Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa

Grammars of Colonialism Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa

Rachael Gilmour

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Grammars of Colonialism

10.1057/9780230286856 - Grammars of Colonialism, Rachael Gilmour

10.1057/9780230286856 - Grammars of Colonialism, Rachael Gilmour

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Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa Rachael Gilmour Queen Mary, University of London

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Grammars of Colonialism

© Rachael Gilmour 2006

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9781403933812 hardback ISBN-10: 1403933812 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gilmour, Rachael, 1973 Grammars of colonialism:representing languages in colonial South Africa/Rachael Gilmour. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1403933812 (cloth) 1. South Africa“Languages“Study and teaching“History. I. Title. P381.S57G55 2007 408 .996“dc22 2006045596 10 15

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In memory of Philip Sandler

10.1057/9780230286856 - Grammars of Colonialism, Rachael Gilmour

10.1057/9780230286856 - Grammars of Colonialism, Rachael Gilmour

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List of Figure and Map

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction The people and languages of pre-colonial South Africa Notes on terminology

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1 Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’: European Travellers to the Eastern Cape, 1652–1806 Travel writing and natural science: Anders Sparrman’s Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope Colonization and collecting language: John Barrow’s Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa Classifying the ‘nomade’ language: Heinrich Lichtenstein’s Travels in Southern Africa 2 Of Translation and Transformation: The Beginning of Missionary Linguistics in South Africa Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp and the first Christian mission to the Xhosa The features of missionary language study 3 Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’: Methodist Linguistics in the Eastern Cape William Binnington Boyce’s Grammar of the Kafir Language John Whittle Appleyard’s The Kafir Language The Cattle Killing and William J. Davis’s Kafir Dictionary 4 Language, Culture, and ‘the Native Mind’: Missionary Language Study in Natal Knowing the ‘native mind’: Lewis Grout’s The Isizulu ‘Meeting the heathen half way’: Bishop John William Colenso’s mission as dialogue vii

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Contents

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Contents

5 From Languages to Language: The Comparative Philologist in South Africa ‘The discovery of the process of human development’: Linguistic and cultural evolution in Bleek’s ‘universal philology’ Typological classification, historical reconstruction, and the study of ‘primitive forms’ Language, ‘race’, and the ‘Negroes’ of South Africa

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Conclusions

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Jacob Ludwig Döhne’s Zulu-Kafir Dictionary Henry Callaway’s researches into comparative mythology and Zulu religion

Figure 1 Wordlist from John Barrow’s Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa Map 1 Map of southern Africa

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List of Figure and Map

My interest in colonialism and the politics of language study was inspired, and nurtured, by Tony Crowley, who taught me as an MA student and supervised the PhD upon which this book is based. Both he and Sylvia Adamson provided the encouragement and guidance required to undertake and develop this research. Ken Hirschkop and Richard Steadman-Jones, too, offered invaluable advice and insight. It goes without saying, though, that errors and sins of omission and commission are entirely my own. From my time as a graduate student at the University of Manchester, I owe a debt of gratitude to a lot of people, but would like in particular to thank Naomi Baker, Deirdre Boleyn, Lucy Burke, Jo Carruthers, Zoë Kinsley, and especially Paul Young. The School of English and Drama at Queen Mary has provided the institutional support, and my students and colleagues there the intellectual stimulation, necessary to complete this book. Again, the list is long, but I would particularly like to thank Javed Majeed for conversation and inspiration, Annie Janowitz for being an involved and interested Head of Research, Bill Schwarz for support and collegiality, and Ed Oliver for producing a map, as well as Julia Boffey, Mary Condé, Katie Fleming, Sam Halliday, Cora Kaplan, Catherine Maxwell, and Patricia Pulham. Thanks are also due to the librarians at the British Library, SOAS, the John Rylands Library in Manchester, Yale Divinity College, and Patsy Williams at St Deiniol’s Library. I am indebted to the trustees of St Deiniol’s for two scholarships which allowed me the space and time to write, as well as access to the library’s collections. Jill Lake has been an enthusiastic and supportive editor and reader, and I am grateful to her and the rest of her editorial team at Palgrave. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in Otto Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen, eds, Missionary Linguistics/Lingüística Misionera, 2004, pp. 113–40. With kind permission by John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. www.benjamins.com. Finally, my friends and family have been unstintingly supportive over the years. In particular, much love and a big thank you to my parents, Ray and Derrick, and to Jonathan.

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Acknowledgements

No nation is so savage as not to see, with more favourable eyes, a foreigner who endeavours to express himself in their language; and this feeling, therefore, might be expected from the Caffres, even supposing them to be the most wild and untamed people upon the earth. – Lichtenstein (1812–15: I, p. 28) So wrote Heinrich Lichtenstein, a German visitor to the eastern Cape in South Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century, explaining his inclusion of a sample of the Xhosa language in the travel narrative he had written on his return to Berlin. This moment of recognition, meditating on the social situatedness of language, and the many meanings which human beings ascribe to it in moments of intercultural encounter, is tempered in Lichtenstein’s account by the function of language to verify the hierarchical ordering of savage and civilized, wild and cultivated, untamed and tamed. To study a language, particularly the language of a ‘savage nation’, in this case the Xhosa people of the eastern Cape, also meant being able to assess and evaluate its speakers, inserting them into a global grid in which relative degrees of civilization could be measured and compared: There is no doubt but that the situation of a savage nation, the degree of civilization which exists in it, and above all, the relationship which it bears with other nations, can never be accurately understood, and properly estimated, without a competent knowledge of its language; – without understanding equally the mode of pronouncing it, its structure, and its compass. (Ibid., p. 1) Lichtenstein’s oscillating responses to the Xhosa language reveal much to us about the nature of colonial linguistics. He acknowledges the authority of Xhosa-speakers over their own language, while simultaneously asserting his own authority to appropriate it; and he represents and mediates the intimate experiences of encounter and communication, while developing distancing strategies of classification and control. He shifts between responses of recognition and identification, and the assertion of difference. In these respects, Lichtenstein’s attitude to 1

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Introduction

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the language of the ‘wild Caffres’ outlines the key arguments of this book, which examines a range of representations of the South African Bantu languages Xhosa and Zulu produced for English-speaking readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will examine the various functions performed by these linguistic representations, and the ways in which their form and purposes were contingent upon the social and political contexts in which they were produced. My concern is to reveal, thereby, the ways in which a diversity of representations of languages – grammars, dictionaries, wordlists, reading books, philological treatises – negotiate and reveal the exercise of various kinds of colonial power, through the intimate practices of language-learning and intercultural communication. Over recent years, scholars from a range of disciplines have worked to chart the numerous ways in which the development and management of linguistic knowledge was imbricated in the maintenance of European colonial power.1 The field of colonial language studies was vast, and diverse, incorporating travellers, explorers, mariners, colonists, colonial officials, missionaries, ethnographers, anthropologists, philologists – to give an exemplary, but not exhaustive list – in and around the colonies controlled by Europe, who studied and wrote about languages they encountered. As Lichtenstein’s comments from the beginning of the nineteenth century suggest, the development of colonial linguistics was fundamental to strategies by which Westerners interpreted the world, categorized its peoples, and affirmed the superiority of their own position within it. Those questions which struck at the heart of European colonialism – the maintenance of colonial stability, the articulation and negotiation of colonial identities, the taxonomic classification and effective control of colonial subjects, the capabilities of non-western peoples for spiritual, cultural, moral, and economic amelioration – impacted on, and were negotiated through, the multiplicity of linguistic representations which, in various ways, rendered colonial subjects ‘intelligible’. Furthermore, as part of global networks of power and knowledge connecting colonies with one another, and with the imperial metropoles, they also participated in a range of linguistic, political, philosophical, scientific, and religious discourses central to Europe’s conception of its place in the world. At the same time as describing, defining, and classifying languages and their speakers, linguistic representations were also representations of, and templates for, particular kinds of communication. This was most clearly (although not solely) the case with texts that were pedagogical in orientation, designed to provide the means to talk to or with speakers

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of a particular language or languages. In various ways, representations of languages implicitly or explicitly laid out parameters for what constituted appropriate communication between colonizing and colonized people. This, too, could serve the purposes of colonial control, by modelling the means to communicate with, in order to govern, evangelize, transform, and control the speakers of the languages they represented. As Johannes Fabian puts it, Among the preconditions for establishing regimes of colonial power was, must have been, communication with the colonized. […] [I]n the long run such exchanges depended on a shared communicative praxis providing the common ground on which unilateral claims could be imposed. Granted that use and control of verbal means of communication were not the only foundation for colonial rule; but they were needed to maintain regimes, military, religious-ideological and economic. (1986, p. 3) Thus, to adapt Susan Cook’s terminology to this context, representations of languages could incorporate both language ideology (attitudes and opinions about a language – and by extension about speakers of a language) and language practice (talking) (1999, p. 3). In both these respects, it is important to note that these discursive aspects of linguistic representation are indivisible from their political and material ramifications, in ‘their capacity to impose the realities they ostensibly only describe’. For this reason, to further quote Ann Laura Stoler, they must be seen not as ‘benign cultural’ acts but as ‘potent political’ ones (2002, p. 8). In all of the ways outlined above, this book addresses the functions of language study in South Africa as it accompanied, and facilitated, the development, maintenance, and consolidation of colonial power and European hegemony. However, it is also the case that these multiple functions of linguistic representations could expose lines of fracture. In particular, the omnipresent fact of language as social practice rather than abstract system, and of native speakers as active interlocutors rather than passive objects of knowledge, frequently rendered colonial representations of languages unstable. To return to Fabian’s comment above: it must surely be the case that to make ‘unilateral claims’ on the ground of ‘shared communicative praxis’, and to ‘use and control […] verbal means of communication’ that are essentially another’s language, are processes of appropriation which enact radically Mikhail Bakhtin’s argument that

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Bakhtin points us back towards representations of language, not as abstract cultural artefacts, nor as straightforward appropriations of another person’s language for the purposes of knowing and controlling them, but as socially situated sites of struggle to possess and control meaning. The knowledge that Western writers presented about nonWestern languages could only have been produced through social contact, interaction, and dialogue with native speakers of those languages, who – as well as helping to teach them their languages in the first place – acted as informants, assistants, interpreters, advisers, or authors. For these reasons, writers of colonial linguistic representations as well as, but perhaps in a more profound way than, the producers of other kinds of colonial writing, had to work to mitigate, manage, or occlude the presence of the native speakers whose authority they appropriated (see for example Cohn 1985). And so, whereas Edward Said has characterized the production of Western knowledge of the ‘other’ as a process which founds itself upon a stable notion of ‘exteriority’ (1991, pp. 20–1), it is certainly the case that in linguistic discourse, the intimacy of communication and the necessary omnipresence of native speakers as interlocutors made this ‘exteriority’ problematic to maintain. Colonial descriptions of languages came out of experiences of intercultural and interlingual encounter with native speakers of those languages which could provoke a complex range of responses: confusion, recognition, fascination, repulsion, self-validation, self-doubt. To (try to) learn a new language, for the writers examined in this book, meant engagement with its speakers, meant trying to understand a new conceptual system, meant attempts at communication which could be met by native speakers with indulgence, bafflement, or mockery. The linguistic descriptions which these colonial writers produced are read here as representations of these circumstances and responses, of moments of contact between languages, cultures, and worldviews, adapted in diverse ways into ‘linguistic knowledge’. In this way, my interpretation of colonial linguistics exposes the ways in which it was not only empowered and controlling, but also unstable and vulnerable. The materials which I address in this book, given the above arguments, are appropriately diverse and wide-ranging. The terms ‘repres-

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Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. (1981, p. 294)

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entations of languages’ and ‘linguistic representations’ are intentionally broad, to include a heterogeneous assortment of materials, including wordlists, phrase books, grammars, dictionaries, reading books, and scholarly or semi-scholarly treatises, which in various ways set out to represent Xhosa and Zulu for Western readers. They were written by an assortment of people including natural scientists, travellers, colonial officials, missionaries, and comparative philologists. The range of meanings and functions I ascribe to ‘representation’ is indicated in Raymond Williams’ discussion of the origin and development of the term, with the sense both of ‘making present’ and of ‘standing for’, in a complex series of ways in which the artistic and the political overlap (1983, pp. 266–9). These are representations of language produced in, and imbricated in, two key sites of colonial encounter. The first is the eastern Cape, and the second is Natal and the Zulu kingdom. In the eastern Cape, I map the development of Xhosa language study by Europeans in the period in which its speakers were being colonized – from the first contacts of European travellers with the independent Xhosa-speakers of the eastern Cape frontier zone, through their negotiation with and resistance to the Dutch and then British colonial authorities, to the later nineteenth century, when they eventually came to be incorporated more fully into the colonial order. In Natal and the Zulu kingdom, I trace key themes in the development of Zulu language study by Western writers, in the context of British colonization of Natal and attitudes to its ‘Zulu-speaking’ inhabitants, and to the independent Zulu, from the 1830s to the 1870s. I situate these representations of languages within contexts in which various kinds of colonial identities were being forged, negotiated, and contested in relation to the cultures and identities of Xhosa- and Zulu-speakers; and I map some of the ways in which the representation of moments or scenarios of encounter – as, I shall argue, colonial representations of language inevitably are – are enmeshed with the micro- and macro-politics of colonial rule. Thus, although the sphere upon which this book focuses is colonial South Africa, it will also become clear that the arguments which were made and the theories which were formulated in this setting about the Xhosa and Zulu languages and their speakers formed part of a network which connected colonies to one another, and to the Western metropoles. As will be evident by now, my aim is to explore the representative strategies used to describe and delimit the Xhosa and Zulu languages, rather than to produce a straightforward account of the developing knowledge of these languages as understood by Westerners in the

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Introduction

Grammars of Colonialism

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That the task of language study in all its varying forms is undertaken for particular reasons, in particular ways, under particular circumstances, would appear to be self-evident. However, all too often the political and social contexts of linguistic representations are regarded as secondary, or relevant only insofar as they contribute to a teleological narrative of the pursuit, and gradual accumulation, of accurate linguistic knowledge. Thus, I am interested in examining linguistic representations not merely – or even mostly – for their transmission of the ‘facts’ about these languages, what Richard Steadman-Jones has called their ‘propositional content’ (2000, p. 189), but in terms of the kinds of representative strategies employed by writers to define these ‘facts’ within their specific social, political, and historical contexts. For example, phrasebooks, pedagogical grammars, and comparative grammars all transmit information about a language but serve very different (although often intersecting) practical and ideological functions. To present a language as a scattering of words in a wordlist has very different implications to the production of elaborate and apparently exhaustive grammatical treatises. As I will demonstrate, these differences reflect variations in the social and political contexts in which texts were produced, as much as they reflect a developmental narrative from less to more knowledge. This book began its life in the history of linguistic thought, with the recognition that, just as with the development of other Western disciplines producing knowledge of peoples and societies on an apparently global scale – such as anthropology, ethnography, or geography – linguistics and comparative philology were founded upon the material and cultural practices of European colonialisms.2 Thus if, as Joseph and Taylor contend, all linguistic inquiry is inherently ideological (1990, pp. 1–5), then in the case of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century linguistic thought, those ideologies were founded in large part upon the practices of comparison, the constructions of difference, and the claims of scientific objectivity, which in turn were bound up with power relations enabled by, and enacted in, colonialism on a global scale. Linguistic representation forms, in other words, an important mode of colonial discourse, defined by Peter Hulme as ‘an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships’ (1986, p. 2). And so, having started out broadly in the history of linguistic thought, this book has also come increasingly to draw its influences from work in colonial studies – in particular, in its emphasis upon the instabilities and contradictions of colonial regimes, the diverse and often conflictual identities

