-Saharan African languages, Ronga was traditionally exclusively oral in nature. While the Ronga were the people with the longest and most intense contact with Europeans of all the indigenous nations of the east coast of Africa, it was only in the 1890s that the first serious academic efforts were made to study their language.

The pioneer of formal Ronga studies was the Swiss missionary and philologist Henri-Alexandre Junod (1863 – 1934), who arrived in the Lourenço Marques area in 1889. He was instrumental in seeing Ronga adapted to writing, following the same modified Latin alphabet developed by Methodist missionaries for Tsonga (this alphabet would be altered slightly in 1989).

Missionaries were responsible for the first books regarding, and written in, Ronga, with important early titles including Junod’s Grammaire Ronga (Lausanne, 1896) and Chants et les contes des ba ronga (Lausanne, 1897) and Henri Berthoud’s Evangeli ya Yohan ni Papela ḍa ku sungula ḍa Muapostola Paulus ku ba-Korinthe hi Šiṛong… (London, 1896), a translation of the Gospel of John, which was the first proper book entirely in Ronga.

António Lourenço Farinha (1883 – 1885) was an important Roman Catholic missionary, a senior Portuguese government administrator and prolific author. Educated at the Real Colégio das Missões Ultramarinas in Cernache do Bonjardim, he served in Mozambique from 1907 to 1918, whereupon he went to great efforts to perfectly master the Ronga language. This resulted in the present unrecorded work, and the subsequent Pequeno Catecismo de Doutrina Cristã (1921), likewise in Portuguese and Ronga. Upon his return to Portugal, he served as senior official in the Colonial Ministry, responsible for regulating Christian missions. He published many other works, including Notícia Histórica do Bairro das Olarias (1932); D. Afonso I, Rei do Congo (1941); A Expansão da Fé no Extremo Oriente (1946); Trinta e Sete Anos nas Missões da China (Vida do Padre Gabriel de Magalhães) (1946); S. Francisco Xavier (1950); and Vultos Missionários da Índia Quinhentista (1955). Padre Farinha passed away in Lisbon on his 102nd birthday.

References: N/A – work seemingly unrecorded.