Multilingual Complexities in the Origins and Development of the Harrist Movement and Its Worship Patterns in Ivory Coast

Abstract

The Harrist Church in Ivory Coast, West Africa, emerged from the ministry of Liberian William Wadé Harris who baptized between 10,000 and 200,000 people during his eighteen-month evangelistic tour, 1913–1915. This story is full of linguistic complexities and anomalies. Harris himself spoke only English and his own local Liberian Glebo language. He was therefore compelled to work through expatriate English-speaking merchants, knowledgeable of and conversant in local languages, as interpreters and translators in addressing the twelve ethnic groups who heard and accepted his message. Harris encouraged new converts to compose hymns in their own indigenous languages by transforming musical genres embedded in their local musical traditions. Additionally fascinating is that during this early colonial period, the twelve ethnic groups impacted by Harris’s ministry lived in almost total isolation from each other and developed their own hymn traditions for thirty-five years (1914–1949), unaware of the existence of churches and worship patterns in neighboring ethnic districts. Only in 1949 did they suddenly become acquainted with the broader, multi-musical, multilingual reality of the Harrist movement. Since then, individual musicians and choirs from local congregations have gradually begun to sing a few of each other’s songs, though the challenge of becoming a truly multicultural, multiethnic church remains a work in progress. Documentation of these developments include written colonial and early Protestant and Catholic missionary sources and a large number of eye-witness interviews. Primary research methods employed here come from four intersecting disciplines and theoretical frameworks: orality studies, with particular focus on oral sources in constructing historical narrative; religious phenomenology; mission history; and ethnodoxological research.

1. Introduction

In the fall of 2010, the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization was held in Cape Town, South Africa. The gathering brought together over 4000 evangelical leaders, thinkers, and practitioners from 198 countries for the purpose of “strengthening the church for world evangelization”.1 The African context for the assembly prompted organizers to include a remarkable dramatic performance in one of the plenary sessions. The presentation featured four representative figures from Africa’s past who had contributed significantly to the growth of the church on the continent: Kwame Bediako (1945–2008), Ghanaian theologian and church historian; Tokunboh Adeyemo (1944–2010), Nigerian scholar and longtime general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals in Africa; Simon Kimbangu (1887–1951), Congolese healer and preacher, imprisoned for thirty years by the Belgians as a security threat and for disturbing the peace; and William Wadé Harris (1860–1929), Liberian prophet-evangelist who, in the view of African church historian, Adrian Hastings, conducted “the most extraordinarily successful one man evangelical crusade that Africa has ever known” (Hastings 1976, p. 10).

With a similar laudatory tone, Nigerian scholar Ogbu Uke Kalu’s (1980) edited work on the history of Christianity in West Africa included a chapter by G. O. M. Tasie highlighting the “significance of native agency” in the mission efforts of the church (Tasie 1980). In it, the author explored early 20th century regional church developments as local men and women of faith took over from Western mission agencies the responsibility of “evangelizing the peoples of their own ethnic groups”. This period of transition, according to Tasie, was first generated by the charismatic personality of William Wadé Harris (Tasie 1980, pp. 296–99). It is Harris’ photo, it should additionally be noted, that was ultimately selected to grace the front cover of Kalu’s aforementioned 1980 edited volume as “the face” of Christianity in West Africa.

The lightning speed and ultimate effectiveness of Harris’ eighteen-month ministry (1913–1915) is one full of linguistic complexities and anomalies. How, speaking only English and his own local Liberian Glebo language, did he manage to travel the West African coastline and forever alter the religious beliefs and practices of diverse populations he encountered along the way? How, in addition, did he launch a creative music explosion among the twelve ethnic groups he met—groups living in relative isolation from each other at the time and speaking languages unknown and largely unintelligible across ethnolinguistic lines?

Exploring these questions is the primary focus of the present three-part study, beginning with an overview of what is known by scholars and eye witnesses of the life and formative influences of the evangelist, followed by an examination of the methods of communication he employed and the music counsel he offered in the course of his ministry, and concluding with a look at the subsequent challenge the Harrist movement has faced in attempting to create a cohesive, national worshipping community while supporting and promoting local indigenous musical expressions as recommended by their spiritual founder William Wadé Harris.

