The Lamba Language
At first, Clement Doke was frustrated by his inability to communicate with the Lamba. The only written material available at the time was a translation of Jonah and a collection of 47 hymns. Soon he mastered the language and published his first book Ifintu Fyakwe Lesa (The Things of God, a Primer of Scripture Knowledge) in 1917. He enrolled in Johannesburg as the extension of Transvaal University College for an MA degree. His thesis was published as The Grammar of the Lamba language. The book is couched in traditional grammatical terms as Doke had not yet established his innovative method of analysis and description for the Bantu languages. His later Textbook of Lamba Grammar is far superior in this respect.
Clement Doke was also interested in ethnology. In 1931 he compiled The Lambas of Northern Rhodesia, which remains one of the outstanding ethnographic descriptions of the peoples of Central Africa. For Doke, literacy was part of the evangelisation since people had to able to read to appreciate the message of the Bible, but it was only after his retirement that he completed the translation of the Bible into Lamba. It was published under the title of Amasiwi AwaLesa (The Words of God) in 1959.
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“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
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