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and practices within them, and the ways in which these were developed and negotiated in relation to the agency and resistance, as much as to the static acquiescence, of colonized people. I have also drawn extensively upon the work of South African historians who have documented and theorized the development of Dutch and British colonialism in South Africa.3 Because of this interdisciplinary focus, and to try to make this account intelligible and relevant to a range of readers with diverse and divergent interests, I have tried to wear my theoretical terminology lightly, where possible avoiding the overly technical vocabulary of either linguistics, cultural theory, or colonial and postcolonial studies. One important term to gloss, however, is ‘discourse’, which I intend in the theoretical sense derived from Michel Foucault, rather than in the alternative, although related, sense in which it is more often used in linguistics.4 The structure of this book is both archaeological and comparative – aiming, in aligning these approaches, both to emphasize the diversity of colonial reactions to and appropriations of the Xhosa and Zulu languages, and to trace patterns within them. Although it begins with the first landfalls of European trading ships at the Cape, its focus lies in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the period in which Xhosa and then Zulu became objects of concerted Western study and representation, in the context of developing British colonialism in the region. It is not, however, intended as an exhaustive survey of works on these languages in this period. Instead, I have chosen texts in order to draw out what I see as key themes and questions: the negotiation of the relationship of Xhosa- and Zulu-speakers to colonial power; the formulation and re-formulation of ideas about the connection between language, culture, and identity; the articulation of various competing or complementary versions of the purposes of language study; and the development of ethnolinguistic classifications, and the meanings ascribed to them. This complex set of interconnected questions was inflected in the case of each individual text or group of texts by discourses of colonialism, trade, competing Christian theologies, and the developing human sciences. In all of this, writers also paraded, or revealed, much about their own standpoint and their own identity. In this sense, the representation of another’s language can also be read as a medium for self-representation (see for example Steadman-Jones 1998). Without wanting to suggest that they are mutually exclusive, I identify three modes of linguistic description, each with its own assumptions and methodologies: natural historical, pedagogical, and comparative philological. Although they overlap with one another, their order is broadly chronological and

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Introduction

Grammars of Colonialism

bound up with shifts in European linguistic thought, with the practices of Protestant evangelism, and with the development of colonial control over the speakers of the languages in question. Chapter 1 examines some of the earliest written representations of Xhosa-speakers and their language, in the context of growing European contact with and exploitation of the eastern Cape region. In particular, it addresses the ethnographic functions of linguistic description in late-eighteenth-century travel narratives, as a means to manage the linguistic, social, and political complexity of the eastern Cape frontier zone, by demarcating and classifying the people there for European readers, along lines inspired by and commensurable with natural scientific classification. Chapter 2 charts the gradual incursions into the region by missionary societies, particularly following Britain’s annexation of the Cape at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and lays the groundwork for the chapters that follow by examining some of the key features of missionary language study. Chapter 3 looks in detail at the work of Methodist missionary linguists, particularly grammarians, on Xhosa from the 1830s to the 1870s. In it, I trace the ways in which the Wesleyans’ representative strategies synthesized the proselytizing and legitimating agenda of missionary language study with elements of frontier settler discourse, in anxious reaction to ongoing Xhosa resistance. Attempting to negotiate between these often competing concerns, the Methodists sought to establish and validate the Xhosa language as an object of study and medium for Christianity while occluding Xhosa culture – and, largely, Xhosa-speakers – from view. Theirs was a unidirectional model of communication, aiming to act upon and alter language, thought and belief in isolation from existing cultural practices and, perhaps perversely, removed from dialogue with the language’s speakers. Chapter 4 contrasts this approach to language study with those manifest in a diverse range of writing on Zulu by missionaries in Natal from the 1830s to the 1870s, shaped by a quite different set of doctrinal, political, and social factors. In work on the Zulu language the emphasis lay centrally upon cultural understanding and interpretation and the need to know ‘the Zulu mind’. As I make clear, this approach was often also fraught with complications and anxieties for the missionaries concerned. Despite their differences, however, missionary work on Xhosa and Zulu was united by an agenda of development. Writers aimed at a set of interlinked goals: they needed to legitimate the language in question as a worthy medium to transmit the Christian message both in oral preaching and in Scriptural translation. This in turn implied a set of transformational processes, notably

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transliteration and lexical expansion, by which, it was believed, the language could be changed from a ‘heathen’ system into a ‘Christian’ one. The figuring of a language’s inherent virtues – construed, as we shall see, in terms of a number of key criteria – formed the basis for its projected transmutation and consecration. Finally, Chapter 5 examines the work of the comparative philologist Wilhelm Bleek, who lived and worked in and around the Cape from the 1850s until his death in 1875. I argue that Bleek’s work on Bantu languages stands in contrast to the evangelical focus of missionary language study, representing a ‘scientific’, anthropological approach which purports to replace pedagogic, normative, and transformative practices with observation, description, and classification. Bleek brought to his language study an evolutionary paradigm in which South Africa was the locus of attention because it was supposed to represent extreme linguistic primitivity. Thus this was an approach which sought to offset the unstable relationship of communicative proximity between subject and object of linguistic discourse, by placing African speakers in the past. Bleek regarded Xhosa, Zulu, and other South African languages as appropriate media for study, and as a suitable foundation for an exhaustive and rigid typology, because he saw them as frozen images of human prehistory. With Bleek’s work, South Africa was transformed into a scientific philological laboratory; but even his studies, produced under conditions both of entrenched colonial power and confident professionalism, contain profound contradictions in their approach to African languages and their speakers.

The people and languages of pre-colonial South Africa Pre-colonial South Africa, before the first sustained contact with Europeans began in the sixteenth century, was inhabited by a number of distinct though interrelated groups of people. Beyond the Kei River to the east and the Orange River to the north lived mixed farmers speaking related languages now called Bantu. Around the coast below the escarpment lived groups now known as Nguni, who spoke closely related language forms, the contemporary standard forms of which are Xhosa in the south and Zulu in the north. The developing representations of these Nguni languages form the focus of this book. On the plateau above the escarpment lived groups speaking related variants of a language the modern standard forms of which are Sotho in the south, Pedi in the east, and Tswana in the west. The Bantu languages spoken by these two groups, above and below the escarpment, had and have distinct

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Introduction

structural similarities and much shared vocabulary; linguistically, and culturally, they are also connected to other groups living as far north as the equator. In the deserts and mountains in and around the Cape region lived a diversity of groups of hunter-gatherers now generally termed San people. The western parts of the Cape, wherever pasture was adequate, were populated by Khoikhoi people who lived as pastoralists, herding sheep and cattle. Both the San and the Khoikhoi were physiologically similar, and relatively distinct from the Bantu-speaking inhabitants of the region. Their languages, although far removed from one another, shared some distinctive characteristics, notably the use of implosive consonants or ‘clicks’. Nguni languages, especially Xhosa, also contain clicks, a result of sustained contact over centuries with speakers of Khoi-San languages. For, while it is true that these groupings – Bantu, Khoikhoi, San – were broadly distinct in terms of language, physiognomy, modes of subsistence and cultural practices, nevertheless their boundaries were negotiable and permeable. Robert Herbert, using linguistic evidence to argue for this permeability, points out that the influence of Khoi-San languages on Bantu languages, and particularly Nguni, points to widespread bilingualism over centuries. Moreover, the kinds of terms borrowed from Khoi-San into Xhosa and Zulu, ‘in socioeconomic and ritual spheres’, ‘reveals a pattern of social interaction and cultural influence that is incompatible with the traditionally described hostile relationship between Southern African groups’. Thus, In place of the traditional view, the Khoisan-Bantu relationship should be seen as a symbiotic one, characterised by frequent and intimate interaction over several centuries in several domains, including trade and intermarriage. Further, one needs to recognise the bi-directional assimilation of remnant and refugee populations within the two groups. (Herbert 1992b, pp. 11–12) Herbert’s historical sociolinguistic account of ‘social interaction and cultural influence’ is intended specifically to counter, and to disprove, the view of categorical division and static identities constructed and perpetuated in colonial linguistics, of which modern-day concepts of ethnolinguistic identities in South Africa are frequently the inheritors. The idea of static ethnolinguistic identities as the foundation for colonial categories was developed in a period of colonization in which the sociolinguistic situation in South Africa was complex, unstable, and perpetually changing. The arrival of waves of colonizers, slaves,

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and indentured labourers speaking new languages; the mass movement of peoples; shifting political and social relations – all led to new kinds of language contact, language change, and even to language death. The successive colonizing powers brought Dutch, and then English, to the region. The former, spoken at the Cape since the early seventeenth century, underwent transformation – through contact with Khoi-San and other languages, and probably a process of creolization – into what will be called in this study Cape Dutch, which developed into modernday Afrikaans. The VOC imported slave labourers first from west Africa, and then from east Africa, as well as Djakarta, China, Sri Lanka, and India, bringing a diversity of other languages to the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; as, in the nineteenth century, did the British practice of importing indentured labourers from India, mostly to work on the plantations in Natal. Contact languages developed, notably contact varieties of Dutch in the Cape Colony and its environs, but also including the Zulu-lexifier pidgin emerging in Natal in the midnineteenth century, which, as a lingua franca in the colony and particularly in the diamond mines at Kimberley from the 1870s, became known as ‘Kitchen Kaffir’, ‘Mine Kaffir’, and, in the present day, Fanagalo (see for example Adendorff 1995; Mesthrie 1998). Although these languages do not form the focus of this book, the circumstances of linguistic diversity and social complexity of which they are suggestive – and which colonial representations of language usually firmly resisted – will be an ongoing theme.

Notes on terminology Finding an appropriate terminology is difficult when examining the records of a period in which ethnic and linguistic classifications were being constructed in South Africa, largely by Western colonizers, which often mapped badly, if at all, onto existing social realities, or precolonial African ideas about languages and identities. As I have suggested above, nineteenth-century linguists worked to construct homogeneous, spatially bounded languages and ethnolinguistic categories according to models derived from Europe. As has often been argued, this was a significant feature and a lasting legacy of nineteenth-century Western studies of non-European languages. Consequently, no study of colonial linguistics in Africa could sidestep the ways in which such work was not just reflective but constitutive of social reality, contributing to new definitions of language and ethnicity. Human beings were assumed, following the models of language and nation developed within

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Introduction

post-Enlightenment thought, to be objectively analysable into linguistically, ethnically, and geographically isomorphic groups. Thus the study of languages and the pursuit of language classification were part and parcel of attempts to ‘make sense’ of Africa, by mapping homogeneous categories onto what appeared to Westerners to be confusingly heterogeneous African realities. Patrick Harries’ study of the origins of Thonga/Tsonga in the northeast Transvaal, for example, is illuminating in its exposure of the links between nineteenth-century European thought and linguistic classifications: One of the first reactions of European explorers and colonists, on being confronted by a world that was wholly novel and outside the bounds of their experience, was to reorder it according to their existing structure of knowledge. This entailed imposing their intellectual grid on the mass of unfamiliar detail that surrounded them. Linguistic and other borders and boundaries were erected in order to restructure the African world in a way that would make it more comprehensible to Europeans. Once linguistic experts had anchored languages spatially, by erecting borders around their regularities of grammar and vocabulary, they sought to stabilize them over time by tracing their historical roots. (Harries 1988, p. 26) The process described by Harries has profound resonances in this book. As we shall see in the South African context, boundaries were erected not only on language and land, but also between bodies, cultures, intellects, and moral orders. The ways in which language study functioned to ‘make sense’ of Africa also had a significant role to play in the consolidation of colonial control. Classification and systematization produced within linguistic thought formed a foundation for an emergent colonial typology. In the long run, this provided the basis for the apartheid system of ‘homelands’ or ‘bantustans’. This legacy is indicated by, for example, Andrew Bank, who connects the classificatory work of the nineteenth-century comparative philologist Wilhelm Bleek with Saul Dubow’s narrative of twentieth-century South African ‘racial science’ (Dubow 1995; Bank 2000, pp. 177–8). Down to the present day, it must also be noted that the construction of ‘languages’ and ‘peoples’ as purportedly homogeneous entities in South Africa has formed the basis for several notional trans-historic ethnolinguistic identities, which have been both politically enabling and disabling.5 The connected issue of language standardization has also had obvious lasting implications. For example, modern standard Xhosa, based on the spoken

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language of the Ngqika Xhosa, is the written standard language of all the southern Nguni, including the Thembu, Bomvana, Mpondo, and Mpondomise. For all of the above reasons, the question of terminology is a difficult one. There are two sets of terms which I shall be using in this book. The first are a set of ethnolinguistic epithets, commonly used (although not uncontested) in the present, describing the African peoples and languages of South Africa: Xhosa, Zulu, Khoi (language), Khoikhoi (people), San, and to denote the latter two groups of languages and peoples collectively, Khoi-San.6 But at the same time, particularly since this book will trace the ways in which African people were ethnically and linguistically defined and divided in such ways as to permit these classifications in the present to be made, it must be noted that even these apparently uncontroversial terms are constructions with their roots in the nineteenth century. All these categories subsume an array of cultural and linguistic diversity and permeability, which they are partly designed to efface. Secondly, alongside the contemporary terminology there are the sets of labels which they have now replaced, those terms which were developed through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries by Europeans to denote the ethnolinguistic and ‘racial’ classifications developing within Western discourses in and on South Africa. ‘Kaffir’ and its variants were used variously to describe Bantu- or Ngunispeakers in general, or Xhosa people specifically. ‘Zulu-Kaffir’ referred to the language and people of Natal and the Zulu kingdom. ‘Hottentot’ referred to Khoikhoi people and their language, and ‘Bushman’ or ‘Bosjesman’ to the San and their language. The shifting uses of these terms, and the meanings ascribed to them, are a fundamental part of the story told in this book, and so I have retained them, enclosed within quotation marks, in the form in which they appear in the original sources.