Documentation of these developments include written colonial and early Protestant and Catholic missionary sources and a large number of eye-witness interviews undertaken and published in Bureau (1971), Haliburton (1971), and Krabill (1995). Primary research methods employed here come from four intersecting disciplines and theoretical frameworks: orality studies, with particular focus on oral sources in constructing historical narrative (Ki-Zerbo 1972, pp. 9–37; Krabill 1979, 2014; Vansina 1961; 1980, pp. 166–90; 1985); religious phenomenology (Moreau 2018; Smart 1996; Turner 1979); mission history (Anderson et al. 1994; Shenk 2002; Skreslet 2012, 2023) and ethnodoxological research (Krabill 2013; Schrag 2013).

2. Who Was William Wadé Harris?

Charles Pelham Groves’ monumental study, The Planting of Christianity in Africa, identified “three notable missionary figures” in French colonial territories during the First World War: Albert Schweitzer in Gabon’s tropical rain forests, Charles de Foucauld in Algeria’s Sahara region, and William Wadé Harris encountering littoral peoples in West Africa’s Ivory Coast (Groves 1958, vol. 4, 4). The lives and ministries of Schweitzer and Foucauld are well documented, but Harris’ story has had fewer sources to rely on and was consequently for many years far less known.

Most Roman Catholic priests of the period simply wrote Harris off as a Protestant-inspired imposter attempting to undermine their mission efforts. Disdain and suspicion of him were so deep among the clergy that even referencing his name in reports to superiors was routinely avoided. In one remarkable communication by Monsignor Jules Moury, Ivory Coast’s vicar apostolic at the peak of Harris’ ministry in 1914, Moury simply exclaimed:

Space is lacking here for exposing the external means which Divine Providence has used for the accomplishment of His merciful designs. I must thus limit myself to exposing the effects. These effects—it’s a whole people who, having destroyed its fetishes, invades our churches en masse, requesting Holy Baptism.2

Among expatriate Methodist mission workers and their African colleagues in neighboring Gold Coast, little was known of Harris, though admiration and approval of him grew as it was learned that he had connections early in life to the Methodist church in his home country of Liberia. The later arrival a decade after Harris’ departure from Ivory Coast of mission personnel from the English Wesleyan Methodist Church and their subsequent claim to be the legitimate heirs to Harris’ legacy set them up as the primary researchers and reporters to the outside world of what became known of the evangelist (see de Billy 1931; Platt 1934; Shank 1979).

Other streams of inquiry in the latter decades of the 20th century also threw light on both the content and context of Harris’s ministry.3 Historians interviewed hundreds of first-generation eye witnesses to Harris’s evangelistic work and labored to reconstruct the unfolding story of his impact on Ivorian coastal societies (Amos-Djoro 1956; Haliburton 1971; Holas 1965; Yando 1970; S. Walker 1983). Anthropologists examined traditional religious cosmologies and placed these alongside the message that Harris articulated and embodied (Augé 1975; Bee 1970; Bureau 1971, 1996; Dozon 1995; Piault 1975).4

Initiatives were undertaken to collect and examine the liturgical texts of the Harrist Church—the sermons, confessions of faith, hymns, and prayers—to explore what impressions could be gleaned about Harris from the oral memory of the faith community resulting from his ministry.5 Members of the Harrist community itself produced a number of important manuscripts and several published volumes during this period (Ahui 1988; Aké 1980; Kouassi 1985). But it was primarily the seminal research conducted by David A. Shank into the early years and pre-ministry influences of Harris’s life in Liberia that has most deepened our understanding of the prophetic thought patterns and practices for which the self-proclaimed “Black Elijah” of West Africa is best known.6

3. A Master Communicator Facing Overwhelming Obstacles

Despite the multiple, diverse, and sometimes contradictory narratives regarding Harris’s ministry, there is one thing upon which virtually everyone agreed: The 53-year-old Liberian prophet–evangelist created an immediate sensation when he arrived in Ivory Coast in July 1913 from his native Liberia and walked along the coast from village to village, preaching a fiery message and engaging in power encounters with prophesies and miracles. “He appeared to the inhabitants to be a spirit, he was so unlike any humans they knew”, reported Jacques Boga Sako, an eye witness to Harris’s ministry. “His white gown and turban, his black sashes, his white beard and flashing eyes, filled all who saw him with awe, and it could be believed that a new god had arrived, more powerful than any preceding ones” (Haliburton 1971, p. 50). Calling local populations to offer up their objects of worship, Harris proceeded to burn the objects—referred to by Harris himself as “fetishes”—and then baptized the villagers who heeded his call. It is estimated that the prophet–evangelist baptized between 100,000 and 200,000 villagers from among twelve different ethnic groups that he encountered during his 18-month ministry from July 1913 to January 1915.

