We do not translate this work. We create it, from the beginning, in the languages people think in.

There is a reason for the distinction. Translation moves words. But the inner life is not stored in words; it is stored in the language you were held in as a child, prayed in, grieved in, joked in. Ask someone to examine their own mind in a language they learned at school and they will give you an accurate description of somebody else.

A meditation in Yoruba is not an English meditation with Yoruba words. It carries Yoruba proverb, Yoruba rhythm, Yoruba ways of speaking about the self that have no English equivalent and do not need one. A comic in Hausa is written by someone who grew up inside the humour. Pidgin is not a lesser register; for tens of millions of Nigerians it is the language of honesty, and honesty is the entire method.

This is also the work of decolonising the mind, in its most practical form. You cannot return a people to their original nature using only the vocabulary that interrupted it.

So: five languages. All of them are first languages. None of them a version of the others.