Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa (Translation/Transnation) - Hardcover

Sanders, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691167567 ISBN 13: 9780691167565

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

"Why are you learning Zulu?" When Mark Sanders began studying the language, he was often asked this question. In Learning Zulu, Sanders places his own endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. Sanders combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history.

Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, Sanders reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning—from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth century to widespread efforts, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to teach a correct form of Zulu. Sanders looks at the white appropriation of Zulu language, music, and dance in South African culture, and at the association of Zulu with a martial masculinity. In exploring how Zulu has come to represent what is most properly and powerfully African, Sanders examines differences in English- and Zulu-language press coverage of an important trial, as well as the role of linguistic purism in xenophobic violence in South Africa.

Through one person's efforts to learn the Zulu language, Learning Zulu explores how a language's history and politics influence all individuals in a multilingual society.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Sanders is professor of comparative literature at New York University. His books include Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid and Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission.

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"Ostensibly about one man's quest to acquire a language, Learning Zulu is a clever, surprising, and enlightening journey into 150 years of South African history. Nobody has written quite this subtly about race and language in South Africa in a long while." --Jonny Steinberg, University of Oxford

"Learning Zulu is a brilliant book. Unprecedented in the South African arena and very likely beyond, Sanders's ‘secret history' is nothing less than a sustained tour de force and an extraordinary mix of linguistics, literary criticism, cultural studies, legal studies, psychoanalytic theory, and autobiography/memoir. This is very much a book about the psychic and psychopolitical investments involved in acquiring and teaching language in colonial and postcolonial settings."--Stephen Clingman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

"Mark Sanders has written a remarkable book that combines analysis and memoir, and mines documentary material and the individual experience of learning Zulu, to unearth the complex and sometimes controversial meanings of Zulu language, culture, and imagery for South Africans and others around the world. Learning Zulu will capture the attention of all readers interested in translation, self-formation, and cultural history in multilingual societies across the globe."--Loren Kruger, University of Chicago

"This book offers a historical account of the Zulu language in South Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. Exploring the psychological significance and symbolic meaning of the language in the South African social imaginary, the work does a real service to the Zulu language and identity by pointing to the richness and complexity of its more recent history. Learning Zulu makes available a wealth of fascinating material."--Gareth Cornwell, Rhodes University

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Learning Zulu

A Secret History of Language in South Africa

By Mark Sanders

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16756-5

Contents

Introduction, 1, 
Chapter 1 Learn More Zulu, 14, 
Chapter 2 A Teacher's Novels, 49, 
Chapter 3 Ipi Tombi, 74, 
Chapter 4 100% Zulu Boy, 96, 
Chapter 5 2008, 115, 
Acknowledgments, 145, 
Notes, 147, 
Select Bibliography, 183, 
Index, 193, 

CHAPTER 1

Learn More Zulu

The ordinary white man in South Africa, who speaks good Zulu, is inclined to laugh at Kitchen-Kafir; but good Zulu-speaking white men are becoming scarcer every year, and those who are left are every day being brought more into contact with natives who do not understand their Zulu, but who do understand Kitchen-Kafir.

A European landing in South Africa must take some years to learn to speak Zulu fluently. The average European picks up sufficient Kitchen-Kafir for his immediate wants and ceases to trouble about Zulu; and when he tries anything higher the result is generally incorrect.

— B. G. Lloyd, Kitchen-Kafir Grammar & Vocabulary, 6th ed. (1944)

The Colenso Legacy

Go back in history and you will see how much depends on the distinction between Zulu and Kitchen Kafir — or Fanagalo, as it was called later. Having placed "understand[ing] one another" second only to the will to " 'solving the problem' of how to live together in peace and comfort," Harriette Colenso writes in her preface to the 1905 edition of John William Colenso's Zulu-English Dictionary:

I believe that a fine language like the Zulu is a valuable possession for the country, and that the debasing of it into an ungrammatical mixed lingo, only half understood on either side, which is now going on, is a positive evil; not merely a measure of the harm done to the Native by contact with Europeans as he experiences it, but also a cause contributing to that harm. I therefore hold that those of us who realise this are bound to do what we can to present the language rightly, and believing that among many worthy efforts to that end my Father's is by far the most accurate, I may not acquiesce in its being set aside.