Donald K. Smith, in his book, Creating Understanding, has identified twelve “signal systems” through which human communication occurs (Smith 2021, pp. 294–312). These include: verbal (speech); written (symbols representing speech); numeric (numbers and number systems); pictorial (two-dimensional representations); artifactual (three-dimensional representations and objects, the “things” used in living); audio (use of nonverbal sounds, and silence); kinesic (body motions, facial expressions, posture); optical (light and color); tactile (touch, the sense of “feel”); spatial (utilization of space); temporal (utilization of time); and olfactory (taste and smell).

William Wadé Harris made use of virtually every one of these communication modalities in delivering his message. He was not ignorant of the fact that for pre-literate audiences, nonverbal gestures, signs, and symbols were of utmost importance. David Shank devotes two entire chapters to Harris’s effective use of “‘spiritual’ phenomena”—prescience, spiritual leading, exorcism, healing, speaking in tongues, signs, miracles (Shank 1994, pp. 174–88), and “symbolic patterns”—clothing, a staff-cross, baptism, fire, the Bible, a sheepskin, and calabash rattles (ibid., pp. 189–223). Historian Sheila S. Walker has even claimed that “it appears that people were impressed less by Harris’ words […] than by the concrete demonstration of his power, which gave meaning to his message” (S. Walker 1983, p. 116).

This is not entirely true, however. For Harris did make prolific use of verbal communication through hundreds of discourses and sermons to diverse audiences in a wide variety of circumstances. Shank calls these utterances by Harris “the prophetic word”, coming frequently as a proclaimed message, and elsewhere in the forms of blessing and cursing, prayer and song, and teaching (Shank 1994, pp. 224–42).

4. Pre-Prophetic Language Training as a Church Worker and Seafaring Laborer

The William Wadé Harris who crossed the Cavally River from Liberia into Ivory Coast in 1913 was a well-seasoned, fifty-three-year-old man with a curriculum vitae of which relatively few men in his day could ever hope to boast: student, traveler, seaman, mason, husband (25 years), father (six times), grandfather (four), preacher, government-paid interpreter, and employee of a prestigious church-mission society as assistant schoolteacher, catechist lay reader, and boarding school director. These are the diverse elements that contributed to the making of the man-become-prophet (Shank 1994), preparing him for the second chapter of his life so different from the first.

These achievements, impressive as they are, in no way explain, however, why coastal villagers by the thousands were willing to leave the safe confines of their secluded encampments, abandoning fish traps and field work, to walk for days through dense forests and along scorching sandy shorelines to receive whatever blessing this man had in store for them.

The excitement that Harris seems to have generated was related not to a long list of past credentials, but to his own dynamic personality, to his mighty words and many acts of electrifying power. Yet Harris did face a serious problem: How was he to communicate through teaching and preaching with audiences speaking languages he had never before encountered?

At the age of thirteen, Harris was taken a hundred miles west from his home village of Glogbale among the Glebo people in the easternmost region of Liberia to live with his uncle, Rev. John C. Lowrie, a Glebo Methodist preacher–minister and erstwhile teacher. Under his uncle’s tutelage, Harris studied the Bible and learned to read and write in both Glebo and English languages. Many years later, Irish Catholic missionary–priest, Father Harrington, was amazed at Harris’s spoken English, writing, “he spoke in perfect English, a very remarkable acquisition for a [seafaring] Kruman” (Harrington 1917, p. 13). In the Lowrie household and at school, there were morning and evening prayers, grace at meals, weekday school lessons, and on Sunday, the Sunday school, morning and evening worship, and a mid-week prayer meeting (Shank 1994, p. 49).

When his uncle Lowrie was transferred back to his Glebo home region of Cape Palmas, Harris took a year to work as a “kruboy”—a seafaring laborer transporting goods between ships and ports up and down the coast from Liberia to Gabon with stops in Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, Dahomey, Nigeria, Cameroon, and various islands in between (Gunn 2021). Harris made four such trips in that year, expanding his horizons of the broader world and learning some of the key people, trades and languages on the West African coast. In 1880, Harris returned to his home village as William Wadé Harris—a literate, baptized Methodist, sophisticated and “civilized” according to the local standards set by Americo-Liberian settlers, and increasingly aware of national and regional politicoreligious dynamics beyond Liberia.

