The Woman Who Gave the World a Thousand Names for God
How a British linguist and a failed Nigerian coup changed everything about Bible translation.
In July of 2007, Bible translators from a dozen Nigerian languages came together in the rural town of Bayara, Nigeria, for a three-week workshop to begin translating the Gospel of Luke. They gathered in a steel-roofed school building with a number of outside consultants—some Nigerian, others American and British.
At the end of Friday, July 27, they had wrapped up their first week of work and made plans to unwind. Multilingual collaboration is taxing, and everyone was eager to eat dinner and watch a movie.
The translators gathered their papers, books, and laptops into bags and slung them over their shoulders. One of them grabbed a USB thumb drive attached to a lanyard, which they used to pass files back and forth and store backups of their work.
They walked half a kilometer through the warm evening air to a guest house where they were staying near the local hospital. The cooler rainy season had just begun, but this day had been neither cool nor rainy.
The group finished eating around 7:30, and Veronica Gambo, the wife of one of the translation consultants, made popcorn. She filled a bowl and was carrying it out to join the others in front of the television when men with automatic rifles burst through a door into the kitchen.
Gambo froze. A man put a gun barrel between her shoulder blades and marched her, still bearing the popcorn, into the living room.
“Get down!” Danjuma Gambo, Veronica’s husband, remembers the men yelling. They fired shots into the walls and ceiling. They forced everybody to the ground, including the translation project’s leader, a silver-haired British woman in her late 60s.
Andy Kellogg, an American working as a Bible translation consultant, was lying on the floor and wondering: …