By Jack Popjes, Contributor
Jo-Ann Richards, a Jamaican ethnomusicologist and missionary to Burkina Faso
ARRIVING IN the Caribbean region in the fall of 2001 to reorganise the Wycliffe Caribbean home organisation, I had no idea what a surprise lay in store for me in Jamaica.
I had been helping local committees to mobilise churches in several other countries, wanting to guide young people into serving God in Africa or Asia in some aspect of the Bible translation task. I was thinking of linguists, anthropologists, literacy teachers, or even administrators and accountants.
Instead, in Jamaica, the first person to tell me she wanted to go with Wycliffe to Africa turned out to be a musician, Jo-Ann Richards.
Jo-Ann, 38, has excelled as a pianist having in 1997 earned an Advanced Certificate from the Royal Schools of Music. She has been a music teacher at the Immaculate Prep School and choirmaster at her alma mater, the Jamaica Theological Seminary, where she was graduated in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theology with a minor in Guidance. She was one of the singers that was part of the now defunct gospel band, Living Stones. And up till the time she left Jamaica she sang with Khords - which has as a mainstay of its repertoire - sacred arias and contemporary gospel songs.
Jo-Ann was not content just to be an accomplished musical artiste - she told me she wanted to help native peoples in Burkina Faso use their own musical styles to praise God and spread the Gospel. She wanted to serve as an ethno-musicologist! I had just completed six years as executive director for Wycliffe Canada, an organisation with 450 members working around the world, and not one of them was an ethno-musicologist. What a thrill to now have one as a member of the fledgling Wycliffe Caribbean organisation. Worldwide there are probably several thousand doctors who can do heart transplants, there are 1,500 experienced Bible translators, but ethno-musicologists are very rare indeed. I personally know only four, and Jamaican Jo-Ann Richards is one of them. It was a joy to guide her into membership with Wycliffe, and then into an ethno-musicology study programme. I spoke at her commissioning service and my eyes filled with tears as she sang praise to God and testified of God's leading her to Wycliffe and Burkina-Faso a nation with a population of 12.2 million covering 274,200 sq. km in Western Africa.
Her home church, First Missionary Church, East Street, Kingston, and close friends shared her vision and sent her out, well prayed for, and with full financial support for all her travel, her studies, and her living expenses. She did well in her ethno-musicology studies in the United States and soon was on her way to Switzerland to learn some French, the national language of Burkina Faso in West Africa.
She arrived in Burkina Faso last December and her real test began. Was this city bred girl going to make it out in the bush? How would she cope living in places with no electricity, no phone, no water taps, and no sewer system? What about diseases like malaria, hepatitis, and meningitis? I have vivid memories of my wife, our three small children, and me, dealing with these in our two decades in Brazil where we helped in the translation of the Bible to the Canela people - one of the indigenous ethnic groups there.
Wycliffe Bible Translators is named after John Wycliffe who in 1380 was the first person to translate the Bible into English. Ninety-five per cent of the world now have access to the Christian Scriptures in whole or in substantial parts. That leaves five per cent or 300 million people who do not have a verse in their own tongue. There are 70 language groups in Burkina Faso 47 of which have the Bible (in whole or in substantial parts) translated into their own indigenous tongue.
I was impressed with the great variety of people and language groups she worked with. I stumbled over all sorts of unpronounceable people and place names like Byali, Mbelime, Samogohiri, and Ouagadougou.
Jo-Ann had told me before she left that she had a special interest in a people group called the Senoufo. They are well known for being strong adherents of their traditional animistic religion (animists are worshippers of spirits). They practice highly effective sorcery through the power of their fetishes.
Missionaries had been working in a certain Senoufo village for some time. After a time away, they returned to the village to find a disturbed village chief. He complained that he was being attacked by demons. They were hitting him and throwing filth at him, as well as into the family cooking pot.
The missionaries then asked him: "In your culture, is it right for anyone to hit an old man?" Naturally, he replied that it was not right. It was a disgrace.
