Guillebaud, Rosemary

Rosemary Guillebaud served as a Bible translator in Ruanda-Urundi (present-day Burundi) where she completed the Urundi Bible in the Rundi language (present-day Kirundi). She was born on June 4, 1915 in Somerset in Southwest England [1]. She was the daughter of Reverend Harold Ernest Guillebaud (September 29, 1888-1941) [2] who was born in Upton, Worcestershire, and Margaret Lindesay Gamul Guillebaud, formerly Edwards (October 8, 1888-1961), who was born in Epsom, Surrey southwest of London [3]. Harold and Margaret married in 1912 in Bath, Somerset and served as missionaries in the Church Missionary Society (CMS), an Anglican organization [4]. They were missioners in Ruanda-Urundi [5] from 1925-1956 [6]. Rosemary was one of five siblings. Her sisters were Margaret Lindesay (November 16, 1916-1971), Philippa Frances (December 13, 1918-2000), and Mary Marshall (June 15, 1921-1999) [7]. Their elder brother, Peter D., was born in 1914, and all of them were born in Bath, Somerset [8].

In 1925, Rosemary’s parents and her three sisters moved to Uganda as CMS missionaries [9]. Rosemary’s father, Harold, had been ordained in 1916-1917, and in addition to serving as a clergyman, he was an accomplished linguist who had studied Greek at Cambridge [10]. He was commissioned with the task of determining whether the Ruanda and Rundi [11] languages were disparate enough to merit a separate Rundi translation of the Bible [12]. He quickly discovered that a distinct Rundi translation was more than warranted, especially since some words that sounded identical in each language not only had completely different meanings but at times had completely opposite meanings [13].

Rosemary’s natural gift for translation was discovered during the first year she moved to Africa when she was ten years old, and those around her took notice [14]. She began to aspire to do translation work at the age of thirteen since she had a natural proclivity for languages [15]. Growing up, Rosemary and her sisters were tutored at their home, and by 1939 [16] she had attended Newnham College [17] in Cambridge, where she achieved her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees [18]. After her first two years at university, she switched from studying Modern Languages to Theology in order to learn Greek to begin preparing for Bible translation work in the event that an opportunity might surface [19].

Indeed it did. Rosemary returned to Africa in 1940 where she worked as a translation advisor for the British and Foreign Bible Society [20]. She was entrusted with overseeing multiple translations, at times up to eleven simultaneously [21]. After her father died in 1941, their mission secretary, Dr. A. C. Stanley Smith, asked her to consider finishing the Urundi New Testament her father had begun [22]. At the time she knew Ruanda (present-day Rwanda), which she had learned as a child, but only knew of a few words in Rundi [23]. Nevertheless, she accepted the task and worked closely with indigenous translators and advisors, including Stephano Ndimubandi [24]. In addition to their CMS presence and the Danish Baptist missionaries with which her mission was affiliated, there were additional missions organizations working in Urundi, including the Friends and Methodists and a branch of the Worldwide Grace Testimony Mission [25]. She endeavored to do her translation work with an ecumenical sensitivity because she sent her translations to each organization for feedback and received their critiques, utilizing their regional insight to meticulously work back through her translations to ensure an understandable message across regions [26]. Contextualization seemed to be her highest priority as she deliberated the dynamic equivalence of every word and phrase [27].

In November 1951, twenty years after the arrival of the Ruanda New Testament, the translation of the Urundi New Testament was printed by the British and Foreign Bible Society and arrived in Urundi [28]. In 1961, Rosemary additionally completed the Old Testament Urundi translation, completing an entire Bible translation into Rundi, finishing the task for which her father was commissioned in the 1920s [29]. Rosemary never married, and dedicated thirty-nine years of her life to teaching and working on Bible translation in Burundi [30]. In 1979, Rosemary and her sister, Philippa, returned to Cambridge where they became well-known within the Christian community for sharing their missionary experiences [31]. Rosemary visited Africa on occasion until her death twenty years later [32]. She died peacefully in Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on June 25, 2002 [33] and was buried in Trumpington [34].

In the days before Rosemary’s death, her great-nephew, Simon Guillebaud, documented on April 24, 2002 that her translation work had impacted hundreds of thousands of people [35]. Rosemary Guillebaud’s legacy continues to outlive her. In addition to completing the translation of the Urundi Bible, Rosemary wrote the article “Problems of Related Dialects: A Study from Experience in the Ruanda and Rundi Languages,” she assisted Joel Abekyamweli in translating The Book of A Thousand Tongues, and she contributed a chapter on “The Doctrine of God in Ruanda-Urundi” to Edwin W. Smith’s African Ideas of God: a Symposium in 1950 [36]. She is additionally cited in various scholarly articles on translation work and the understanding of God in Rwanda and in African culture.

Rosemary’s legacy is also evident in her family’s descendants. Simon founded Great Lakes Outreach in 2003 which aims to engage in holistic mission through partnering with local leaders in Burundi to transform its communities [37]. On December 16, 2018, Simon announced that an updated translation of the Kirundi Bible had been launched in Burundi, since Rosemary’s translation had become outdated [38]. He wrote that his great-aunt is would be extremely supportive of the update, as it is in the very spirit of her contextualizing methods to make the message clear to the community as the language evolved [39]. Additional missional contributions of the Guillebaud family and their collective legacy can be found in Lindesay Guillebaud’s A Grain of Mustard Seed: The Growth of The Ruanda Mission of C.M.S., Herbert Osborn’s Fire in the Hills, J. E. Church’s Quest for the Highest, and Margaret (Meg) Guillebaud’s Rwanda: The Land God Forgot [40].