Though baptized as a Methodist before his seafaring adventures, it was upon his return to his home region that, according to his own testimony, “the Holy Ghost come on me” under the summons of a certain Rev. Thompson and “the very year of my conversion I started preaching” (Shank 1994, pp. 57, 61). For the next thirty years, Harris served local Methodist and Episcopal churches in a variety of ways, as a mission employee, a day-school teacher, a headmaster of the boarding school, and as a liturgical lay reader in Glebo and English languages following the “Table of Readings” in the Book of Common Prayer in both Old and New Testaments (Shank 1994, p. 76).

Because of his remarkable language proficiency, Harris was also recruited as a government interpreter for the national administration in Monrovia on behalf of his own Glebo people, thus thrusting him into the mainstream of Liberian politics at a local level. This role eventually put him at serious odds with the Americo-Liberian government, but served the function nonetheless of preparing him for his work in Ivory Coast where he would need to depend on translators and interpreters for his preaching and teaching ministries there.

5. Making Use of Local Language Resources for Preaching and Teaching in Ivory Coast

Ultimately, Harris’s growing discontent with the Americo-Liberian government in Monrovia landed him in trouble. Relationships between local Glebo and Liberian authorities were deteriorating rapidly and finally came to a crisis in 1907–1908. Harris, caught between his Glebo roots and his “civilized/Christian” training, was torn in both directions. In 1909, he was arrested, imprisoned, then tried and found guilty of treason for having participated in an unsuccessful coup d’état designed to overthrow the Liberian authority and replace it with some form of British protectorate. Harris was fined, sentenced, imprisoned, then finally released, only to be placed back in prison until the uprising was over in 1910 and the Glebo people had been crushed with harsh conditions laid upon them. Harris, now a 50-year-old man and experiencing the most discouraging moment of his life, was—according to his own testimony—awakened one night from his prison bed and called by God via the Archangel Gabriel to “exchange his Western-style clothing for a white toga-like robe” and begin preaching “the destruction of fetishes and the reign of Jesus Christ”. Later that year, Harris was seen out on the streets again, this time preaching, “Repent! from all your sins, or … [hell] fire!” (Krabill 1995, p. 172; Shank 1994, pp. 105–30; S. Walker 1983, pp. 14–15).

In July 1913, Harris carried his message out of Liberia, across the Cavally River, and into the newly established French colony of Ivory Coast where he would confront a complex maze of linguistic challenges. There were at that time and still are today at least sixty “indigenous” languages spoken in Ivory Coast (Loucou 1984, pp. 180–84),7 regrouped in the southern coastal region into two large linguistic families of Kru-related speakers (in the southwest, spilling over into Liberia) and Akan (in the southeast, shared with Akan-speaking groups in Gold Coast, today’s Ghana). The Bandama River, running north to south, divides Ivory Coast down the middle and separates the two regional linguistic family groupings from each other.

As Harris progressed eastward along the coast from Liberia and into Ivory Coast, he encountered Kru populations in villages and port towns such as Tabou, San Pedro, Sassandra, Drewin, Kadropka, Fresco, and the Dida village of Lauzoua, until he reached the Bandama River. Just to be clear, of the twenty-some languages spoken within the larger Kru family, few are fully inter-intelligible, though speakers seem to recognize the existence of certain connections and inter-relationships (Krabill 1995, p. 11; Tonkin 1985, p. 30). This explains why some of the early teaching Harris attempted to carry out in his native Kru-family Glebo language and a few of the Glebo song texts he sang for Kru-speaking Dida-language baptismal candidates were vaguely recognizable, yet far from sufficient for exhorting the growing crowds through teaching and preaching. Once Harris crossed the Bandama River, however, and into the Akan family of languages, his Kru-related Glebo language was of no use to him whatsoever.

So, what was Harris to do? There is no record of Harris understanding or speaking the French language—though at this early phase of France’s linguistic imprint on their new colony, with no organized colonial educational system, no body of instructional literature, or other means for teaching the French language to the local population, an understanding of French would not have resolved his communication challenge. Harris did, of course, speak English and, as it turns out, “pidgin English”—emanating from the long-established British ports and colonies in Nigeria, Gold Coast, Gambia, and Sierra Leone—had for decades been the common trade language in use all along the West African coast, including in emerging French colonial territories.