Then they asked him, "Is it right for anyone to throw filth at someone else, especially an old man?" Again, the reply was that this was disgraceful. "So why do you continue to serve gods that treat you in this disgraceful manner," the missionaries then asked. That question set the chief to thinking seriously about turning to Jesus Christ to be delivered from these attacks. A local pastor led the chief and his whole household to turn to the Lord. The chief and his family lived with this pastor for a few weeks until the demons finally gave up and left him.
But the story doesn't end there. A few weeks later Jo-Ann met a pastor she knew who had been working with the Senoufo people. When she asked about how things were going in that people group, he excitedly told her about what God was doing in that people group and invited her to come and see for herself. A few weeks later Jo-Ann travelled nearly five hours by bus to the area and stayed with the pastor. As they travelled throughout the region, they stopped at the home of the pastor who had provided refuge for the chief and his family. The pastor was not home, and his wife told them that people from that Senoufo village had come to ask for help because now the demons had returned and were throwing not filth but fire! At that Jo-Ann's pastor friend began to laugh saying, "God is now getting the demons to help us in evangelism. The more they harass the people, the more they will be turning to Christ for deliverance! God's plans cannot be thwarted."
It is in this context that Jo-Ann works as an ethno-musicologist in training. With her mentor, she travels about running week-long workshops to compose native music with lyrics in newly translated Scripture. In one workshop, the language of instruction was French, one sentence at a time, which was then translated into four native languages, all at once! It reminds one of the tower of Babel story.
In another workshop, they focused on making sure the words to the songs were biblical and had sufficient depth of meaning. Musicians and composers from every denomination worshipped and worked together to record 48 hymns, enough for three one-hour cassettes, all in native music, and in their own heart (indigenous) language.
An ethno-musicologist needs to be prepared to do Bible teaching too. Take, for instance, in one workshop where the story of Job was the subject of the song. Most African songs are based on a "call and response" construction where the most important theme is taken as the refrain that is then constantly repeated. In this workshop, instead of choosing as a refrain Job's response to his sufferings, "Even if God kills me, I will still trust Him," the group chose the advice of Job's wife, "Curse God and die!" Whoa! Wait a minute! Let's open our Bibles . . .
The connection of ethno-musicology with linguistics, literacy, cultural anthropology, and Bible translation is obvious. They are all scientific tools in the hands of God to bring the Good News into languages and cultures that do not know about the love of God yet. Preaching in French, no matter how impassioned, touches neither the minds nor the hearts of those who understand only their own indigenous language. Neither does music from a western culture, played on western instruments touch the hearts of those whose own musical instruments are balaphons, or violins with a single string of horsehair.
Strenuous though it is, Jo-Ann enjoys her ministry, but as she looks back on this past year of study, travel, more study, more travel, and finally service in Burkina-Faso, she does confess to having experienced times of extreme loneliness, depression, even serious doubting and questioning. Right from the beginning her laptop computer gave her a lot of trouble. Since it contained all her "tools of her trade", as well as being her e-mail 'lifeline' back to her church this was an enormous frustration. She eventually had to replace it. Travel in the bush is not just a matter of banging and bouncing over rutted roads. Imagine a small pickup truck, load it with a motorcycle, numerous bags, and cases, and 13 people, inside, outside, on the roof, hanging on the back, and you are one of them. It's enough to give anyone culture shock.
Yet these things fade into nothing when, after completing a workshop, she hears reports of whole congregations singing new songs and lifting their worship to a new level. As she wrote in one letter, "Each group returned to their village singing the newly composed hymns. They sang them in churches on the very next Sunday! The elders of the village, especially, were excited to hear new songs written in their own traditional styles that touched their hearts. That's what it's all about: heart language, heart music, heart worship!"
Jo-Ann will be in Jamaica May 23-24, en route to further ethno-musicology studies in Minnesota. Thereafter she is scheduled to return to spend her vacation in the country during the period August 2-September 14. She may be reached at jo-ann_richards@sil.org.
Jack Popjes, is executive director of Wycliffe Caribbean. He may be reached at jack.popjes@wycliffe.org.