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Introduction

Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’: European Travellers to the Eastern Cape, 1652–1806

The southernmost part of Africa entered Europe’s purview only gradually, through the development of maritime trade routes. At the end of the fifteenth century the Portuguese mariners Bartholomew Dias and Vasco da Gama successfully rounded the Cape peninsula, demonstrating as they did so a crucial new means of access to the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese exploited this new development, working to divert European trade with southeast Asia from the traditional routes via the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Soon Dutch, English, French, and Scandinavian merchant ships also started using the Cape route, landing at Table Bay in order to barter for supplies with the Khoikhoi people there. By the early part of the seventeenth century, as the VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company) grew to dominate trade in southeast Asia, it became apparent that an established trading post at the Cape would offer a particular advantage, in allowing the Dutch fleet to restock supplies between the Netherlands and the Company’s eastern empire. Consequently, in 1652 a party of 80 VOC representatives landed at Table Bay under the command of Jan van Riebeeck for the purpose of fulfilling this plan. Their original intention was simply to gather the necessary supplies through establishing trading links with the Khoikhoi people around Table Bay, but it quickly became apparent that the Khoikhoi were not much interested in extensive trade. Instead, the Dutch seized land and resources, establishing a small settlement around Table Bay whose economy was based upon its role as a staging post for the fleet of the VOC. 14

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 15

Representations of language were a regular feature of written European accounts of the Cape from the sixteenth century onwards. Mariners, settlers, travellers, and VOC officials weighed in with their accounts of life at the Cape, in which descriptions of the Khoikhoi inhabitants of the region were often a particularly sensational feature, and almost all of which dwelled with frustration, puzzlement, or disgust upon these people’s apparent lack of human language. John Milward’s account of 1614 exemplifies early descriptions of encounters with ‘Hottentots’: These people are most miserable, destitute of Religion in any kind, as farre as we can perceive, and of all civility; their speech is a chattering rather then language; naked, save a short cloake of skinnes on their shoulders, and a fox-skinne before their privities: have but one stone [testicle], naturally or ceremoniously I know not; eate that which dogges would hardly digest. They demand unreasonably for their Cattel. (Cited in Raven-Hart 1967, p. 70) Such lists of the supposedly remarkable features of Khoikhoi life and culture were commonplace in European ‘eyewitness’ accounts. Observers attested, time and again, to a series of strange practices, characteristics, and cultural deficiencies – they reported that these people ate unwashed intestines; that they covered themselves in animal grease; that they draped dried entrails around their necks; that the women had elongated labia and enlarged buttocks while the men, whether by nature or by design, had only one testicle; that they had no conception of God; that they had no conception of money or of the acceptable rules of trade; that they were lazy and slothful; and that their language was bestial and incomprehensible. J. M. Coetzee, focusing on descriptions of the Khoikhoi as idle, asserts that such pejorative accounts reflected frustration on the part of European observers unable to process and classify the Khoikhoi people and their practices according to the categories of current anthropological discourses. As Coetzee argues, Europeans arrived mentally equipped with a ‘table of categories’ which together defined ‘Anthropological Man’, in other words ‘Man with a developed Physical appearance, Dress, Diet, Medicine, Crafts, etc.’ For the early travellers, ‘The Hottentot is Man but not yet Anthropological Man’ (Coetzee 1988, pp. 12–23). In place of these categories, European observers reported a

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‘A chattering rather then language’: Descriptions of Khoikhoi people and early colonial typologies

set of absences: the Khoikhoi were, as the mariner Ralph Standish put it, ‘bruitt and savadg, without Religion, without languag, without Lawes or gouernment, without manners or humanittie’ (cited in Raven-Hart 1967, p. 57). The Khoi language, with its phonological system characterized by implosive consonants alien to European ears, arguably represented the most significant of these absences. Repeatedly, observers attested that the Khoikhoi used gibberish or animal noises in place of articulate human speech. In 1634, the traveller Thomas Herbert described the language of the Khoikhoi as ‘rather apishly than articulately sounded’; the mark of a people whose perversely alien nature and distance from the norms of European behaviour extended, in Herbert’s account, to sexual intercourse between Khoikhoi women and baboons (1634, p. 18). Herbert’s description of Khoikhoi language – a combination of baffled frustration and dehumanizing dismissal – is an extreme but by no means atypical instance of the attitudes of early travellers to South Africa, for whom the processes of communication in the colony proved at best problematic, and at worst deeply alienating and disturbing. John Davys wrote in 1598 that ‘their words are for the most part inarticulate, and, in speaking, they clocke with the Tongue like a brood Hen, which clocking and the words are both pronounced together, verie strangely’ (cited in Raven-Hart 1967, p. 20). These pejorative descriptions reflect in part the confusion of observers encountering languages so alien to their experience – accounts of the ‘animalistic’ nature of Khoikhoi speech were frequently accompanied by frustrated references to its unlearnability for Europeans. Peter Kolb, for example, called Khoi ‘a Monster among Languages’, before confessing that ‘for my own part, tho’ I resided many years among them, and in all that Time did my utmost to acquire it, I could never roundly succeed in the Matter’ (1731: I, p. 32). At the same time, however, the ‘monstrosity’ of the Khoi language symbolized in graphic terms – and entrenched – the status of its speakers as the apotheosis of the unreadable and the strange. The terminology which settlers and travellers used for the indigenous populations of the Cape was, to begin with, varying and unfixed. Early accounts often used variants of the term ‘Caffre’, from the Arabic word ‘kafir’ meaning ‘non-Muslim’ or ‘infidel’, adopted from Arab traders, for all people around Table Bay indiscriminately. In 1649, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier wrote that the inhabitants of the Cape were called ‘Kaffers or Hottentots’ (cited in Raven-Hart 1967, p. 179; see also for example pp. 9, 164–5). Gradually the term ‘Hottentot’ became the norm in referring to

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16 Grammars of Colonialism

the Khoikhoi pastoralists with whom settlers had regular contact (see for example Raven-Hart 1971: II, pp. 233, 236). The term ‘Hottentot’ may originally have derived from a word used by the Khoikhoi in dancing; but settlers quickly came to assume that it referred to their ‘clicking and clumsy speech’.1 Increasingly, as their grazing land was occupied by the expanding Dutch settlement, and their political and social structures were dismantled under the pressure of colonial expansion and introduced diseases, many Khoikhoi were forced either to migrate outside the Colony, or to become its servants. Thus, while the Dutch refused them the status of citizenship in the Colony, the colonial Khoikhoi became a servant class upon which the Cape economy depended (Schmidt 1996, p. 18). In the environs of the Colony, simplified contact varieties of Dutch and Khoi began to be used by colonists and Khoikhoi as lingua francas. The term ‘Hottentot’ was also initially used to refer to the huntergathering San people (see for example Raven-Hart 1971: II, p. 483). As the Khoikhoi became a feature of settled colonial life for the Dutch, increasingly these San hunter-gatherers were separately designated as ‘Bosjesmen’ – later anglicized to ‘Bushmen’. However, ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Bosjesmen’ shared a number of features in common, according to Europeans, notably their apparently bizarre, ‘clicking’ manner of speaking. The term ‘Caffre’ and its variants, meanwhile, became reserved to refer to the Bantu-speaking mixed farmers living to the north and east of the settlement. With these groups, however, settlers and other Europeans still had little contact, since by the end of the seventeenth century the furthest limits of European habitation were only 80 kilometres from Cape Town. Some trading ships landed at Port Natal and encountered the northern Nguni-speakers there; a few shipwrecked sailors also encountered coastal groups and wrote accounts of their experiences (see for example Moodie 1838–42: I, p. 425). But in this early period the Nguni peoples were still at the farthest periphery of a tiny far-flung outpost of the Dutch trading empire, hardly featuring at all in European written accounts of the region, which were largely restricted in their view to the environs of the Cape colony.2 Over the course of the eighteenth century, the area of European habitation around the Cape expanded considerably: this period saw the movements and migrations of hunters, traders, raiders, and finally Boer cattle farmers shift the colonial ‘boundary’ over 800 kilometres eastward, as Boer colonists established permanent settlements to the west of the Gamtoos River. Meanwhile, the limits of settlement of

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 17

the easternmost Xhosa groups also crept slowly westward, as shifts in the Xhosa leadership led minor chiefs and their followers to separate from the Xhosa paramountcy and establish autonomous chiefdoms. By around 1770, the two lines met at the Zuurveld, in a region which became known by Europeans as the eastern Frontier, between the Sunday and the Kei Rivers. This region was anything but a static, well-defined colonial border. In social, political, and cultural terms, it was still complex and unstable, being the zone of contact between groups of Khoikhoi, Xhosa, Boers, and San, jostling for land and resources. Hermann Giliomee describes the eastern Cape in this period as an ‘open’ frontier, ‘an area where colonisation is taking place’ – adapting Mary Louise Pratt’s useful formulation to emphasize it as a zone of contact, rather than a defined boundary between two separate spheres of political control (Giliomee 1989, p. 426). It was, in Pratt’s terms, a ‘space of colonial encounters’, ‘in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ (Pratt 1992, p. 6). While many Khoikhoi in the region, for example, retained their autonomy, their position was increasingly embattled; others accepted Xhosa authority, or took employment with Boer settlers. Many San people, on the other hand, were captured as slaves by Boer armed commandos, and forced to work on Boer farms. The independent San were consequently pushed further into the inhospitable regions of the interior. In 1779 war broke out between Boer commandos and sections of the Xhosa; clashes would continue periodically until, in 1811–12, British forces drove the Xhosa over the Fish River, in what Giliomee sees as the culmination of the ‘closing frontier’. Although relations of conflict and inequality characterized the region in the later eighteenth century, so did temporary and provisional allegiances. Linguistically, the frontier zone was polyglot, with varieties of Xhosa, Khoi, San, and Cape Dutch languages all spoken in the region, so that the use of interpreters was a commonplace feature of political relations.

Scientific travellers in the eastern Cape The first Western written descriptions of the languages of the eastern Cape frontier zone – of Xhosa, alongside Khoi – came from European scientific travellers. As the expansion in colonial settlement further from Cape Town made the region more accessible to Europeans, from the 1770s onwards, written accounts of organized expeditions to the

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18 Grammars of Colonialism

frontier zone began to appear in print in Europe in the final decades of the eighteenth century – a period of huge growth in the market for travel literature, and one in which interior exploration and observation took over from the sea voyage as the dominant mode in travel writing (Edwards 1994, p. 3). These accounts differed in significant ways from those that had gone before. The influence of natural history, and in particular of the work of Linnaeus, offered a new descriptive paradigm for travel writing which revolved around the rendering of experience as science, involving systematic investigation, description, and classification of the region’s geographical features, flora and fauna, and human inhabitants. What Mary Louise Pratt has called ‘the Linnaean watershed’ intersected with the first attempts by travellers to describe the language of the Xhosa, so that these early representations of language in the frontier zone formed part of a developing global project of categorization that was the culmination of the Enlightenment zeal for classification combined with the ambitions of European colonialism (Pratt 1992, p. 39). In the sections that follow I examine the three most elaborate of these descriptions: those of Anders Sparrman, John Barrow, and Heinrich Lichtenstein. Although other travellers spent time among the Xhosa, and even – as in the case of the French naturalist Francois Le Vaillant – learned to speak some Xhosa, these three were notable for publishing vocabularies and descriptions of the language (Le Vaillant 1790: II, pp. 284–5). In this way they began, for the first time, to try to appropriate and represent Xhosa for a European metropolitan readership. The collection of lists of words and phrases had been, for centuries, a common ingredient in Western ethnographic writing (see for example Hanzeli 1969, p. 17). In later eighteenth-century accounts of ‘exotic’ lands and peoples, such wordlists were considered to perform a number of important functions. Notably, they provided sets of data that could be compared with one another, so as to highlight linguistic difference or similarity on the basis of lexicon, enabling writers to make arguments about linguistic relatedness and linguistic origins; and they thereby permitted arguments to be made about the categorization and hierarchical ordering of languages. In both of these respects, they were also remarkably compatible with the methods and aims of natural science, and notably with the Linnaean system. One of the benefits of this system was, as Paul Carter has argued, its seductive simplicity. It suggested a universally applicable method of taxonomic classification of living forms based not upon detailed study of morphology, but on ‘a superficial comparison of a limited number of characteristics’

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 19

(Carter 1987, p. 19). By extension, therefore, it provided a persuasive model for linguistic classifications, on the basis of the kind of limited observation and data encapsulated by the wordlist. We may use the analogy, as the Linnaean travellers themselves often did, of the collection of samples: languages were represented in these travel narratives not in the context of social praxis, but as limited series of artefacts and characteristics, to be compared for the purpose of differentiating one from the other. The natural scientific travellers applied to linguistic description a Linnaean paradigm which saw languages both as taxonomies in themselves and as objects to insert into a global classification, as theoretically amenable to the reification of peoples and languages, as to plants and animals. This process of differentiation and taxonomic ordering, detaching languages from the particularities of their social environment and representing them as objects of scientific scrutiny, represents a striking attempt to assert authority over the contingency of experience. As we shall see, the experiences of travelling in the frontier zone were often baffling and disorienting, and languages – and the many possibilities for miscommunication – were among the greatest obstacles that scientific travellers encountered. Unable to speak more than a few words of most, if not all, of the languages spoken in the frontier zone, they were reliant upon interpreters, to whom they also had to turn to seek explanations for social relationships and cultural practices that, like the languages through which they were expressed, often simply confused them. But as we shall see, particularly in examining the work of Sparrman and Barrow, the ‘botanizing mind’ (Carter 1987, p. 19), delighting in the orderly exemplification of difference, set about recasting both languages and social categories as simple, unified, and straightforwardly referential, and in particular seized upon the distinction between ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ in order to interpret and represent the linguistic and social order of the frontier zone.

