The role of missionaries in the development of African languages

"Most of the contributors suggest that, much as the work of these missionary groups laid the foundations for the literary rendering of African languages, the wider object of African education was not their principal aim. The central purpose of missionary endeavours was to use African languages to win African souls for Christianity. Missionary approaches to the writing of African languages have also, because of rivalries and the unsystematic selection of these languages and dialectal variants for literary expression, after decades of often hard work, created classificatory confusion, multiplication of ethnicities and effectively an African Tower of Babel"--Cover.