Oromo St. Mark (Lovedale 1893)

(?) The Gospel According to St. Mark. Lovedale (South Africa): Mission Press, 1893.

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(1) Notes on the publication

Darlow & Moule, Catalogue, # 4117, reads:

“About 1890 the Lovedale Missionary Institution in South Africa made an attempt to supply with Scriptures a company of 42 Galla boys and 22 girls who had been rescued from Arab slave-dhows in the Red Sea, and taken to Lovedale [in South Africa] for their education. The edition from St. Matthew’s Gospel in Ittu [transl. by Haylu] was found on trial to be unsuitable, and very few of these Galla pupils could read the Ethiopic character of Krapf’s version. Hence some of the lads while in the Institution transliterated portions of Krapf’s N.T. into roman type; and an edition of St. Mark’s Gospel thus prepared was printed at the Lovedale mission-press in 1893.”

  • Coldham, Bibliography, # 764, repeats (with minor changes) the notes on the Roman script Gospel according to St. Mark printed in Lovedale in 1893.

In 1961, the Mission Council of the Church of Scotland in South Africa decided to transfer books and other media that were previously in the strongroom of the Lovedale Mission Press in Alice (Eastern Cape Province) to the Cory Library at Rhodes University (Republic of South Africa). However, the Gospel in question is not mentioned in the List of Accessions no. 15. It also appears to be absent at the University of Cape Town Libraries and the Bible Society Library at the University of Cambridge.

(2) Notes on Contributors

Message by Dr Sandra Rowoldt Shell to the webmaster
on 9 May 2024:

If the Lovedale missionaries involved a few of the Oromo children they would have asked for Liban Bultum‘s assistance. He emerged as a leader amongst them and was later involved in the production the Galla-English/English-Galla Dictionary compiled by the Rev E. C. Foot originally published in Cambridge in 1913.

(3) Cross-reference

Oromo Youths at Lovedale


Further reading

Foot, Edwin C, ed. Galla-English, English-Galla Dictionary. Collected and compiled by E. C. Foot with the aid and approval of his Majesty’s Foreign Office. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1913. [Republ. Farnborough: Gregg Press, 1968.]

Shell, Sandra Rowoldt. Children of Hope: The Odyssey of the Oromo Slaves from Ethiopia to South Africa. Athens: OH: Ohio Univ. Press, 2018. [See index, s.v. Liban Bultum; Google Books]