Travel writing and natural science: Anders Sparrman’s Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope The first travel writer to ‘collect a sample’ of the language of the Xhosa people for his readers was Anders Sparrman, a renowned Swedish naturalist and prominent disciple of Linnaeus himself, who went to the Cape in 1772 to scientifically investigate the geography, flora, fauna, and human inhabitants of the region. When Captain Cook’s second circumnavigatory expedition landed at Table Bay later that year, Sparrman joined the party on board the Resolution, but afterwards he

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20 Grammars of Colonialism

returned to the Cape in order to conduct further exploration into the interior. The success of Cook’s first expedition had brought fascinating evidence of exotic lands to a European reading public, in the form of pictures, description, and the collection of specimens and trophies on a mammoth scale. Interest in Cook’s second voyage, so much more ambitious in scale than the first, was therefore at a premium. However, while Sparrman’s association with the Cook expedition could only have served to make his account more appealing to the general reader, his real interest lay in the Cape portion of his travels, as the work’s title indicates – in English translation it appeared as A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, and Round the World: But Chiefly into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffres, from the Year 1772 to 1776. As was quite customary in travel writing of the period, Sparrman justified his entry into print by emphasizing the ways in which his account of the Cape improved upon those that had preceded it. This was, he asserted, a narrative which not only described new regions of the African interior, but also inaugurated a new kind of travel writing, framed around the methods of systematic, accurate description developed within natural history. Sparrman emphasized his status within the scientific establishment, particularly underlining his connections to Linnaeus, who had backed the initial plan for the voyage (Sparrman 1805: I, p. xv). He was, he proclaimed, a reliable observer and a man of learning, whose twin commitments were, as the preface to the English edition of the Voyage puts it, to ‘science’ and to ‘truth’ (ibid., p. v). In this way Sparrman distinguished himself from the outlandish and ‘marvellous’ claims of earlier travellers, sternly cautioning readers that ‘a great many prodigies and uncommon appearances, about which I have frequently been asked [  ] are not to be found in my journal’ (ibid., p. xvi). The travelogue was arranged chronologically, interspersing narrative with natural historical data and analysis. Sparrman as ‘natural scientist’ justified this journal format by insisting that it served to highlight the role of experience in the arrangement of information presented. The narrative of his travels, in other words, would act as an index of the credibility of his observations: The arranging by way of journal the occurrences and events which I have described, though in certain respects it be not the best method, is yet in general, the most natural. [   ] The greatest advantage accruing from this method is, that hereby it becomes easier both for the writer and reader to distinguish, what is the actual result of the

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 21

22 Grammars of Colonialism

Thus Sparrman, characterizing his work as reliable and orderly, used the format of a narrative while peppering it with scientific description and Linnaean binomial classificatory terms, by which he simultaneously named and classified the landscape he travelled through. His writing hinged on the relationship between experience and science, and his efforts to make the former conform to the latter; it was his stated intention to submit the vagaries of the travelling experience to the organizing processes of natural history. It was the frontier zone, or ‘country of the Hottentots and Caffres’, which most interested Sparrman: a region which few European travellers had visited, and which had never been subject to his kind of scientific scrutiny. Travelling there, however, was by no means easy. Sparrman’s narrative traced a journey eastward from the Cape into a social environment that was increasingly polyglot and alien, as well as dangerous and unstable. Staying with colonists in the Riet Valley, Sparrman described their attempts to teach him some basic words of Khoi which would be useful for the journey. He reported that Boer settlers, and particularly children in families with Khoikhoi servants, acquired the language as a matter of course. For his own part, however, he admitted that the distinctions of the Khoi ‘clicks’, explained to him by his hosts, eluded his less well trained ear: ‘I own that my ears were not nice enough to attend to such minute differences. I must likewise confess, that I did not take pains sufficient to get this point cleared up to me.’ Sparrman’s own mastery of language in this multilingual setting was, he continued, limited to what he perceived as a minimal level of practical utility: ‘it was sufficient for me to learn, in the course of my journey, partly for pleasure, and partly for use, some common words and phrases in the Hottentot language’ (ibid., p. 242). Learning words and phrases might have afforded Sparrman any number of ‘pleasures’: the pleasure of achievement, the pleasure of speaking a new and unfamiliar language, the pleasure of making himself understood in this polyglot linguistic environment, as well as the pleasure – so vividly evident throughout Sparrman’s account – of the natural historian collecting his specimens. However, for the most part it is abundantly clear from his narrative that he was dependent on other means than direct verbal communication in his travels around the frontier zone: either conversation mediated through one

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author’s own experience, from what he has, in defect of this, been obliged to advance on the strength of the information given him by others. (Ibid., p. xx)

or sometimes two interpreters, or the ‘reading’ of gestures, signs, and bodies. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in an account of the party’s encounter with a group of Xhosa men: an interlude in which communication was carried out through a complex and, certainly for Sparrman, decidedly uneasy mix of body language, physical significations, and layers of mediated verbal exchange. One evening, having set up camp, the travelling party were concerned by the arrival of ‘a hord of Caffres’ numbering about a hundred men. Sparrman gave a context to the consternation and fear among his party by recalling the story of a Dutch colonist, Heuppenaer, who had recently been killed in the Xhosa territory while on an elephant-hunting trip. With this vision of Xhosa brutality firmly in mind, Sparrman reported that the Xhosa approached ‘each of them armed with a few hassagais, or a couple of kirries’, walking ‘with an almost affected pride and stateliness in their deportment, as they approached nearer to us’. The swagger with which the Xhosa men approached Sparrman’s party was met by Sparrman’s attempt to bluff them into submission with a show of bravado, by shouting loudly, and emphasizing his superior weaponry by loading and waving his guns around. This mime of Western power – one which Sparrman identified as a common feature of colonial encounters, writing that ‘I knew from experience, that by this means the Indians might be kept in awe just like children’ – was at least partly foiled (as Sparrman tells it) by the actions of his Khoikhoi interpreter, Jan Skeper: I called out Jan Skeper, the most alert and intelligent of all my Hottentots, and had the satisfaction to see him fly to me like a flash of lightning; a proof of his obedience which, indeed, was at this time very agreeable to me; as it was requisite in order to excite in the Caffres a high opinion of our authority and power: but the still higher ideas, and even dread which he had conceived of this nation, put his whole body into a tremor, so that even his teeth chattered in such a manner, that he could not utter a word. (Ibid., p. 274) Naturally, the fear and the chattering teeth were Skeper’s – Sparrman was at pains in his account to emphasize his own coolheaded control of the situation. However that may be, this evident display of fear was a visible reversal of Sparrman’s show of strength, and his subsequent attempt to save the situation, disguising ‘the real reason for [Skeper’s] trembling’ by ‘threaten[ing] him very hard and accost[ing] him in the roughest manner’, was only partially successful. He concludes by revealing that, rather than impressing on the Xhosa men the ‘authority

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 23

24 Grammars of Colonialism

I am not certain, however, whether the Caffres were not more sharpsighted than I wished them to be; however that may be, some of them fixed their eyes upon [Jan Skeper] and laughed. (Ibid., pp. 273–7) Sparrman plays this scene partly for laughs: a theatrical encounter in which the various players negotiated their relationship to one another through physical signification and dumb-show. However, it contains a thread of uneasy discomfort at the problematics of communication which the humour – achieved by loading fear onto the ‘Hottentots’ of the party – is able only partially to efface. Later Sparrman again displays concern to control a communication process which perpetually threatened to slip from his grasp. Jan Skeper’s reaction of fear notwithstanding, Sparrman suggests that communication between Khoi and Xhosa – over which he would have no control, and the import of which he would not understand – was a serious threat to be guarded against: Whenever the interpreter of the Caffres offered, which he did several times, to enter into a private conversation with my Hottentot, I constantly took care to prevent it. (Ibid., p. 277) Clearly the loyalty of ‘his’ ‘Hottentot’ was, despite the possessive adjective, a cause for anxiety. And in fact, although Sparrman’s narrative emphasizes the ways in which he succeeded in retaining control of the situation, this control appears tenuous, constantly threatening to slide from under him in the face of disruptive laughter, incomprehensible language, and uncertain social relationships. He continues to relate the episode as a struggle to ‘read’ the situation and the intentions of the Xhosa men, to assert his authority over them, and to retain his status in the eyes of his Khoikhoi servants. For example, the party of Xhosa accounted for their arrival by telling Sparrman that they had come to see if he was intending to trade for their cattle, and he responds as follows: In order to prevent their sitting down without previously being asked, I told them without delay by means of their interpreters, that they had my leave to sit down, whilst I gave my answer on the subject of their proposed commerce. (Ibid., p. 277)

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and power’ of his own presence, it was possible that the proceedings had simply amused them:

Finally, both parties separated to camp for the night. Sparrman, still uncertain and evidently anxious as to the intentions of the Xhosa, went to keep an eye on them, accompanied by his friend Immelman. The pair observed them as they slaughtered an animal for supper, noticing with some confusion that the Xhosa had abandoned their weapons for the night, and appeared utterly unconcerned by their European observers: ‘indeed, they did not pay the least regard to our being present’ (ibid., p. 281). The whole account is laced with repeated allusions to the Xhosa as a physical threat, and intimations that they were thieves, but nothing in their behaviour appears to have corroborated these interpretations and ultimately Sparrman remained entirely in the dark as to their true intentions. As his party settled down for the night, having taken care to fortify their camp, he acknowledges his imagining of the Xhosa, and expresses an uneasily mingled sense of relief and disappointment that his sanguine fantasies had not been fulfilled, reporting tellingly that Upon the whole we slept tolerably secure: and though, even after such ample preparations for our defence, we thought ourselves happy to escape being attacked by the enemy, yet still we could not help wishing that we had been able to gratify our friends with an account of an assault on the part of the Caffres. (Ibid., pp. 282–3) Ultimately, Sparrman’s story places him in control of the communicative situation he found himself in, despite his inability to speak the languages of the frontier zone. The narrative turns on a marked, threeway categorical distinction between its actors – the Khoikhoi as servants, timid and docile; the Xhosa as warriors, confident and proud, but unpredictable; and the white traveller, as choreographer of the situation, whose authority is put to the test (but ultimately confirmed) by the communicative difficulties of the situation. At the same time, however, the story also reveals the limits of Sparrman’s power, particularly with regard to language. His power to interpret is severely curtailed, leaving him adrift in a situation in which social relationships are complex and hard to read, motivations appeared opaque, boundaries inchoate. Reliance on his Khoikhoi interpreters is revealed to be a risk, their loyalty by no means given, and it takes all of his ingenuity to keep (tenuous) control of this situation. For Sparrman, the encounter as a whole was one of partial communication, of double or uncertain meanings, one in which different groups imagined one another and which he himself,

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 25

with a combination of unease and delight, acknowledges as ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations on all sides. When Sparrman returned to the question of languages, in an Appendix to his second volume, it was to reassert control over them by recasting them as natural scientific data, and thus part of the province over which he was master. He included two glossaries in his travel narrative, one of Xhosa and one of Khoi, compiled from data gathered from Boer colonists, and from Khoikhoi servants and interpreters. The former list comprises fewer than 70 lexical items, almost exclusively concrete nouns; the latter has roughly 150 entries, including a few short phrases from which an interested reader might deduce some minimal morphological and syntactic information. Although differing markedly from one another, both lists share roughly the same lexical semantic domains, typical of ethnographic glossaries of the period, including terms for elements, parts of the body, celestial bodies and natural phenomena, numerals, social and familial relationships, foods, and animals. This whole Appendix contains, as well as the glossaries, a miscellany of material which Sparrman apparently could not, or chose not to, place within the journal format of his narrative. It includes several engravings of animals, and an account of a newly discovered species of rat. This appended material appears in some ways quite awkwardly heterogeneous – after all, rats and glossaries do not at first glance have a great deal in common. However, in fact the rat provides an indication as to how the glossaries are to be read. Sparrman presents it as a scientific specimen, whose classification on the basis of the existing Linnaean system exemplifies the capacity of natural science to encompass and order the new; and this, by implication, is also the purpose of the glossaries. Placing them next to one another, their tabular format reminiscent of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, Sparrman suggests that the languages of the frontier zone, too, were ripe for classification through comparison. The glossary form presents languages as, in essence, lists of names for things; making them appear, in other words, very much like Linnaean taxonomies, as sets of labels by which the world may be named and known. Ignoring linguistic structure, this model of languages-as-labels suggests a stable one-to-one correspondence between words and their referents. It also, for this reason, suggests an immediate kind of equivalence or comparability between different languages on the basis of lexicon, rather than at a higher structural level; and this is precisely what Sparrman intended, suggesting the reader examine them ‘with a view to their mutual comparison’ (ibid., p. 242). Just as, in Linnaean natural history, species are judged as analogous to or distinct from one another

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26 Grammars of Colonialism

through the comparison of a limited number of observable characteristics, so the reader was invited to compare the two glossaries point by point in order to determine the relationship of difference between ‘Hottentot’ and ‘Caffre’. Sparrman underlined this oppositional relation with a brief reference to phonology, couching his argument in gendered terms by explaining that The Caffres do not make a noise with their tongue against the roof of their mouths in speaking, as the Hottentots do, but pronounce their words in a manly and distinct manner, mostly with a strong accent on the penultimate. (Ibid., p. 350)3 Sparrman’s comparative approach to the representation of Xhosa and Khoi operates within the classificatory framework of the work as a whole. The languages are placed next to one another, so that the reader can recognize the difference between Xhosa and Khoi by comparing them to one another. And with language standing metonymically for human group – an analysis invited not least by the description of Xhosa language as ‘manly’ – by extension two groups of human speakers, ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’, could be seen to be definably distinct. As representations of social reality, the wordlists also differ markedly from one another. The Khoi glossary contains terms for slave, servant, and master, and a predominance of imperatives, suggestive of a social and economic order in which the Khoikhoi were incorporated as a servant class: Master, Master of the house, t’Kukoi. Come hither, Heva ha. ——, Jata ha. Come quickly, Susa ha. Do not come, Ha gutti. Give me, Male gu. Give fire, t’Ei mare. Give milk, Bi mare. Order me some drink, Ereka (ibid., pp. 349–51). The Xhosa list, by contrast, illustrates a quite different set of frontier relations revolving around travel, trade, and warfare: A Road, Usala. Javelin, Hassagai, Emkangota. Knife, Sifhatse.

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 27

28 Grammars of Colonialism

The semantic variation between the two lists offers readers a picture of the social order in the eastern Cape. Each list illustrates a different set of communicative scenarios, involving interaction between the Western language-learners and speakers of the language in question – with the Khoikhoi as servants, the Xhosa as warriors. In one sense, these features of the glossaries reinforce Sparrman’s power: they represent social reality and they also, simultaneously, simplify and polarize it, helping to fix it in place. However, they also display to the reader the limited and contingent nature of Sparrman’s mastery of the languages of the frontier zone, since they represent so very clearly a circumscribed model of traveller’s communication, just a few ‘common words and phrases’, ‘partly for pleasure, and partly for use’. If eighteenth-century natural science set out to own the world by naming it, then, in a sense, Sparrman tries to do this twice over. For not only does he demonstrate his power over the landscape of the eastern Cape by apportioning to it Linnaean labels, he also appropriates the frontier zone’s own naming systems – the languages of the Xhosa and Khoikhoi – and attempts to demonstrate how they might themselves become objects of classification, folded into the overarching universal system of Linnaean taxonomy. By doing so, he converts an apparently protean and – for Sparrman – confusing social environment, in which language was a notable obstacle, into a seemingly stable social order. Here, Xhosa and Khoi were again placed side by side, as they had been in the complex and apparently indeterminate social space of the frontier zone, but now Sparrman had the power to reduce those shifting linguistic and social circumstances to an orderly, tabulated form in which difference was fixed: Xhosa and Khoi were separated from one another and converted into appropriate objects of scientific observation and classification. The mutability of social relations was made to conform to the stability of the table. And we see here one possible role of linguistic description in mediating experience: here, language was cast in a natural historical mode, and in this way Sparrman attempted to reassert his scientific authority over it. Language, far from being baffling and exclusionary, became an object of knowledge over which Sparrman

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Waggon, Noto. Copper, Brass, Emsibemsopi. Glass Beads, Sintela. Small red Glass Beads, Lenkitenka (ibid., pp. 353–4).

Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 29

could assert mastery: his was the Linnaean power to name and classify a world apparently rendered domesticated and knowable.