Katelyn Brooke Hannan

Notes

1. “Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide (Formerly Known as the Henry Martyn Centre):Guillebaud Papers.” Accessed February 25, 2020. http://www.mundus.ac.uk/cats/17/275.htm & https://www.cccw.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/GUI-Guillebaud.pdf.
2. “Harold Ernest Guillebaud - Margaret Lindesay Gamul Edwards.” Accessed February 25, 2020. http://slatters.org.uk/Trumpington/f3388.htm.
3. “Tabularjon - Rosemary Guillebaud (1915).” Accessed February 25, 2020.
4. “Harold Ernest Guillebaud - Margaret Lindesay Gamul Edwards.”
5. Ruanda-Urundi was a European colony ruled by Germans and Belgians until 1962 when the separate countries of Rwanda and Burundi were formed.
6. “Guillebaud Papers,” 1.
7. Ibid.
8. “Rosemary Guillebaud (1915).”
9. “Guillebaud Papers,” 1.
10. Ibid.,1.
11. Rundi and Kirundi are the same language and can be referred to interchangeably; Kirundi is more commonly employed in more recent writings.
12. Rosemary Guillebaud. “A Study from Experience in the Ruanda and Rundi Languages.” The Bible Translator 1, no. 1 (1950): 15–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/000608445000100105, 16.
13. Ibid.
14. “Harold Ernest Guillebaud - Margaret Lindesay Gamul Edwards.”
15. Rosemary Guillebaud, 17.
16. “Harold Ernest Guillebaud - Margaret Lindesay Gamul Edwards.”
17. “Guillebaud Papers,” 2.
18. Guillebaud, Rosemary - Praise! Accessed February 25, 2020. https://www.praise.org.uk/hymnauthor/guillebaud-rosemary/.
19. Rosemary Guillebaud, 17.
20. “Guillebaud Papers.”
21. Ibid.
22. Rosemary Guillebaud, 17.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 20.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 16-20.
28. Lindesay Guillebaud. A Grain of Mustard Seed: The Growth of the Ruanda Mission of C.M.S. (London: Ruanda Mission C.M.S.), 1956. https://missiology.org.uk/pdf/e-books/guillebaud_lindsay/grain-of-mustard-seed_guillebaud.pdf, 81.
29. “Guillebaud Papers.”
30. Guillebaud, Rosemary - Praise!
31. “Guillebaud Papers,” 2.
32. Ibid., 3.
33. Guillebaud, Rosemary - Praise!
34. “Harold Ernest Guillebaud - Margaret Lindesay Gamul Edwards.”
35. Simon Guillebaud. Dangerously Alive: African Adventures of Faith Under Fire (UK: Monarch Books), 2011, 93.
36. “Guillebaud Papers,” 3.
37. “GLO - Simon Guillebaud - Author, Speaker, Social Entrepreneur, Family Man, Cyclist and Charity Founder.” Accessed February 26, 2020. https://www.greatlakesoutreach.org/about-us/simon-guillebaud/.
38. “The New Kirundi Bible! - Simon Guillebaud.” Accessed February 25, 2020. https://www.simonguillebaud.com/new-kirundi-bible/.
39. Ibid.
40. “Guillebaud Papers,” 3.

Bibliography

“Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide (Formerly Known as the Henry Martyn Centre): Guillebaud Papers.” Accessed February 25, 2020. http://www.mundus.ac.uk/cats/17/275.htm & https://www.cccw.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/GUI-Guillebaud.pdf.

“Church’s History - Anglican Church of Burundi.” Accessed February 25, 2020. http://www.anglicanburundi.org/history/.

“GLO - Simon Guillebaud - Author, Speaker, Social Entrepreneur, Family Man, Cyclist and Charity Founder.” Accessed February 26, 2020. https://www.greatlakesoutreach.org/about-us/simon-guillebaud/.

Guillebaud, Lindesay. A Grain of Mustard Seed: The Growth of the Ruanda Mission of C.M.S. London: Ruanda Mission C.M.S., 1956. https://missiology.org.uk/pdf/e-books/guillebaud_lindsay/grain-of-mustard-seed_guillebaud.pdf.

Guillebaud, Rosemary. “A Study from Experience in the Ruanda and Rundi Languages.” The Bible Translator 1, no. 1 (1950): 15–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/000608445000100105.

“Guillebaud, Rosemary - Praise!” Accessed February 25, 2020. https://www.praise.org.uk/hymnauthor/guillebaud-rosemary/.

Guillebaud, Simon. Dangerously Alive: African Adventures of Faith Under Fire. United Kingdom: Monarch Books, 2011.

“Harold Ernest Guillebaud - Margaret Lindesay Gamul Edwards.” Accessed February 25, 2020. http://slatters.org.uk/Trumpington/f3388.htm.

Pettersson, Olof. 1967. “Divinity and Destiny in the Religion of Ruanda-Urundi”. Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 2 (January), 158-71. https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67015.

“Tabularjon - Rosemary Guillebaud (1915).” Accessed February 25, 2020. http://www.tabularjon.co.uk/tree/person.php?person_id=2484.

“The New Kirundi Bible! - Simon Guillebaud.” Accessed February 25, 2020. https://www.simonguillebaud.com/new-kirundi-bible/.

This article, submitted in August 2020, was researched and written by Katelyn Brooke Hannan, a Masters of Religion student at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. Originally submitted for “Women in World Christianity” course at Gordon Conwell’s Hamilton campus, taught by Dr. Gina Zurlo, Co-director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity.