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Text 207

a political decision to eschew the white-dominated world of mission and
colonial state. In one case, Simon Kimbangu, who broke away from the
Baptists in the central Congo region, probably picked up some symbols from
the book, in all likelihood from illustrations. One of them shows Christian
emerging dripping from the Slough of Despond. In his hand is a Bible that
is dry. Kimbangu traditionalized this image of fetching a book from the next
world, a process that involved passing through a body of water. Kimbangu
“poached” from the text but disavowed the source (Hofmeyr 2004: 28–9).
In other cases, the text disappears not because of difference but because
of similarity. Here the story evaporates into African oral traditions that share
many similarities with Bunyan’s storytelling techniques that emerge from
a paraliterate world, Bunyan himself being a first-generation literate. Both
The Pilgrim’s Progress and African oral narrative traditions share folktale
motifs such as the use of dramatic dialogue, two characters to a scene,
proverbs, riddles, formulaic phrasings, and onomastic strategies. Particles of
Bunyan’s story could hence be elided into African literary traditions. In these
circumstances, texts disintegrate, not through political resistance but rather
under systems unaware of, or indifferent to, their supposedly “correct” and
“original” meaning (Hofmeyr 2004: 30).

Conclusion

We began by asking what a text is. We conclude with some speculation on
what a religious text might be. What confers spiritual power on texts? The
answers lie both outside and inside a text. Texts need to be institutionalized,
endlessly taught and interpreted within religious textual communities for
them to gain spiritual authority and canonicity. Such textual communities
provide forums of apprenticeship in which believers learn to allow themselves
to be addressed by the generic conventions of texts and to experience such
address as sacred.
Central to this process of address is the idea of circulation. One feature
of a religious text is that it comes from somewhere else. In part, religious
ritual that collapses time and space seeks to erase this distance so that most
believers never ponder in great detail as to whether or how religious texts
have been translated. Yet, as nineteenth-century Protestantism became
more globalized, this fact of circulation became increasingly important for
sustaining the idea of a transnational religious community. Readers then
had to undertake interpretive apprenticeships that involved reading for
circulation.
Further research in this area would be important and may reveal how such
apprenticeships played a role in sustaining a secular idea of transnational
circulation.