By the end of the eighteenth century, relations around the frontier zone were becoming increasingly fraught and hostile, as Boers, Khoi, San, and Xhosa struggled over livestock and land. At the same time, developments on the European political stage were about to have an irrevocable effect on South Africa. The significance of the Cape to the British, who were rapidly becoming the dominant European maritime power, was appearing increasingly evident since it was the key to trade routes to India. This also made it a target for their enemies, the French. It was primarily the worrying prospect of a French takeover – not interest in the colony for its own sake – which led the British to take temporary occupation in 1795, seizing the Cape from the by-now bankrupt VOC. In February 1803, under the Treaty of Amiens, the Batavian Republic re-took possession, but then in January 1806 the British invaded once more, this time with a view to permanent occupation, and finally took formal possession in 1814–15, at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Although part of the region had been in European hands since 1652, this wrangling over the Cape, culminating in its institution as a British colony, initiated a new phase in its history, bringing it further into Europe’s line of sight and signalling the beginning of serious moves to become involved in and to ‘open up’ South Africa. In this period of political and military upheaval, during the course of the acquisition of the new colony by the British and immediately afterwards, several new accounts of the Cape appeared in print in Europe. The political significance of the region was acknowledged by a wave of books surveying the colony and its prospects; travelling and travel writing were facilitated by the increased accessibility of the interior, thanks in part to the spread of colonial settlement farther from Cape Town; and around the turn of the century, a new era of missionary activity and writing also began at the Cape. All of which, together with increased contact between Europeans and Xhosa people, generated new interest in representations of language on the colonial margins. The first European to attempt a more thorough description of the language of the Xhosa was John Barrow, a travel writer whose work combined the emphases of Linnaean natural history as exemplified by Sparrman, with a new thrust towards systematic information-gathering as a component of colonial control.

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∗∗∗∗∗

30 Grammars of Colonialism

Sir John Barrow’s obituary in the Times, written by his old friend Sir George Staunton, alluded to relatively humble and inauspicious beginnings. Barrow had, wrote Staunton, not been provided with ‘more than the ordinary means of instruction’, and yet he had ‘seized on those means with avidity and industry, and it was his self-education that mainly conferred on him those powers which, when the day of trial arrived, he turned to so good an account’ (Staunton cited in Barrow 1849, p. 207). The only child of North Yorkshire smallholders, Barrow’s talent and drive for learning as a means to social elevation had indeed been the foundation of his career. Having left grammar school and formal education at 14, he went on to travel as a government employee to China, and thence to the Cape of Good Hope as private secretary to the Governor of the colony. When he returned to Britain, the travel narratives which he published describing China and South Africa contributed to the making of his reputation. It is clear, not least from the autobiography written at the end of his long life, that Barrow’s ascent to the position of a powerful and respected public figure and man of letters was dependent on a number of key factors: notably, his assiduous cultivation of the patronage of powerful men, and his self-education, through which he promoted himself as an able and reliable, if essentially amateur, mathematician, cartographer, and natural scientist. In all these efforts, Barrow also presented himself as a dedicated patriot and servant of his country, ever eager to find new ways of serving Britain’s overseas interests through exploration, diplomacy, and the gathering of knowledge. These motivations, characteristic of Barrow’s career as a whole, intersect strikingly in his Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa, published in two volumes in 1801 and 1804, during, and immediately following, Britain’s first annexation of the Cape. Barrow’s stated motivations in writing the Travels were scientific, political, and patriotic. This was a period marked by a new interest in and ambition for the relationship between the Cape and Europe: Barrow was convinced of the great strategic and economic value of the colony to British interests, and determined to persuade his readership to adopt this view. He dedicated his first volume to his patron, the then Secretary for War and former Home Secretary, Henry Dundas, Under whose auspices, the extensive and important colony of the Cape of Good Hope was acquired and annexed to the British Empire,

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Colonization and collecting language: John Barrow’s Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa

Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 31

This first volume, published with the Cape under British control, described the colony in terms of its natural attributes and resources, including ‘sketches of the physical and moral characters of the various tribes surrounding the settlement of the Cape of Good Hope’. The second volume, published in response to the Dutch resumption of control of the colony, represented and sought to justify the Cape as a strategic asset to the British empire: ‘as a naval and military station; as a point of security to our Indian trade and settlements during a war, and as a territorial acquisition and commercial emporium in time of peace: with a statistical sketch of the whole colony’. Barrow was intent on demonstrating the importance of the Cape to Britain in the strongest possible terms, not just as a temporary possession of strategic value but with a view to permanent colonization. Thus Barrow’s travelogue was designed explicitly to serve a legitimating function in supporting the drive towards permanent colonization of the Cape by the British. As a corollary to this, it was presented as a significant contribution to the consolidation of British power through the collection of knowledge about the colony and its environs. In opening his second volume, Barrow pointed out that the British had made mistakes in dealing with the Cape because of a lack of information, and that the French, ‘our most inveterate and rancorous enemy’, had gained strategic advantages by their more thorough knowledge of the region (1804a, p. 5). The work is hybrid in form: in part what Charles Batten has called an ‘encyclopaedic travel book’ (1978, p. 84),4 attempting to more or less comprehensively and systematically describe all the features of the region; but at the same time, it is laid out largely as an episodic narrative. Accounts of encounters and negotiations with local leaders, for example, are laced with ‘manners and customs’-style ethnographic description, and anecdotes relating to Barrow’s travels through the colony are interspersed with detailed maps of the coastline. The paradigm which structures Barrow’s account of his experiences in South Africa is that of natural history: his claim to authority, like that of Sparrman before him, rested on his self-presentation as a scientific traveller. As Barrow recounted later in his autobiography, the period leading up to his departure for the Cape had been taken up in the study of the gardens at Kew – that famous spatial rendering of natural history as spectacle. Spending three days a week among the hothouses, Barrow recalled, provided the ideal grounding in classificatory botany

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by which our political and commercial interests in the East-Indies have been secured and promoted. (1801, p. v)

which, in my future travels in South Africa, was the greatest service to me, Kew being in possession of a large portion of the flora of the Cape of Good Hope. We examined most of the plants in the order of their systematic classification, and the only interruption we ever met was a royal one, when George III and his Queen came, one day, suddenly into the hothouse where we happened to be; and, of course, we retired. (1847, pp. 1838–9)

In such a short passage Barrow managed to incorporate the themes that unified his career as a whole. The presence at Kew of ‘a large proportion of the flora of the Cape of Good Hope’ vividly evokes the relationship between the appropriative natures of Britain’s colonial ambition on the one hand and classificatory science on the other. Even George III and Queen Charlotte manage to make an appearance in the midst of Barrow’s botanizing, his deference in the face of this ‘interruption’ a reminder to the reader of his dedication to the service of King and nation. The sense of scientific systematicity which Barrow had so enjoyed in his time at Kew provided a framework through which to interpret his subsequent experiences in South Africa. In the Travels he cites over and again his favourite works of classificatory natural history: Pallas, Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis – but particular emphasis is placed upon Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. The text is authoritatively strewn with Linnaean binomial classificatory terms; here, however, in contrast to Sparrman’s earlier work, the language of natural science sits alongside the explicit language of colonial acquisitiveness. Barrow presents the Cape and its environs in terms of material and strategic resources to serve Britain’s interests. Tellingly, the region’s human inhabitants do not feature at all in the first 42 pages of the first volume. When they do finally appear, they are the object of the following sentence, once again justifying Barrow’s ambitions for British colonization: ‘most of the fatal diseases that prevail among the natives should appear to proceed rather from their habits of life than from any real unhealthiness in the climate’ (1801, p. 42). However, this was to be a comprehensive account of the region: a physical, natural, scientific, historical, and political representation of a desirable colonial territory. And so, while for Barrow the Cape was a space to explore and to possess without impediment, at the same time its human populations were of undeniable interest to him: as future colonial subjects, as resources to be exploited, as threats to be contained, and as objects of ethnographic scrutiny. Both the classificatory gaze which characterizes the work as a whole, and Barrow’s colonizing agenda, are clearly in evidence when Barrow turns to

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32 Grammars of Colonialism

describe the colonial frontier zone of the eastern Cape. This was a major selling point of the Travels: Barrow offered, for the first time in print, a detailed, first-hand account of the eastern frontier region, compiled in the course of several quite lengthy journeys to the frontier zone. Barrow’s purposes in making these trips were both political and scientific; he reported Governor Macartney’s instructions to him in the following terms: We are shamefully ignorant even of the geography of the country; we have no map that embraces one-tenth part of the colony; I neither know nor can I learn where this Graaf Reynet lies – whether it is five hundred or a thousand miles from Cape Town. I am further informed that the Kaffirs, with their cattle, are in possession of the Zuur-veldt, the finest grazing country in the colony, and that these people and the boors are perpetually fighting and mutually carrying off each other’s cattle. These matters must no longer be tolerated, and my wish is that some adjustment should be made between these two people. Now, [  ] information on these and various other points is my object, and my experience assures me that you are the person I can most confidently rely on to acquire for me that information. (1847, p. 141) There is no doubt that this extract is typical of Barrow’s self-presentation as a valued public servant, ventriloquizing Macartney’s trust and reliance as a means to point up his own pivotal role in the colonial endeavour; it is also, however, illustrative of the unstable situation in which the new colonial regime had found itself. The British had inherited from the Dutch a situation of worsening instability in the region – simplified in the above account into a mutual process of fighting and the carrying off of cattle. In fact, as we have already seen, the Boer colonists there were involved in frequent clashes with the Xhosa; Boers continued to expand their settlements into land controlled by the Xhosa, which exacerbated tensions still further. In 1799 war had broken out again between Boers and the Xhosa chiefdoms, which lasted until 1802. All sorts of other people became involved in the conflict, too – individual Khoikhoi and San people, for example, joined up with Xhosa groups, as did Boer rebels, and deserters from the British forces. Into this situation was sent the young Barrow, commissioned by the Governor as a colonial representative on a diplomatic mission to meet, negotiate with, and pacify the frontier populations. At the same time, as is clear from the above extract, this was to be a studied exercise in information-gathering. The Governor, acutely aware of the gaps in British knowledge of the colonial periphery, charged Barrow with the

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 33

systematic recording of his observations, and more particularly with the mapping of the region (see for example Barrow 1847, p. 141). He was also asked to report on what ‘Commerce or Intercourse might be carried out with the Hottentots, Caffres, or other savage nations on our Boundary with safety, propriety and advantage’ (Macartney to Barrow, cited in Theal 1897–1905: II, p. 111). So, as Barrow recorded in his autobiography, the equipment he packed to take on his first mission included the following: A small pocket sextant of Ramsden of 5-inch radius, an artificial horizon, a case of mathematical instruments, a pocket compass, a small telescope, and a double-barrelled rifle-gun [  ]. The only books I carried with me were Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis and the Systema Naturae, which were of great importance, affording me both comfort and assistance. (1847, p. 143) Barrow’s list is quite dazzlingly succinct in its summation of the tactics of colonial control (Figure 1). But, while pocket sextants and doublebarrelled rifle-guns were undoubtedly useful, it was his books of natural history which apparently afforded him the greatest ‘comfort’ as well as ‘assistance’. Offering the solace of the familiar, they also furnished the means to tame the unfamiliar, via an overarching global schema through which it might be interpreted, classified, and thus domesticated. Thus equipped, Barrow set off into the colonial border region: the frontier zone at the periphery of British control, polyglot, shifting, and politically volatile. His diplomatic missions were concerned with the visible presence and exercise of colonial power, and with the establishment and enforcement of ‘proper limits’ to the colonial border between the Boer colonists and the Xhosa (Barrow 1801, p. 111). Diplomacy, and the attempt to consolidate British power over the colonial periphery, provided the narrative frame to Barrow’s account of the people of the eastern frontier zone: Boers, Xhosa, Khoikhoi, and San. Into this narrative, Barrow threaded his information-collection, observation, measurement, and painstaking record-keeping. And in keeping with the colonial remit of the mission, Barrow assessed as he observed, his acquisitive colonial gaze noting possibilities for trade and agriculture on this first political mission into Xhosa territory. Measuring and tabulating such things as a ‘Catalogue of Useful Woods’, Barrow anatomized his surroundings as resources available to an incoming colonial power. The ethnographic description included in this section of Barrow’s first volume is thorough and elaborate, in keeping with the ‘encyclopaedic’

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34 Grammars of Colonialism

intent of his work. Barrow offered details relating to the practices, beliefs, history, physiognomy, and relations between the people of the frontier zone, notably the Xhosa and the Khoikhoi. He also discussed language in some detail, again focusing on Xhosa and Khoi, and included a pair of wordlists for the two languages – unlike Sparrman’s, these were collected from native speakers of Xhosa as well as Khoi, although they are extremely sparse, with only 23 Khoi lexical items and 34 for Xhosa. The lists comprise the kind of terms which Barrow described elsewhere as ‘most likely to have retained their primitive names’: heavenly bodies, natural phenomena, and numerals, considered by Barrow as by other travellers, philosophers, and philologists, as comprising a ‘core vocabulary’ least subject to change or borrowing (Barrow 1804b, p. 243). In this sense the wordlists are unlike those of Barrow’s predecessor Sparrman, whose collections and the variation between them placed the speakers

Figure 1 Wordlist from John Barrow’s Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa (Reproduced by courtesy of the John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester.)