Hybrid words must, of course, arise wherever two or more vigorous races begin to live and to work together (has not the English tongue been so built up?), and I have recognised this need by appending to the dictionary proper a list of some of these words now in common use by Natives in Natal. But "kitchen kafir" proper is another thing. I quote a choice but by no means exaggerated specimen given recently in the Natal Mercury:

"Imagine anyone telling you: 'No, he good looking here you they call themselves I it cries.' . ... And yet this is a verbal translation of Ayi muhle le, wena ayibiza mina kukala? which, interpreted, is supposed to mean: 'It is not well that you did not call me first,' or 'why the devil didn't you call me at once.'"

Or the following: "Hamba down to lo spring and tarter manzie and cadan stir up the bottom and if you don't make plenty checher I will bularler your scope with this here bit of kuney" [Go down to the spring and take water and don't stir up the bottom and if you don't hurry I will murder your head with this piece of wood].

For Harriette Colenso, whose preface combines high moral seriousness with the persiflage that nearly always attends mention of Fanagalo, "Kitchen Kafir" is a "positive evil," because it does not achieve the goal of facilitating understanding between Africans and Europeans. The example that she provides from the Natal Mercury illustrates this by showing how a speaker of Zulu with no knowledge of the pidgin might make sense of a sentence in it. Although the sentence is meaningful in Fanagalo, when the sentence is heard as if it were in Zulu, the result is sheer gibberish. When Harriette Colenso explains that "Kitchen Kafir" is "not merely a measure of the harm done to the Native by contact with Europeans as he experiences it, but also a cause contributing to that harm," she formulates a project for the European, who, having caused harm through language, can also undo that harm through language. This project she takes up from J. W. Colenso, who, as Church of England Bishop of Natal from 1855 until his death in 1883, made it his business to refine, correct, and amplify existing grammars and dictionaries in Zulu.

Bishop Colenso's vision extended beyond the typical wish of a missionary to win converts. Wanting to found a "Kafir Harrow," which would nurture a literate Christian Zulu elite, Colenso recruited the sons of Natal chiefs and headmen to his school at Ekukhanyeni (Place of Light) just outside Pietermaritzburg. Given the Zulu name Sobantu (Father of the People) by Africans when he arrived in Natal as Bishop, Colenso proved unpopular with the white settlers. He was declared a heretic and excommunicated by the Church in South Africa when, after years of research prompted by a question from William Ngidi, his interpreter and language teacher, he published The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862–63), which questioned the Bible as literal truth. After mounting a series of legal challenges, Colenso succeeded in retaining his office as bishop. But Ekukhanyeni closed in 1861, "the boys ... sent home" because of rumors of an impending attack by the Zulu prince, Cetshwayo, and Ekukhanyeni never re-opened again.

Like Theophilus Shepstone, with whom he broke after the Secretary for Native Affairs led the armed suppression of the Hlubi under Langalibalele in 1873, Colenso sought to influence and transform relations between Natal's black and white populations — albeit in a different direction, from a different office, and using different methods. Shepstone is best known as the father of indirect rule — or the "Shepstone system" — which is commonly seen as a forerunner of the governing of Africans through customary law administered by chiefs during the segregation and apartheid eras. As Colenso's guide on his first visit to Natal in 1854, Shepstone had won the newcomer's support for his most ambitious, albeit unrealized, scheme for indirect rule: a "Black Kingdom" south of Natal under Shepstone as "supreme Chief." Colenso had favorably compared Shepstone to Brooke of Borneo. And Shepstone had helped persuade Ngoza and other notables to send their sons to Ekukhanyeni. But Colenso's views changed, and so did his opinion of Shepstone.

The trial of Langalibalele demonstrated to Colenso how, having learned Xhosa growing up on the Cape Frontier, and speaking Zulu fluently, Shepstone employed his command of the language to manipulate, mislead, and intimidate. After friction over the registration of guns, Langalibalele had been summoned to Pietermaritzburg by Shepstone, but failed to appear. Shepstone's messenger, Mahoyiza, accused Langalibalele of insulting him by stripping him bare; he had been asked to remove his coat and jacket so that he could be searched for weapons by the Hlubi, who feared that he had come to assassinate their chief. Emboldened after having presided over the installation of Cetshwayo as Zulu king in August 1873, Shepstone, who did not know then that Mahoyiza had lied, treated this as an act of defiance, and proceeded to take the actions that led to the eventual dispersal of the Hlubi tribe. Mahoyiza repeated his account in court. After Colenso asked Magema Fuze to approach Hlubi and other witnesses, Mahoyiza's perjury was exposed,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691167567
• ISBN 13: 9780691167565
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
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