Eshu Mistranslated: How a Messenger Became the Devil in Print

The identification of Eshu with the Christian devil has a specific, datable origin rather than being an old confusion: Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba former slave ordained in the Church of England, compiled the first substantial vocabulary of the Yoruba language in the 1840s as part of a missionary translation effort, and in rendering Christian theological vocabulary into Yoruba he chose Eshu as the equivalent for Satan. The choice then propagated through mission Bible translation and mission education across the following century, so that generations of Yoruba Christians, and eventually many outside observers, encountered Eshu first as a translation of the biblical adversary rather than as the narrative figure Yoruba oral tradition actually describes. Idowu's study is one of a long line of Yoruba scholarship that rejects the equation directly: Eshu's stories cast him as an agent of testing, consequence, and the enforcement of ritual correctness, categories with no real overlap with a cosmic principle of evil opposed to a supreme good. The mistranslation is now widely acknowledged by scholars of Yoruba religion as a translation artifact of a specific nineteenth century missionary project rather than an authentic feature of Yoruba theology, though the association it created has proven durable in popular usage well outside the tradition that produced Eshu's own stories in the first place, including within some diaspora practice shaped by the same missionary-era literature.