Learning Zulu

A Secret History of Language in South Africa

Mark Sanders

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400881086
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

" 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.

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].¹

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.² Given the Zulu name Sobantu (Father of the People) by Africans when he arrived in Natal as Bishop,³ 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.⁴ 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.⁵

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.⁶ 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.”⁷ Colenso had favorably compared Shepstone to Brooke of Borneo. And Shepstone had helped persuade Ngoza and other notables to send their sons to Ekukhanyeni.⁸ 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,⁹ 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 1873,¹⁰ 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.¹¹ Mahoyiza repeated his account in court. After Colenso asked Magema Fuze to approach Hlubi and other witnesses, Mahoyiza’s perjury was exposed, although nothing was done to change the judgment or to mitigate Langalibalele’s sentence of banishment for life. Until these events, Shepstone had managed to exert tight control over official communications between Africans and Europeans in Natal. This had required not only an insulation of Zulu and English-speaking publics from each another, but also a bifurcation of language in its oral and written forms. Colenso’s intervention at the trial of Langalibalele exposed Shepstone’s double dealing, ending the monopoly that he had held over the transmission of African views by virtue of his command of Zulu.¹²

Harriette Colenso followed in her father’s footsteps politically by aligning herself with the Zulu monarchy, first Cetshwayo, and then Dinuzulu, whose legal defense she organized at both of his trials, and whose tireless advocate she was with the British government and before the British public. Further details of J. W. Colenso’s remarkable career—and those of his children, Harriette Emily, Francis Edward, Frances Ellen, and Agnes Mary, and of the influence of Ma gema Fuze and his fellow Ekukhanyeni converts—may be found in the excellent studies of Jeff Guy and other scholars.¹³

For the secret history that I am writing, it is sufficient to observe that J. W. Colenso, through his work as a linguist, sowed the seeds for a motivation to learn—and to teach—Zulu that has lost none of its power because it is the motivation to make good, and to stand for what is right. This is no small turn; when Colenso first visited Natal, American Board missionary and linguist, the Reverend Lewis Grout, was referring to Zulu when he declared that “he would not have his little girl learn one word of that filthy language, on any account, if he could help it.”¹⁴ Colenso, of course, did not impose such a prohibition on his daughters. From his scattered remarks about learning the language, we can tell that he wasted no opportunity for improving his own command of it. Journeying by ox wagon in 1859 to ask King Mpande if he could build a mission in Zululand, Colenso found himself drawn to his companions—whom he refers to by their first names: William, who had come because Colenso wanted an interpreter and they were working on the grammar and dictionary,¹⁵ Jojo, the driver, and the youthful Ndiyane and Magema: “The chatter of so many tongues a little interferes with one’s more serious thoughts; but it is pleasant to hear them so cheerful, and one can get help in respect of the language by sitting close by, within reach of their conversation, instead of the little wagon-chamber being removed to a greater distance.”¹⁶ Colenso elsewhere lauded the fact that William Ngidi, who “still spoke the [i]siZulu of the Zulu kingdom…. ‘spoke it with great correctness, in the pure Zulu dialect, and would immediately point out a deviation from it, just as an educated Englishman would detect a provincialism.’”¹⁷ Ngidi’s distinctions must have helped the Bishop to delimit his celebrated grammar and dictionary, in the elaboration of which his teacher was closely involved.¹⁸ The Zulu-English Dictionary, first published in 1861, expressly excludes certain dialects.¹⁹ By the turn of the twentieth century, for many educated Africans in Natal, this linguistic standardization,²⁰ and its attendant orthography,²¹ was a fait accompli. By the 1850s, “speaking ‘proper Zulu’” had become “not only the absolute benchmark of missionary identity, but also an ideal for ordinary colonists,” whose settlement missionaries saw as promoting conversion among Zulus.²² By the time that Harriette Colenso prefaces her father’s dictionary in 1905, “those of us who realise” what harm is being done when Zulu is spoken badly and “are bound to do what we can to present the language rightly,” include the Africans who addressed letters to newspapers defending the standard language and orthography that they had learned and embraced.²³ Like the latter, who, in so doing, “influenced Zulu politics,”²⁴ Harriette Colenso was prepared to generalize the ideal of “speaking ‘proper Zulu’” beyond the missionary project.

The circumstances of the breach between Colenso and Shepstone suggest that the Bishop’s eldest daughter could not have been naïve about what could be accomplished by having a command of Zulu.²⁵ We know from a letter written by her mother after her husband died that “her power in the way of colloquial Zulu was beyond her father’s after all these years.”²⁶ This had meant that, in the defense of Langalibalele, “[m]uch of the hard work fell on Harriette…. [S]he interviewed African witnesses, transcribed the evidence, wrote letters and petitions for her father.”²⁷ The part that she played in these events would have shown her that, just as literacy and English would make Africans better informed, a more widely spread knowledge of Zulu among Europeans might allow greater “understanding” by counteracting the misrepresentations of those with a stranglehold over Zulu-English communications, as well as a sanctioned ignorance that is, as I have experienced firsthand, pervasive to this day. Although not a sufficient condition, since not all are of like will, knowledge of the language was a necessary one—the straw without which no bricks could be made²⁸—and, for that reason, it attained an immense symbolic significance.

Assuming that the will exists, in order for the European to make good the harm done to the African through language, Zulu must be learned, and it must be learned, if circumstances dictate, in place of Kitchen Kafir. Although an appendix to the Dictionary newly supplies commonly used loan words that have entered Zulu from Kitchen Kafir (or isiPiki, meaning “speak”), the latter is said to be a “mixed lingo, like pigeon English, i.e., without grammar.”²⁹ But Kitchen Kafir is “ungrammatical” only because it does not follow Zulu’s rules of formation. To speak well is to speak grammatically. Zulu is grammatical; to speak Zulu is therefore to speak well. Implied but not stated, this flawed syllogism prescribes a method for making good through speaking Zulu that, enduring for a long time, will never be separable from politics—although these politics will not always be the same politics.

Certain traits nonetheless remain constant, as when the pidgin is bound up with archetypal hierarchies of labor. There, violence lies near the surface, as Harriette Colenso’s second, cruder, example shows; the speaker of Kitchen Kafir—more of a macaronic English with Zulu words—threatens to strike the head of the drawer of water with a piece of wood if she fails to make haste. If Kitchen Kafir tends to bring a chuckle, the joke is getting old. Although it is not without an air of election that the Europeans and Africans who are aware of the difference between the language and its pidgin make themselves the ones taking the lead in ending the violence of colonial relations,³⁰ the publication of a dictionary tells us that, by implication, if those who know are “bound to do what we can to present the language rightly,” then the more who learn Zulu, the more will bind themselves to the practice of making good through speaking and writing well.

At certain moments, the trial of Langalibalele being one, the secret history intersects with recorded history, even if only with relatively little-known episodes. This may therefore be the time for a brief excursion into the type of chronologic...