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The Pilgrim’s Progress

The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in two parts in 1678 and 1684 in the
wake of the English revolution. The first part of the book tells the story of
the hero Christian making his way from earth to heaven. The second tells
of his wife Christiana and family who follow in his footsteps to join him in
heaven.
The book very rapidly became an evangelical classic and traveled beyond
England, making its way to Protestant Europe and the New World. Its next
major migration came courtesy of the nineteenth-century Protestant mission
movement. Drawn largely from Low Church evangelicals to whom The
Pilgrim’s Progress was a most beloved book, the movement propagated the
text in most parts of the globe, resulting in some 200 versions worldwide.
To understand what fuelled this translation activity, we need to grasp
the seminal role of Bunyan’s book in the lives of Protestant evangelicals,
most of whom grew up with the book, hearing it in Sabbath day readings,
poring over the illustrations, and acting out scenes to entertain themselves.
As adults, they read Bunyan on a daily basis, and encountered the story in
choir services, pageants, dramas, tableaux, magic lantern slides, postcards,
and posters. One fan even landscaped his garden as a Pilgrim’s Progress theme
park. As a book that was woven into the emotional fabric of everyday life
and was featured in conversion narratives, The Pilgrim’s Progress was seen
as a user-friendly Bible that summarized the core verities of the Protestant
message.
Once these evangelicals became missionaries, they hastened to translate the
text. Back home, Nonconformist mission supporters assiduously publicized
these translations not only as a way of raising the profile of overseas mission,
but to add value to their most beloved writer, who was still regarded as vulgar
and theologically suspect by the Anglican establishment. At fundraising
meetings, magic lantern slides showed illustrations from foreign editions.
Mission periodicals reported on translations and how they were received.
In one instance, a mission exhibition showed a live tableau of a missionary
translating The Pilgrim’s Progress. Cumulatively, these reports created the
idea that the text had miraculous powers of circulation and acted like a mini-
Bible in converting those it encountered (Hofmeyr 2004: 56–75).

The Pilgrim’s Progress in Africa

Africa was host to eighty translations of Bunyan’s book and so provides a
useful site to examine how the book was changed as it traveled into new
spiritual communities.