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 35

Figure 1 (Continued)

of Khoi as servants, and Xhosa as warriors. Instead, Barrow’s wordlists represent nothing short of specimen-collecting to a set pattern. The lists are laid out as columns side by side in order that ‘the following brief specimen of the Kaffer language, with the synonimous [sic] words in that of the Hottentots, may serve to shew how little resemblance they bear to each other’ (1801, p. 219). In other words, the purpose of the wordlists was again, as for Sparrman, comparative, and the purpose of the comparison was once again the demonstration of difference. As well as the lists, Barrow provided an accompanying commentary in which he elaborated on some of the characteristics of the two languages and the distinctions between them. His description of Khoi, as with previous accounts, dwelled at some length on the implosive consonants or ‘clicks’ which he regarded as the defining feature of the language. Referring to its reliance on implosives Barrow wrote of Khoi that

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 37

Elaborating on this extraordinariness, he further explained: the noise made by the dental is exactly that which is sometimes used to express impatience, and the palatial [sic] is much more full and sonorous, and not unlike the clacking of a hen that has young chickens. This sound is never made to precede or to follow a syllable, but is thrown out at the same time, and incorporated with it. (Ibid., p. 160) This strangeness can be seen even more starkly illustrated in Barrow’s brief, comparative description of San, in which he wrote, The nature of their language is the same as that of the Hottentots, though they are not able to understand each other. In the latter, the action of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, or the teeth, is seldom used on more than one syllable of a word. In the language of the Bosjesman, there is scarcely a syllable enunciated without it; and this action is performed by them much more forcibly than by the Hottentots. Notwithstanding the difficulty for a European to acquire such a language, several of the Sneuwbergers speak it as fluently as the natives, from their having been committed, in their infancy, to the care of Bosjesman nurses. (Ibid., p. 290) Once again, we find a sense of wonder and dismay: these languages, so alien and apparently unlearnable, were nevertheless spoken by colonists in the polyglot frontier zone. Barrow’s rendering of Khoi and San speech for his readers is dominated by a sense of unease at the languages’ apparently ‘difficult’ and ‘extraordinary’ nature. No such concerns, however, colour Barrow’s description of Xhosa. We have already seen that he introduced the language by means of difference, emphasizing in no uncertain terms ‘how little resemblance’ it bears to ‘Hottentot’. He further attempted to represent, and to categorize, it by describing its sounds: ‘in the enunciation it is soft, fluent, and harmonious’. In other words, it sounds like a language, and what is more, one which is pleasing to Barrow’s (British) ear. To make this difference, and inequality, between Xhosa and Khoi

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Of all the methods that have been adopted in language by different nations for the purpose of expressing objects, and conveying ideas in a clear and unequivocal manner, that which has been hit upon by the Hottentots is certainly the most extraordinary. (1801, p. 160)

38 Grammars of Colonialism

Has neither the monotonous mouthing of the savage, nor the nasal nor guttural sounds that prevail in almost all European tongues. It is as different from that of the Hottentots as the latter is from the English. (Ibid., p. 218) In order to locate Xhosa, Barrow presented the language via a series of comparisons and analogies. He contrasted the language against the ‘monotonous mouthing of the savage’, directing the reader again to the Khoi and particularly the San languages so pejoratively described by him elsewhere. He also asserted the superiority of Xhosa, at least in phonological terms, to some European tongues – those characterized by ‘nasal’ sounds (notably, of course, the language of that ‘most inveterate and rancorous enemy’, the French) or ‘guttural’ sounds (the Germanic languages). Finally, he insisted that the difference between Xhosa and Khoi was as great as that between Khoi and English. Thus, very succinctly, Barrow outlined two separate but analogous linguistic (and, by implication, cultural and ‘racial’) hierarchies. In the environs of the Cape, a classificatory distinction and radical inequality was set up between the ‘harmonious’ language of the Xhosa on the one hand and the ‘savage’ ‘mouthings’ of Khoi and San on the other: languages which abutted each other geographically, but which were worlds apart culturally, conceptually, linguistically. Within Europe, a hierarchy is simultaneously implied between English, the superior language, and its ‘nasal’ and ‘guttural’ counterparts across the Channel. The way in which Barrow maps these linguistic hierarchies onto one another is somewhat crude, but no less effective for that. In using these methods Barrow inaugurated what was essentially a nascent system of ethnolinguistic classification: he implied that a European-centred understanding of language and nationhood or ethnos as coterminous with one another was appropriate to the analysis of the situation around the eastern Cape frontier zone. A demonstration of categorical difference was the explicit motivation for Barrow’s descriptions and lexical ‘specimens’ of ‘Kaffer’ and ‘Hottentot’, and this hierarchical arrangement between the two groups, already marked linguistically, was underlined by reference to other tropes of inequality. Barrow defined the Xhosa and the Khoikhoi physically, associating their appearance immediately with their psychological features, in gendered terms. For Barrow, Khoikhoi men were physically

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recognizable, Barrow resorted to the mapping of one hierarchy through another. Xhosa, he wrote,

weak and womanish, and this was a marker of their psychological inactivity or ‘effeminacy’: ‘[they show] no protuberance of muscle to indicate strength; but a body delicately formed as that of a woman marks the inactive and effeminate mind of a Hottentot’ (ibid., p. 157). Under British protection, he assumed, they would therefore be the willing servants of the colony. The independent Xhosa, by contrast, were warriors, supremely masculine in both body and mind, as Barrow repeatedly noted and admired: The men [  ] were the finest figures I ever beheld: they were tall, robust, and muscular; their habits of life had induced a firmness of carriage, and an open, manly manner, which, added to the good nature which overspread their features, shewed them at once to be equally unconscious of fear, suspicion, and treachery. (Ibid., p. 169) Thus the two-way division between ‘Bosjesmen’/‘Hottentots’ and ‘Kaffers’, in which ‘Kaffer’ was the privileged term, was marked for Barrow not only in language, but as a gendered distinction in both body and mind. His arguments are reminiscent of Sparrman, who had also gendered the linguistic division between the Khoi tongue and ‘manly and distinct’ Xhosa. For Barrow’s imperialist vision, the independent Xhosa provided an admirable model of masculinity, combining mental and physical strength, martial prowess, and moral virtue. Finally, Barrow found evidence for the hierarchical relationship he suggested between Khoi and Xhosa by speculating briefly on the origin of the two languages. Khoi must, he suggested, be onomatopoeic in its formation: The croaking of a frog is readily recognized in kraal or kraaie; the lowing of an ox in ‘mnoo; the mewling of a cat in meau; the neighing of a horse in hahoe; the breaking of the sea upon the shore in hurroo; all of which are correspondent words in the language of this people. Many instances, besides these, sufficiently prove that the vocables were adopted in imitation of the sounds proceeding from the different objects they were meant to express. (Ibid., p. 161) Khoi apparently showed clear evidence of its imitative beginnings; this theory of linguistic origins was not unusual to eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury thinkers on language. But this odd and odd-sounding tongue had, according to Barrow, atrophied at a very early stage in linguistic development, which he conceived as progressing from simple onomatopoeic

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All languages in their infancy consisted probably of simple or monosyllabic sounds; but, as these could convey only a very limited number of ideas, recourse was had to inflexion of voice and composition of the simple sounds to make the vocabulary more copious. The division of such simple sounds into their elements, and by the various combinations of these elements to form an almost unlimited number of new sounds, was one of the most wonderful inventions in the history of man, and much beyond the genius of a Hottentot. He has done, however, all that he found to be necessary by a very few compound words, and by the clacking of the tongue. (Ibid., p. 161) In Barrow’s view the Khoi language was, therefore, defined by the supposed conceptual limitations of its speakers. In his account, linguistic development in human history had been driven by the need to find new words for new ideas; lacking the ideas that made these developments necessary, the ‘Hottentot’ had contented himself with ‘a very few compound words, and by the clacking of the tongue’. Approaching the Xhosa language, by contrast, Barrow was moved to marvel at the presence of such a splendidly melodious form of speech in what he terms a ‘savage nation’. Insofar as it offered an insight into the history of its speakers, the language must, he averred, be a relic of a previously more elevated state: Not the smallest vestige of a written character is to be traced among them; but their language appears to be the remains of something far beyond that of any savage nation. (Ibid., p. 218) Barrow’s discussion of language in Travels in Southern Africa, scattered through the 1801 volume, covers Khoi, San, and Xhosa, and offers lexical material, phonological description, ethnolinguistic classification, and historical/philosophical speculation on linguistic origins. Yet it is, however, based on precious little direct linguistic knowledge on Barrow’s part, nor does it appear in any way designed to facilitate communication in the languages concerned for future travellers to the region. This is a rendering of language predicated entirely on observation, comparison, and classification. Mary Louise Pratt has commented on the curious air of detachment in Barrow’s narrative, and this certainly extends to his

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monosyllables to polysyllables. While most languages had come to be capable of the miracle of near-limitless recombination, Khoi had to make do with a little minimal compounding, and the notorious ‘clicks’:

description of the languages of the frontier zone (Pratt 1992, p. 59). There are moments in the narrative, however, where interaction between European and African appears, behind or at the edges of Barrow’s ostensibly detached, scientific gaze. In one such example, Barrow uses the language of the Khoikhoi as a means to diagnose the limits of their scientific knowledge. Beginning by using the authoritative, generalizing, ethnographic present, he writes that They have a name for the sun, another for the moon, and a third for the stars: but this is the extent of their astronomical knowledge. The division of time, by the motion of the heavenly bodies, was too subtle an operation, and required too much observation and profound thinking, for the careless and inattentive mind of a Hottentot. The period of a day may almost be said to be the extent of his reckoning. When he has occasion to refer to the time of the day, like all other nations who are without machines for marking the divisions of time, he will point out the place in the heavens where the sun then was. The periods that have past he can express only by saying they were before or after some memorable event. [  ] I know not how far the numerals in his language proceed, but none of those of our party could tell beyond five, nor could any of them put two numbers together but by the assistance of their fingers. Yet they are very far from being a stupid people. (1801, pp. 159–60) Barrow’s tone is commanding and detached: the Khoikhoi have no knowledge of medicine; they have no knowledge of astronomy; their ability to talk about the past is limited; their minds are too restless, inadequate to the tasks of analysis. His words here are particularly significant when read alongside the Khoi wordlist which appears 50 or so pages later – that sparse lexicon appears all the more authoritative and complete, since it maps almost exactly onto this ethnographic description. ‘They have a name for the sun, another for the moon, and a third for the stars’; the wordlist in its brevity encompasses, therefore, the Khoikhoi conception of the universe. Terms for ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ encompass their understanding of time. Numerals from one to five express the extent of their counting system. Thus the wordlist represents in a different, tabulated form the same information contained in this ethnographic description. Just as with Barrow’s account of the origins of Khoi, the reader is invited to see this severely limited, referential model of communication as straightforwardly reflecting the features of the language, and mapping directly onto the Khoikhoi view of the

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 41

world. But there, at the end of the above passage, the generality of Barrow’s writing slips to reveal something of the particular, the circumstances of encounter in which his knowledge – and the material for his wordlist – was gathered. ‘I know not’, he wrote, ‘how far the numerals in his language proceed, but none of those in our party could tell beyond five, nor could any of them put two numbers together but by the assistance of their fingers’. Here we have the communicative setting, and the informants, behind Barrow’s authoritative pronouncements on the Khoikhoi language, culture, and conception of the universe. Barrow, in the midst of his travels, trying to question the Khoikhoi servants in his travelling party. The communicative process was made more difficult, since his knowledge of Khoi was nonexistent. We can imagine Barrow pointing as he questioned: what is the name for this? And for this over here? The referentiality and the limitations are those of the communicative setting; but the specificity of this communicative setting is all but concealed by Barrow’s air of scientific detachment. Its limitations are ascribed to what appear to be gaps in the Khoi lexicon, and in turn explained by the language’s supposed conceptual inadequacy. The specificity and extreme limitations of the communicative settings in which Barrow found himself are more clearly revealed in a later discussion with the chief of the Rharhabe Xhosa, Ngqika, and his advisers, in which Barrow was unusually candid about the difficulties he faced. And for once, Barrow made explicit reference to his reliance on interpreters, who elsewhere in his narrative are almost entirely obscured (see for example 1801, pp. 193–6). As he regretfully reported, So different are the opinions and the feelings of different nations concerning religion, and so difficult do the most civilized people find it to express their notions clearly and consistently of the ‘unknown God’, that little satisfactory information can be collected on those points without a very familiar and extensive knowledge of the language of the people among whom the inquiry is made, which was far from being the case in the present instance. (1801, p. 214) Through the medium of his Khoikhoi interpreter, Barrow conducted an interesting but ultimately unsatisfactory discussion with Ngqika on the subject of the supernatural, religion, and beliefs concerning death and the afterlife, and Barrow’s bafflement and frustration are evident. Finally he concluded,

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 43

Barrow implied that it is the use of a ‘Hottentot’ interpreter which made this exchange so difficult – either because this interpreter was mediating between two languages (Xhosa and, presumably, Cape Dutch) in which he was not completely fluent, or because a Khoikhoi interpreter was less likely to grasp such ‘abstruse points’. But this is also tantamount to a more general confession that certain ideas – notably, about ‘the unknown God’ – pushed translation to its limits. Attempts at discussion of such complex, culturally specific topics as beliefs about death and the afterlife led, quite simply, to ‘embarrassment’. For all of these problems, however, Barrow like Sparrman treated languages not primarily as means to communicate, but as features of human groups by which they could be described and classified – and did so on the basis of very limited linguistic data. The paradigms of natural history, as laid out in particular by Carl Linnaeus, structured these eighteenth-century analyses of language. The process of classification through comparison, fundamental to natural science, was adapted to describe the linguistic and social environment of the colonial frontier zone. This region – polyglot, socially and politically complex – was interpreted through a bifurcated ethnolinguistic division between Khoikhoi and Xhosa. The Khoikhoi were cast as the servants of the colony; the Xhosa as warriors living outside the colony. At the same time, both Sparrman and Barrow relied on a referential model of languages-aslabels, implied by their wordlist models, which imbued them with a stability and a certainty analogous to, and certainly compatible with, their Linnaean projects of comparison and classification. Classifying the ‘nomade’ language: Heinrich Lichtenstein’s Travels in Southern Africa The research methods employed by Barrow in gathering data for Xhosa – pointing at objects and asking their names, listening to its ‘sounds’, and talking to Xhosa-speakers through his ‘Hottentot interpreter’ – were treated scathingly by a traveller who soon followed him into the eastern Cape frontier zone. When the Batavian Republic re-took possession of the Cape in 1803, the German naturalist Heinrich Lichtenstein accompanied the new Governor General Janssens as a medical attendant and tutor to his son. He, like Barrow, travelled

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As little information was likely to be gained on such abstruse points through the medium of a Hottentot interpreter, the conversation was turned to other subjects less embarrassing, and such as came more immediately before the senses. (Ibid., p. 215)

extensively in the colony, including making a journey into the Xhosa territory in the company of Janssens, before returning to Germany after the British takeover in 1806. The two-volume account of his experiences, Travels in Southern Africa, was published in Berlin in 1810 and 1812. To return to the epigram with which we began, Lichtenstein argued for the particular significance of language study to the student of ‘savage nations’ – in this instance, the Xhosa: There is no doubt but that the situation of a savage nation, the degree of civilization which exists in it, and above all, the relationship which it bears with other nations, can never be accurately understood, and properly estimated, without a competent knowledge of its language; – without understanding equally the mode of pronouncing it, its structure, and its compass. (1812–15: I, Appendix, p. 1) Language was, Lichtenstein asserted, diagnostic of the mentality and cultural development of its speakers, and a key to the relationships between different human groups. One needed, however, a ‘competent knowledge’ of a language in order to put it to such purposes. Among the several faults which Lichtenstein found with earlier travel writers on South Africa – not least, both Sparrman and Barrow – was their glancing and inadequate treatment of the Xhosa language. While confessing to being anything but an expert on the subject, he would endeavour, he assured his readers, ‘to exculpate my work from being liable to the same observation’ (ibid., p. 6). Lichtenstein’s more thorough description of Xhosa was, however, hedged around with uncertainty: regarding the frontier zone as a fluid and confusing environment, he saw the Xhosa language as fluid and confusing as well. Just as Barrow’s had been, Lichtenstein’s mission to the frontier zone was one of militarized diplomacy. His narrative describes a mission in which General Janssens, with Lichtenstein in attendance, had attempted to broker peace between the Xhosa and Boers, to reassure the frontier Khoikhoi, to secure the eastern border of the colony, and to establish the authority of the colonial regime – in this case, the new, shortlived Batavian government. Lichtenstein provided plenty of natural historical detail, as he travelled around collecting specimens of the flora and fauna of the region; beside his list of equipment for the pursuit of natural scientific research, Barrow’s appears thoroughly restrained. As well as compasses, a telescope, microscope, and thermometer, he included