Enterprising, semi-skilled, and educated English-speaking merchants—often referred to as “clarks”, i.e., clerks—from British commercial firms and centers circulated up and down the coast, buying and selling products, acquainting themselves with local languages and cultures, occasionally marrying local women, and in some instances, gathering for worship among themselves as West African expatriates (see clerk photos in Krabill 1995, p. 211; Morris 1982). There is evidence of at least one such English-speaking Methodist congregation in Ivory Coast at this time, established not as a mission outpost for reaching the local population, but to accommodate anglophone Protestant merchants from neighboring colonies.

Several of these English-speaking merchants became aware of and excited about Harris’s preaching ministry. Many of them, like A.E.M. Brown and “Papa Penny”, were Methodist Protestants from the Fanti ethnic group in the Gold Coast, or in the cases of J.W. Samuel Reffel and a man named Goodman, both Methodists, from Sierra Leone (Krabill 1995, p. 176; F. D. Walker 1926, opposite page 29; Shank 1994, p. 9). There were a few non-Methodist merchants—a Sierra Leonian Baptist and John Thomas, a Roman Catholic clerk from Bathurst, Gambia—who offered their services to Harris in various aspects of his work. According to Shank, Harris seemed less concerned during this early ministry phase about the confessional affiliation of the clerks, and more focused on “providing care for his followers from the people available, whether Catholic or Protestant” (Shank 1994, p. 9).

Some clerks volunteered to assist Harris in his ministry. Others were specifically recruited, even “ordained”, by Harris (Shank 1994, p. 244) for the work of interpreting, preaching, baptizing, recording the names of the baptized, being dispatched to areas where Harris had not yet gone or could not reach, or even teaching rudimentary confessions of faith or biblical passages like the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles’ Creed. None of these men were church employees or theologically trained clergy. They were businessmen, possessing the unique gift of understanding and speaking both English and one or another of the local Ivorian languages. In at least one instance, a local literate clerk, Jacques Boga Sako, from the Avikam ethnic group centered in and around Grand Lahou, also joined Harris and assisted him in his work (Shank 1994, p. 244).

Harris preached in English and the clerks would interpret. According to eye witness testimony in Haliburton (1971, p. 118), Harris focused on two principal instructions: “God is all-powerful, so you must burn your fetishes” and “Love one another”. In de Billy’s (1931) account of Harris’s preaching, we find a much longer, more elaborated sermon text from the prophet–evangelist’s 1913 baptizing ministry in the coastal village of Kraffy. This text—though admittedly a synthesized, somewhat artificial reconstruction—would suggest that Harris’s preaching may well have contained from the earliest days a message of rather solid substance (for the full sermon, see de Billy 1931, pp. 15–16; Eng. trans. in Shank 1994, pp. 227–28; and Krabill 1995, pp. 179–80).

6. Harris’s Counsel on Music and Its Implication for Language Usage and Development

Once the crowds had heard a powerful sermon and received baptism from Harris, he proceeded to give them practical counsel on how to conduct their new life together. Emile Beugré, from the Dida village of Nzida, recalled these words from the prophet-evangelist:

Upon arrival in Kraffy, Harris told our fathers, “I am going to baptize you, but when you get back to your village, you must burn all of your fetishes. Then, you must choose men of calm spirit to serve as your preachers. Even if they don’t have much knowledge, God will bless them because of me. Build yourselves a house of prayer and if you don’t know what to say to God, pray in my name, telling God that it is Harris who told you to do this, and He will hear your pleas. Do everything just as I say, and if all is not for the better, then I myself will take full responsibility”.

(Emile Beugré, in Krabill 1995, p. 187)

Other testimonies recount the counsel offered by Harris regarding the music to be sung in the new faith communities. In the Dida village of Lauzoua, he simply commanded people to start singing. The exchange that ensued in that instance between local leaders and Harris is reported as follows:

Mr. Kouadjo Affo, an important man in Lauzoua, told the Prophet, “We would be glad to do what you ask if we knew the songs of God, but since you have come as God’s messenger, it is you who must teach them to us”. And so it was that the Prophet told the people of Lauzoua that God has no personal, favorite songs; that He hears all that we say in whatever language; that it is sufficient for us to praise Him in our own language for Him to understand.

