Few things touch us as deeply as hearing an essential truth in the language we learned at our mother’s knee. For millions of people around the world, the Bible still arrives, if it arrives at all, in a foreign language. The story of Onesimos Nesib is born out of exactly that distance.
Born around 1856 in an Oromo village near Hurumu, in present day Ethiopia, he was given the name Hika, meaning translator. He lost his father while still a boy, and at thirteen, in 1869, he was captured by slave traders and passed through the hands of eight different owners.
The Swiss Werner Munzinger, then French consul in Massawa, freed the boy and handed him over to the Swedish evangelical mission. There he learned to read, was converted, and was baptized in 1872, receiving the name Onesimos, the same name of the runaway slave whom the apostle Paul sent back transformed to Philemon.
Sent to Sweden to study theology, he twice tried to return to his homeland, in 1882 and 1886, and both times was blocked by wars and closed borders. Unable to enter Ethiopia, he returned to the mission at Imkullu, near Massawa, and there devoted himself body and soul to translating the Bible into Afaan Oromo, his mother tongue.
The work depended decisively on Aster Ganno, a young woman also freed from slavery, who knew spoken Oromo like few others. Onesimos acknowledged this in writing to the mission: she filled in many gaps, finding words that he could not find. The New Testament came out in 1893, the complete Bible in 1899.
The cost was high. In Switzerland, where he oversaw the printing of the Bible between 1897 and 1899, he lost a young daughter and watched two other children fall ill; his wife Lidia insisted that he remain at his post, as Jonah should not have fled. Only in 1904 was he able to return to Welega, where he opened a school with Aster.
The persecution did not stop: in 1906, accused by the local clergy of blasphemy against Mary, he was tried and sentenced to exile. Emperor Menelik reversed the sentence, but banned him from preaching for ten years, a restriction lifted only in 1916. In 1931, on his way to a service, Onesimos died of a stroke, faithful to the call to the end.
The life of Onesimos reminds us that God does not discard what men steal: he took a name imposed in slavery and gave it back as a blessing to an entire people. Where Scripture still does not speak the language of someone’s heart, that unfinished task remains, today, a real call.
