Beijing Doctors＇ Gospel to the Children of the Plateau Who Are Suffering from Congenital Heart Diseases

Kunsang Yangzom burst into tears. If the Beijing medical team, aiming to complete a medical survey and treatment, did not drive 220-odd kilometers from Lhasa to Nakartse County in Lhoka Prefecture, the l 1-year-old little girl would never have known she had a congenital heart disease. If she had missed this opportunity to get treatment, in the coming some days her life would be at risk due to heart failure which might be caused by pulmonary hypertension and endocarditis.     

Cultural Innovation and Translation in the Eastern Cape: Jan Tzatzoe,Xhosa Intellectual and the Making of an African Gospel, 1817–1833

Abstract

This article describes the construction of a truly African Bible on the London Missionary Society's Eastern Cape Buffalo River mission station in the early years of the colonial encounter. Largely unacknowledged in the historical record, the isiXhosa translations were made in an intellectual partnership involving Jan Tzatzoe, a cultural and intellectual intermediary and innovator, and two European missionaries, John Brownlee and Friedrich Gottlob Kayser. A particular focus is Tzatzoe's breakthrough in moving the depiction of Jesus Christ towards Christ as Xhosa healer or ‘physician’. The article builds upon the renewed scholarly attention directed towards intermediaries by examining African involvement in the creation of crucial discourses and the conditions under which colonial texts were produced. It is suggested that Tzatzoe and other African linguistic intermediaries might be thought of as the vanguard of an African intellectual tradition born in the colonial encounter.