(Krabill 1995, p. 5)

It is important to remind ourselves at this point, that Harris had spent over thirty-five years—nearly all of his pre-prophetic adult life (1873–1910)—attending, worshipping in, and actively serving the “civilized” Methodist and Episcopal churches of eastern Liberia. Throughout those years, he had grown to love the Western musical traditions of the churches he attended. When asked in 1978 whether Harris had any favorite hymns, his grandchildren recalled without hesitation, “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending”, “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah”, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”, “How Firm a Foundation”, and “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” (Shank 1994, p. 239). All the more remarkable, then, that Harris should have been willing to set aside his own personal musical tastes in order to encourage the creation of indigenous worship traditions by taking the music and dance forms with which the local people were already acquainted and transforming them for appropriate usage in worship settings.8

For the Dida people—one of the first and largest ethnic groups to feel the impact of Harris’s ministry—the pre-Harris musical repertoire was vast, including at least 30–40 distinct classifications of traditional music genres, ranging from love ballads and funeral dirges to songs composed for hunting, rice planting, and rendering homage to wealthy community leaders. Not all musical genres, however, were suitable, according to Harris, for use in praising God. One female musician from Lauzoua stepped forward in Harris’s presence and began singing a zlanje tune—a love song with suggestive lyrics aimed at seducing potential partners into sexual activity. “That song does not honor God”, Harris said. “Sing something else”. At that suggestion, another singer came forward proposing a dogblo tune—a type of honorific praise song that literally hurls forth or shouts out the name of a nature spirit, a wealthy family head, or clan leader deserving special attention or recognition. “That’s it!” Harris reportedly exclaimed. “That is the music you must work with! Though now you must refrain from using these songs for earthly rulers and lesser spirits and begin transforming the words bit by bit to bring glory to God”.9

Harris never explained, so far as we know, what it was that informed his position on this matter. Clearly, something occurred during his 1910 trance–visitation with the Archangel Gabriel that produced in him a shift from Western to more African forms of faith expression. The impracticality and cultural inappropriateness of introducing to large crowds strange-sounding Western melodies and translating rather complicated English-language hymn texts may also have sent the prophet–evangelist searching for other solutions. Such considerations, though, did not seem to discourage him from preaching English-language sermons that needed translating or from teaching certain “imported” liturgical texts such as the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, seen by Harris as basic, indispensable elements of worship for new converts.

The primary issue at stake for Harris seemed to be not so much the question of Western versus African musical forms, but rather whether or not, in one way or another, God’s message was getting through to the hearers. From this prospective, Harris could on occasion order the Fanti Protestant clerks to teach new converts Western Christian hymns (Haliburton 1971, p. 100), while in other settings, this same concern provided him with a handle for issuing critiques of certain African musical traditions—such as the sexually tainted zlanje love songs in Lauzoua—which according to him failed to achieve the desired objectives.

Whatever the reasons behind Harris’s choice to encourage the composition of indigenous worship music in local languages, the effect was a phenomenal burst of creative musical energy across the twelve ethnic groups that were taught and baptized by the prophet–evangelist. While I lived with my family among Dida Harrists in the 1980s, it was my rare privilege to work with church leaders to collect and transcribe in one village over 500 hymn texts from the oral worship traditions of the church, spanning the 75-year period from 1913 to 1988. Since our departure from Ivory Coast in 1996, hundreds, if not thousands of new compositions have been added to the multiethnic Harrist Church’s repertoire, and these, in several new musical styles that did not yet exist during our years of worshiping with the Harrist community (Krabill 2005, pp. 93–97).

7. Multicultural or Ethnocentric? The Harrist Story as Invitation and Warning

We have attempted in this article to highlight some of the multilingual complexities inherent in the life story and ministry of the prophet–evangelist William Wadé Harris, and in the mass movement that emerged from his brief but electrifying preaching, baptizing, and fetish-burning tour through Ivory Coast at the outset of the twentieth century. We began by chronicling Harris’s early years of language formation in English and Glebo, his Liberian mother tongue, and his exposure to other West African cultural and linguistic realities during his year as a seafaring “kruboy” traveling up and down the coastal route from his homeland to Gabon. Then, we explored Harris’s passionate, unbridled commitment to the ministry calling he had received from God via the Archangel Gabriel, which pushed him beyond the confines of his native Liberia and into the complex linguistic maze of Ivory Coast.