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A case of anatomical instruments, two points of orpiment for preserving birds and quadrupeds, and a cask of brandy for keeping reptiles, &c. Some thousands of needles of various sizes for fastening insects, tin boxes for insects, and butterfly nets. Twelve wooden boxes for receiving my daily collections, some stronger ones with divisions for minerals; and a large provision of paper for drying plants. He also carried what he describes as ‘my library’, comprising the travel narratives of his predecessors, including Kolb, Sparrman and Barrow, as well as ‘companions for my hours of relaxation’, ‘Göthe’s Works, Lessing’s Nathan, Schiller’s Don Carlos, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, and Tasso’s Aminta’. He also included ‘a variety of books on Natural History’, particularly ‘those that had all the latest discoveries’ – but, he added tellingly, ‘thanks to the inexhaustible treasures of Nature in Southern Africa, I seldom found them of much use to me’ (ibid., p. 20). Thus, as much as he set about taking charge of his surroundings through the processes of natural science, Lichtenstein constantly reveals the limits of Linnaean classification as a frame for interpreting experience. As Carli Coetzee points out, Lichtenstein was concerned ‘with placing the observing, narrating self in the text’ (Coetzee 1992, p. 73). He was anything but a detached observer: the landscape through which he travels is dramatized as a place of human encounter, of diplomatic exchanges and hunting parties, of physical danger and discomfort, and moments of excitement. Indeed, it is precisely the distance between the secure detachment of the scientific observer and his own experiences of travel that lends dramatic structure to Lichtenstein’s narrative: he repeatedly returns to the ways in which the people, animals, and landscape of the eastern Cape exceeded or evaded his attempts to classify and botanize them into submission, refusing to behave in the obedient manner of scientific specimens. At one point, for example, Lichtenstein celebrated the party’s discovery of ‘a great many scorpions and a species of large poisonous spider’, making ‘a rich booty for my collection’. That very night, having broken his camp bed, Lichtenstein was forced to sleep on the ground, only to discover in the morning that his would-be specimens had nearly been the death of him in the night: This accident had put me into no small danger, for [  ] I found under my coverlid a number of these dangerous insects, probably some of which we had chased the evening before from their hiding places, and who here sought a refuge, attracted by the warmth. (1812–15: I, p. 429)

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 45

Lichtenstein was not, by any means, the untroubled monarch of all he surveyed in the Xhosa territory. The physical and emotional experiences of travel – whether pain or pleasure, discomfort or delight – are constantly present in his narrative, making impossible any sense of detached observation. Over and again he reports his hunger or thirst, being burned by the sun or cooled by the rain, frightened by scorpions or covered in flies.5 Thus, if this was a journey (and a narrative) to take charge of the land and its inhabitants, animal and human, then it was not a particularly successful one. Rather than dictating the terms of engagement, Lichtenstein implied that just as often, the party found themselves dictated to instead. This uncertainty of perspective was at its most obvious when it came to the region’s various groups of human inhabitants. All of these people were, Lichtenstein noted, unpredictable and peripatetic, prone to staying where they were not wanted, and moving about when they were required to keep still. Xhosa people in particular had, as he put it, the distinctive and unnerving habit of ‘roving about’ (ibid., p. 418). Thus it was with a palpable air of relief that Lichtenstein recorded how the party’s encampment, made in a different location but in exactly the same formation every day, served as an island of order in the midst of all this confusion and flux. The tents, the wagons, the horses, and oxen were always arranged by ‘the same rule’, so that In this way our camp resembled a little wandering village, in which every one soon knew his place with the utmost exactness, and easily learned the business, which, as a citizen of the little state, was allotted him for the good of the whole. As the country in which from this time we generally encamped was very much the same, a small plain near the bed of a river, and under the shade of mimosas [  ]; and as we always sent our wagons forwards that every thing might be in order against our arrival, so it often appeared as if we had only been out for the day, and returned to our home again at night. (Ibid., pp. 413–14) This ‘little state’ was a bulwark against the uncertainties of the frontier zone, being a space in which ‘every one knew his place’, and where ‘every thing’ could be predicted to be ‘in order’. But, as Lichtenstein immediately acknowledged, the encampment offered only the illusion of social and spatial stability. In reality, the party were experiencing the flux which he saw as distinctive of all human and animal populations in South Africa, at the mercy of the instructions or compulsions of nature:

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46 Grammars of Colonialism

We were indeed become perfect nomads, sharing the lot of most of the inhabitants of Southern Africa, whom nature disposes, or compels, to stated changes in habitation. The colonists are driven by the snow from the mountains down to the Karroo; the Caffre hordes forsake their vallies [sic] when food for their cattle begins to fail, and seek others where grass is more abundant; the Bosjesman is fixed to no single spot of his barren soil, but every night reposes his weary head in a different place from the former; the numerous flocks of light-footed deer, the clouds of locusts, the immeasurable trains of wandering caterpillars, these, all instructed by nature, press forward from spot to spot, searching the necessary means by which that nature is to be supported. (Ibid., p. 414) Lichtenstein treated the ‘wandering life’ as a defining feature of the frontier zone, not just of particular groups within it – not only were the Xhosa prone to ‘roving about’, even English deserters ‘wandered as vagabonds’ (p. 391). The moral implications of this nomadic existence were clear: the ‘roving life’ of Boers in the region, he wrote, ‘wandering hither and thither without any settled habitation’, was ‘calculated to increase [  ] unamiable propensities in their disposition’ (ibid., p. 383). How does one represent language spoken in such a disturbingly transient environment? Lichtenstein owned, in his Appendix on the Xhosa language, that it was partly his own travelling about that had made linguistic description difficult: ‘he [  ] who would catch and describe the spirit of it has no easy task, especially if that man be a traveller who has only had an opportunity of knowing one or two of the tribes’ (1812– 15: I, Appendix, p. 1). Some of the Vocabulary was, Lichtenstein reports, ‘collected by myself in the course of my travels’, probably from some of the Xhosa people he met, and from the unnamed Khoikhoi interpreter or interpreters travelling with his party.6 The rest was borrowed from a Dutch missionary, Johannes van der Kemp, to whom we shall return in the next chapter. So, Lichtenstein recognized that his Vocabulary was possibly inaccurate, but he nevertheless included his whole collection of Xhosa words and phrases in order to make some kind of assessment of ‘the situation’ of this ‘savage nation’: The number of wants and ideas existing among a people, whether that number is great or small, as well as their relative situation with the countries by which they are surrounded, can never be so efficiently determined as by procuring a collection of their words, the mediums

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 47

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Given this emphasis upon ‘wants and ideas’, it is not surprising that Lichtenstein’s Vocabulary is dominated by nouns, grouped into semantic domains. Lichtenstein also includes ‘specimens of their modes of speaking’, most of which he had apparently compiled himself and from which, as he pointed out, some morphosyntactic information might be deduced; it is presumably to this end that he sometimes gives word-by-word translation directly beneath a Xhosa phrase (ibid., pp. 5, 26–8). The phrases are brief, degrammaticalized and often inaccurate. In this, and the sorts scenarios they represent, they suggest a very limited model of linguistic contact on the road – short inquiries and responses, phrases relating to travel and the weather, comments and imperatives relating to food, as well as phrases indicating the routine problems of communication: I do not understand I do not comprehend it Speak loud, that I may understand I understand it

An diwa Au di kaas T’heeta k’hakulu di ésûeh Di sihle (ibid., p. 27).

The final phrase appears perhaps the most unintentionally revealing of the experiences and wishes of the traveller on the road: Let us go home

Hambane kuduka (ibid., p. 28).

All in all, this was a far larger sample of Xhosa than those of Sparrman or Barrow – with around 600 lexical items, over half of them nouns. It was also one compiled and presented not primarily for the purposes of comparison, with Khoi or other languages, as had been the case for his predecessors, but rather to illustrate the language in something approaching a comprehensive way. And by including examples of the various parts of speech, as well as phrases, Lichtenstein went some way towards making the Xhosa language look like a language, a complex and structured system with grammar and syntax, rather than as a series of loosely-connected words-as-labels. This very recognition of complexity, however, appeared as a problem for Lichtenstein: once he acknowledged Xhosa as a system with internal structure, rather than a nomenclature, then he had to recognize that it was a system he did not understand. As we have seen earlier in the cases of Sparrman and Barrow, the simplicity

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whereby those wants and ideas are expressed, and those relations are defined. (Ibid., p. 1)

of the wordlist model partly constituted a response to the sense of troubling transience engendered in travellers by travel in the eastern Cape frontier zone. It implied stability: a transparent relationship between words and their referents, suggesting the ability to pin down meanings, and to pin down language. Lichtenstein, however, considered the Xhosa language to be mysterious, confusing, difficult to understand; the wordlist’s stability, therefore, was illusory. Xhosa was, he asserted, characterized by ‘intermediate syllables’, the sense of which was ‘little defined, being often very different in one case from what it is in another’ (ibid., p. 28). Indeterminacy, ultimately, was the defining feature of a language as transient and unstable as its speakers: Among a people where no such things exist as the palpable signs of language, who lead beside a nomade [sic] life, and are divided into numerous tribes, at whose rise and fall new dialects arise and old ones are lost – among such a people the language has in it nothing permanent, it shares the fate of those by whom it is spoken, it changes without being improved. (Ibid., p. 1) Thus Lichtenstein’s pervasive concerns at the implications of the wandering life found their way into his Appendix on the Xhosa language. For Lichtenstein, learning language on the road was indistinguishable from learning a language of the road – Xhosa was, he asserted, worryingly temporary and unfixed, although he confessed that it would require more expertise and experience than he possessed to distinguish ‘what is permanent’ from ‘what is fluctuating’ in it (ibid., pp. 1–2). And so Lichtenstein presented his Vocabulary as little more than a snapshot of a fluctuating language in an inchoate social environment: resistant to the impulses of the natural scientist to pin down, reify, and label the phenomena of the natural and social world. But, looking forward, he optimistically suggested that, at the very least, his tentative study of the language might ‘smooth the way for the future happier Inquirer, who has the same desire to investigate the Caffre language upon the spot’ (ibid., p. 2). Referring, as earlier travel writers had not done, to the possibility of learning to speak the Xhosa language from linguistic descriptions, he concluded, But however incomplete may be this Vocabulary, and the remarks annexed to it, I yet hope [  ] that I may, with respect to enquiries into the Caffre languages, as well as on many other points, have

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Language in the Land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’ 49

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rendered myself useful to future travellers. No nation is so savage as not to see, with more favourable eyes, a foreigner who endeavours to express himself in their language; and this feeling, therefore, might be expected from the Caffres, even supposing them to be the most wild and untamed people upon the earth. (Ibid., p. 28)

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Of Translation and Transformation: The Beginning of Missionary Linguistics in South Africa

As he freely acknowledged, Heinrich Lichtenstein had been reliant for much of his linguistic data for Xhosa, as for much of his ethnographic detail, on a man named Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp, who in 1799 had become the first Christian missionary to visit the Xhosa. The mission historian J. Du Plessis characterizes the last two decades of the eighteenth century as the beginning of the ‘new mission era’ in South Africa (1911, p. 61). In Europe, the evangelical revival of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries set off rapid growth in the establishment of Protestant missionary societies, and this proselytizing zeal found an outlet not only among the working classes at home, but also in the many parts of the world to which Europe was directing overseas colonial expansion. Evangelical interest in South Africa was to build steadily, particularly following Britain’s annexation of the Cape Colony. As the London Missionary Society put it at the century’s outset: The conquest made by the English, of the Cape, and its dependencies, seemed to facilitate an entrance by that colony into an immense space, still occupied by heathen darkness.1 Missionary ambitions saw the Cape as an access point to Africa, which appealed both as an ‘immense space’ and because of its occupation by ‘heathen darkness’, and the British takeover, coinciding as it did with the boom in overseas evangelical activity, provided an unsurpassed opportunity to capitalize upon it. By the end of the nineteenth century, South Africa had become one of the most intensively missionized regions in the world (Etherington 1978, p. 24). 51

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The first British group to send missionaries to the Cape were the London Missionary Society (LMS), a putatively interdenominational (though in reality almost exclusively Congregationalist) Protestant organization. Their party was led by Johannes van der Kemp. Van der Kemp’s selection as leader of the mission had been motivated partly by linguistic concerns: he was Dutch, and the Directors of the Society recognized the need for Dutch-speaking missionaries for work at the Cape (Transactions, p. xx). But, equally, he was selected for his energetic missionary zeal, which was directed particularly fervently towards the Xhosa. Having learned of the Xhosa from the published writings of earlier travellers to the eastern Cape, Van der Kemp believed himself to be called by God to evangelize among them (Transactions, p. 324). Van der Kemp’s party arrived at the Cape early in 1799. The missionaries Kicherer and Edwards went to work among the San people to the north, setting up by the banks of the Zak River. Van der Kemp, meanwhile, set off with Edmonds in the direction of the Xhosa living around the colony’s eastern frontier region. The missionaries carried letters of recommendation from General Dundas to permit them safe passage through the eastern Cape frontier zone to their final destination, the Xhosa of Chief Ngqika.2 At the time, the Zuurveld was riven by conflict on all sides – between the followers of the Xhosa Chiefs Ngqika and Ndlambe, between Xhosa and Boer colonists, between Boer colonists and the British colonial state, and in the aftermath of a rebellion of Khoi-San servants against their colonist masters (Elbourne 2002, p. 118). Van der Kemp’s Journal records a short-lived, troubled, and unsuccessful mission. Ngqika’s reception of the party was mixed: initially, he showed concern that the missionaries might be spies for the British; finally, he allowed them to establish a station in the region. Edmonds, however, was ill and miserable, unhappy around the Xhosa and desperate to leave, and Ngqika appeared to the missionaries to be worryingly unpredictable, particularly as political relations in the region became increasingly unstable. The Xhosa proved, for all Van der Kemp’s optimism, resistant to his Christian evangelism. Finally, less than 2 years after arriving, in the midst of worsening tensions between Boers and Xhosa and after Edmonds had already left, Van der Kemp was forced to flee the eastern Cape. In spite of these difficulties, Van der Kemp’s Journal, giving his account of the mission and description of the Ngqika Xhosa, formed

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Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp and the first Christian mission to the Xhosa