During his eighteen-month tour in this newly established French colony, he confronted a seemingly unsurmountable communication challenge by partnering with West African merchant-clerks conversant in both English and several local languages in order to connect with local populations through the clerks’ interpretation and translation services of his preaching and teaching ministries. In a colony where French authorities required all religious services to take place in either Latin or French languages, Harris informed the teeming crowds flocking to him that they could talk to God through songs and prayers in their own indigenous languages and that God would understand (Krabill 1995, p. 5). While politically provocative for French officials, this word of counsel from Harris had the effect on local populations of empowering and energizing them to return to their home villages and create locally produced worship patterns, spontaneously uttered prayers, and countless indigenous musical compositions for immediate use in the newly forming faith communities throughout the southern coastal region of Ivory Coast.

There are very few Christian communities anywhere in the world that have never sung an imported song. The Harrist Church is a remarkable exception to the rule. This has now occurred for over a hundred years because of Harris’s early counsel to the very first believers in 1913 and by virtue of the movement’s ongoing embrace, encouragement, nurture, and guidance of the church’s composers—many of whom are women—in providing the movement’s musical diet for worship, communal rituals, and celebrative holidays and festivals.

There are moments, however, when the Harrists’ insistence on indigenous song composition and usage has proven to be somewhat cumbersome, inconvenient, and potentially even an impediment to the movement’s expansion and growth. With the migration of Ivorian villagers in recent decades from rural to urban areas, it has not always been easy for Harrists from different ethnolinguistic groupings to know how to worship together. French is the only language taught in the public school system in Ivory Coast and is the mode of common parlance among most urbanites in social settings and business encounters. But Harrist songs are not composed in French, only indigenous languages, and so becoming multicultural, multilinguistic worshiping bodies in urban contexts can present a challenge for Harrist churches.

In the 1990s, I attended a Harrist worship service in a village on the outskirts of Ivory Coast’s capital city, Abidjan, where a group of French tourists happened in to the church building and sat down for worship. The younger preacher in the congregation got up to translate into French the elder preacher’s prayers and sermon, but was told that this was not permitted, because “the Prophet Harris had instructed the church to sing and pray in its own language and God would understand”. In such instances, we see the gradual transformation of Harris’s wise instruction in the form of a recommendation to becoming a commandment—that worship can occur in local languages, according to Harris, to a requirement that it must take place in such a manner.

During the early colonial period, Ivorians were not encouraged or even permitted in some instances to travel widely across the colony. Dida Harrists in the western sector of the territory knew virtually nothing of Harrist communities existing further east among the Alladian, Adjukru, Ebrie, and other ethnic groupings. Only around 1950—thirty-five years into the movement and long after the passage of Harris in Ivory Coast—did the Dida learn of a man named John “Jonas” Ahui from the Ebrie village of Petit Bassam who in 1928 had visited Harris in Liberia and then returned to Ivory Coast to begin the long process of revitalizing and unifying Harrist communities scattered over many miles along the Ivorian coastline (Shank 1979; Krabill 1995, pp. 55–61; Ahui 1988, pp. 179–239). Since then, and up until the present time, there have been many efforts to work at creating a national church identity across ethnic lines through the establishment of a National Committee in 1960, a Harrist youth organization in 1975, a publication on doctrinal statements and liturgical structures (Aké 1980), a Harrist historical version of the message and impact of the prophet–evangelist (Ahui 1988), and a dossier of legal documents clarifying the status and legitimacy of the current spiritual head and national committee of the Harrist movement (Dogbo 2001).

As for musical developments in the church, recorded cassette tapes of various local ethnic and regional choirs began circulating among the faithful in the 1980s and eventually, in the 1990s, a national choir was formed. The majority—though not all—of the songs sung by the choir, however, were in Ebrie, the language and ethnic identity of the spiritual head, the church’s Chef Suprême, from Petit Bassam near Abidjan. One key church leader, Thierry Djolé—a historian, theologian, singer, and composer from the Dida ethnic group—has worked tirelessly over the years to diversify the national choir’s repertoire and to provide leadership to ACoFess, the Association de Koya Harriste Festival (the Harrist Choir Festival Association). As a new generation of Harrist musicians begins to play an active role in the church and as the movement puts down deeper roots in Ghana, Benin, France, and elsewhere beyond the Ivory Coast, it will be interesting to watch whether the church will explore creative ways of becoming increasingly multicultural or whether it will rely more heavily on the ethnic-focused origins that inspired the first generation of believers following the counsel of the prophet–evangelist William Wadé Harris who gave birth to the movement over a century ago.