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a centrepiece to the first volume of the Transactions of the Missionary Society when it was published in 1803. This Journal offers insight into the circumstances of communication in the frontier zone for travellers such as Van der Kemp and Edmonds. The missionaries travelled with a large party including an interpreter, ‘Oukootzo’, who acted as a negotiator when the party arrived near Ngqika’s court (Transactions, pp. 335–6). Other interpreters were found to facilitate communication: notably a ‘Bengali interpreter’ provided by Ngqika’s mother, probably a runaway slave living among the Xhosa, and Coenraad de Buys, a Boer rebel living at Ngqika’s court (ibid., p. 394; Mesthrie 1998, 20–1). It is clear, however, that despite the short-lived and abortive nature of his mission, the time Van der Kemp did spend among the Xhosa was dedicated in significant measure to his own attempts at language acquisition. In the Journal, Van der Kemp records his efforts to learn the language of the Xhosa, including the fact that on several occasions, he received linguistic instruction from Ngqika himself (Transactions, pp. 396–7). The description of the mission which appeared in the Transactions also included Van der Kemp’s account of the Xhosa language. His ‘Specimen of the Caffra Language’ appeared in a separate section following his Journal – in a chapter titled ‘An Account of the Religion, Customs, Population, Government, Language, History, and Natural Productions of Caffraria.’ The ‘Specimen’ – covering 16 pages of linguistic description, single lexical items, and phrases – was sandwiched between a detailed account of Ngqika Xhosa culture, and a section of information on the climate, geology, flora, fauna, and history of the eastern Cape region. As is implied by this setting, the function of Van der Kemp’s ‘Specimen’ appears to be primarily ethnographic: a description of, rather than a guide to, the language. However, the detail of the specimen, the inclusion of information on pronunciation, and of a two-page list of phrases, also suggests that it was intended at least partly for use in communication with Xhosa-speakers. As Lichtenstein put it, writing of his own Xhosa wordlist, adapted from Van der Kemp’s, ‘No nation is so savage as not to see, with more favourable eyes, a foreigner who endeavours to express himself in their language.’ And indeed, ever the evangelical optimist, Van der Kemp certainly envisioned future missionaries returning to the Ngqika Xhosa to continue the work he had had to abandon. Van der Kemp began his ‘Specimen’ with a discussion of the ‘letters’, or phonology of the language, then proceeded to a list of nouns which are divided by headings into semantic domains: ‘Names of Animals and their Parts’, ‘Of Mankind’, ‘Celestial Bodies and Phenomena’, ‘Terrestrial

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Of Translation and Transformation

Objects’, ‘Vegetables’, ‘Food and Drink’, ‘House and Utensils’, ‘Dress’, ‘Diseases’, ‘Dignities, Qualities, &c.’ These domains were typical of ethnographic wordlists, such as had been included in the work of the scientific travellers. What followed, however, represented a departure from previous descriptions of Xhosa: another six double-columned pages, conforming in their headings to the traditional Western grammatical model derived from Latin. Van der Kemp gave examples of adjectives, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, numerals, diminutives, and comparatives; finally, two pages of phrases offered syntactic information by illustrating the language in use. Van der Kemp’s representation of Xhosa in the ‘Specimen’ shows an understanding of some of the language’s structural features, although it is grammatically simplified and, in places, inaccurate. As Rajend Mesthrie has argued, it is illustrative of what in second language acquisition research is called an interlanguage – what we might term a form of ‘learner’s Xhosa’ – rather than resembling an accurate reflection of the target language, Xhosa (Mesthrie 1998, p. 14). Given the amount of time Van der Kemp had spent in the Xhosa country, this is not surprising. Nevertheless, in spite of its inaccuracies, the ‘Specimen’ represented several extremely significant new developments in the wordlist model as it had been employed by the earlier travellers Sparrman and Barrow. As with earlier wordlists, Van der Kemp’s ‘Specimen’ implied a particular mode of communication, which in this case reflects the relationship between teacher and pupil. Included in the section of phrases are the following examples: Dia thànda founda, Dia khou fourdiessa, [  ] Oúja thanda oú founda?

I desire to be taught. I’ll teach you. Do you like to learn? (Transactions, p. 457).

In one sense, of course, the learner was Van der Kemp, tutored in the Xhosa language by Ngqika himself; but Van der Kemp’s understanding of his role among the Ngqika Xhosa was above all structured around his role as teacher – and, as a corollary to this, he situates the Xhosa as learners, potential converts, ‘desiring’ to be taught. As he put it, The Lord has sent me to preach the Gospel to this people, after I shall have attained their language. (Ibid., p. 395)

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It was a matter of doctrine for Protestants of all denominations that people should hear, and ultimately read, the word of God in their own language. Language-learning, under these circumstances, was not merely a matter of practical necessity, scientific inquiry, or curiosity, it was also a divine imperative. Van der Kemp’s linguistic researches crucially involved ascertaining whether the Xhosa had a word for, and thus a concept of, God. Recounting a discussion with Ngqika, he reported, I observed that he expressed the Deity by the Hottentot name Tuikwa, to supply, in this respect, the defect of his native language. (Ibid., pp. 396–7) Later, he elaborated by explaining that The Caffree language has no word to express the Deity by. Thiko is borrowed from the Hottentots, who call God by the name of Thuuikee signifying one who induces pain. (Ibid., p. 416) Although the Xhosa apparently did have what Van der Kemp interpreted as a name for God – uThixo, which he took to signify creator or ruler – this was, he reported, a borrowing from Khoi. Therefore, he concluded, the Xhosa had no indigenous understanding of a Creator. Van der Kemp thus considered this apparent absence in the lexicon to be of immense significance, offering startling evidence of the Xhosa’s need for Christian teaching and salvation. In spite of the troubling Khoi etymology of uThixo as supposedly ‘one who induces pain’, Van der Kemp appropriated the term and set about transforming it semantically by ‘filling it with Christian content’. He told his Xhosa audiences that he had brought new messages and new teachings relating to uThixo (Hodgson 1997, p. 70). He clearly felt that, in the short time he was there, he had made sufficient progress in the language to set about this work – by 17 December 1799, he reported that I began to keep twice a day a reading and writing school, in the Caffree and Dutch languages, with eleven pupils of different nations. (Transactions, p. 410)3 Van der Kemp’s emphasis on language learning as indispensable to his proselytizing mission and his attempt to represent, via the model of Western grammar, language-as-system were in many ways two sides of the same coin. In comparison to the scientific travellers who were

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Of Translation and Transformation

his contemporaries, his approach to communication appears different in focus, and also significantly more complex and ambitious – aiming to ‘attain’ the language of the Xhosa in order to ‘preach the Gospel’. The ‘Specimen of the Caffra Language’ in turn can be seen as an attempt to render this approach to communication in visual form. To the contemporary reader, the categories and terminology of the GrecoRoman grammar, as employed by Van der Kemp, would have been immediately familiar: these had provided the framework for grammatical description in Europe from the Middle Ages onwards (Gneuss 1996, pp. 29–30).4 Thus, via this representative strategy, Xhosa was presented not simply as an assortment of miscellaneous components, words and phrases; nor as merely one feature of a group of people by which they may be illustrated or explained. Instead, it was represented as an organized system made up of the full complement of clearly defined and arranged components, labelled in conformity with the heads of the Greco-Roman grammatical model, and thereby implicitly fulfilling all the conceptual categories and functions demanded of rational speech. In other words, in visually echoing the familiar structure of a Western grammar, the layout of Van der Kemp’s ‘Specimen’ makes the Xhosa language look to his readers like a language. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Heinrich Lichtenstein, adapting the model instituted by Van der Kemp to represent Xhosa, nevertheless suggested that the language was a ‘nomade’ – shifting, migratory, impossible to pin down. Van der Kemp, by contrast, made no such suggestion; to him, the language was a stable system, and an appropriate medium to preach the Gospel. We must remember that Van der Kemp wrote about the need to learn Xhosa in his Journal not only as a means to communicate with the people around him, but as a means to explain the central tenets of Christian doctrine to them. This in turn implied two things: first, that the sacred concepts of Christianity were translatable and, secondly, that the Xhosa language specifically was sufficient as a target language to express them. In both these regards, the Greco-Roman grammatical model may be said to serve an implicit persuasive function. By presenting Xhosa in this manner, Van der Kemp suggested its sufficiency as a system for communication, and therefore, its suitability for the task of proselytization. The apparent universality of the Greco-Roman grammatical model also served an additional persuasive function, by suggesting that perfect translatability was possible between the languages of Europe and this new target language, Xhosa. Van der Kemp’s description of Xhosa was, in some ways, a text in transit – poised halfway between a wordlist and a rudimentary grammar.

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Van der Kemp was preoccupied with representing the language as a means to communicate with its speakers, and in particular for the purposes of proselytization and education; and with demonstrating it to be a complex and regular system, rather than as a mere series of labels. In these respects, he gives us a clear demonstration of the emphases of nineteenth-century missionary linguistics more generally, as well as prefiguring the work of later missionary linguists who followed him to the eastern Cape. That Van der Kemp himself did not manage to learn enough about the Xhosa language is probably one reason why, for all his efforts, he made no converts (Hodgson 1984). However, in this early, troubled, and unsuccessful mission to the Xhosa, it is possible to see in nascent form the drive to language acquisition which was bound up with the missionary impulse: to ‘preach the Gospel to this people [by] attain[ing] their language’.

The features of missionary language study Although the LMS mission to the Xhosa was abandoned in 1800, the Society retained its missionaries in the Cape Colony, and their undimmed enthusiasm for South Africa as a field of evangelical endeavour soon spread to other missionary Societies; British Methodists, Scottish missionaries of various denominations, the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, and others, building up through the early decades of the nineteenth century. The missionaries brought with them a concerted drive towards language-learning, which was integral both to missionary work and to Protestant evangelical theology. In other parts of Africa, Catholic societies made considerable inroads in language study; Johannes Fabian’s (1986) examination of the appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, for example, focuses largely on the work of the Catholic White Fathers. In both the eastern Cape and Natal, however, Protestant missionaries overwhelmingly predominated and dominated the study of Nguni languages throughout the nineteenth century. Their approaches to this work, while by no means homogeneous, shared certain key assumptions and features; many of these, as we have already seen, were foreshadowed in the work of Van der Kemp. The language study undertaken by Protestant missionaries was, in various obvious and not-so-obvious senses, shaped by the nature of their missionary work. First of all, missionaries needed to be able to speak to, and understand, their prospective flocks. As we have already seen in the case of Van der Kemp, this model of communication revolved around the tasks

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Of Translation and Transformation

of preaching and teaching: it was a doctrinal obligation for Protestant missionaries of all persuasions to evangelize in the vernacular. In many ways, however, oral competence was preparatory, and subordinate, to the written word: vernacular preaching was intended to pave the way for Biblical translation, which in the context of early-nineteenth-century Protestant evangelism needed to be undertaken as a matter of great urgency. Direct access to Scripture in the vernacular was held to be the key to salvation. The importance of Scriptural translation in this period is illustrated vividly in the inception of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) in 1804. This pan-evangelical organization was set up in the hope (largely realized) of overcoming doctrinal differences between Protestant denominations towards the execution of ‘one sacred purpose’, namely the circulation of translations ‘of the Scriptures, and of the Scriptures only, without note or comment’,5 in an affordable form, to as wide a readership as possible both in Britain and overseas (see for example Howsam 1991, p. xiv). The dissemination of religious texts in the vernacular was therefore a task central to the conception of mission among Protestant missionaries, and for those who demonstrated any aptitude for the task, there was often immediate pressure to turn to translation work. Full versions of Scripture were generally considered the most important goal, but there were also prayer books and religious readers of various kinds to be translated or composed. The significance of this work was reflected in the rapid establishment of ‘that mighty engine’, the printing press, at key South African mission locations for the purpose of speedy and efficient production of texts (Thornley Smith 1850, p. 109). The first complete Xhosa New Testament was published in 1846, and the first Zulu in 1865. These dual imperatives – to preach in the vernacular and to undertake Scriptural translation – were, for most missionaries, not easily fulfilled. Just as for the scientific travellers previously discussed, the use of an interpreter or interpreters was invariably necessary, at least at the outset. Indeed, for English-speaking missionaries in the eastern Cape, communication frequently had to take place through two layers of interpretation: English to Cape Dutch, and then Cape Dutch to Xhosa.6 In the complex linguistic and social environment of the eastern Cape, interpreters were often outsiders – most frequently Khoikhoi – who spoke some Xhosa.7 As Monica Wilson has pointed out, interpreters had to not only translate between the languages spoken by different groups, but also act as ‘cultural brokers’, mediating between the divergent sets of cultural values and assumptions embedded in the utterances of each party (Wilson 1972, pp. 19–20). Sometimes missionaries exhibited a

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quite unquestioning faith in the capacity of their interpreters to mediate their message without distortion from what the Comaroffs term ‘intervening cultural “noise” ’ (1991, p. 216). Just as frequently, however, missionary preachers expressed anxieties about the use of interpreters. They pondered the myriad ways in which their message might become distorted, and fretted at a process in which they sometimes had little way of knowing how much had been explained, or how it had been understood by their hearers. Using interpreters might be adequate for day-today communication, but it was commonly considered inadequate for the transmission of sacred Truth. Robert Moffat wrote longingly of ‘an humble and devout interpreter, who feels the very words glow as they pass through his lips’, but lamented that more often the missionary was forced to trust ‘an ignorant and unqualified interpreter’ – a situation Attended with consequences not only ludicrous, but dangerous to the very objects which lie nearest the missionary’s heart. [  ] I have been very much troubled in my mind on hearing that the most erroneous renderings had been given to what I had said. (Moffat 1842, pp. 293–4) This made for difficulties and insecurities for many missionaries who remained at least partially, if not wholly, reliant on native-speaker interpreters and advisers in spoken communication. There is an obvious tension – and, of course, a correlation – between the reliance of missionaries on interpreters and their mistrust of the interpretation process. They certainly could not do without such assistance, but nor could they usually avail themselves of it without misgivings. Indeed, the use of interpreters could be construed as downright counterproductive, or even anti-evangelical. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Robert Needham Cust, a British mission activist and enthusiast for the study of African languages, argued forcefully that unless he or she learned the vernacular, ‘the Missionary is a dumb dog’. ‘The idea of preaching the Gospel through an interpreter’, moreover, was not simply foolish but downright ‘revolting’ (Cust 1889, p. 25, emphasis added). Cust did not elaborate on his revulsion, but we can speculate as to its sources. In the vehemence of his reaction, there was the suggestion that to use interpreters threatened to do violence to the sanctity of Scripture through mistranslation. Equally, however, Cust’s was a doctrinal objection: to preach the Gospel by means of interpreters would be antithetical to the Protestant doctrine of salvation through direct access to Scripture – to which Cust, as a prominent member of the BFBS, was unquestionably committed. As he continued,

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Of Translation and Transformation

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The duties of mission were, Cust argued, based on a particular model of communication predicated on two-way understanding – to understand the words spoken by African people, and to be understood in return – and for this reason, were impossible to discharge effectively without learning the vernacular. Equally, he suggested that it was the hard work of language acquisition which provided evidence of the missionary’s devotion to duty. Cust’s argument, often echoed both in the publications of missionary societies and in the diaries and correspondence of the missionaries themselves, was that to acquire a working knowledge of the vernacular was definitive not only of effective missionary work, but also of the missionary calling itself. Using interpreters to preach the Gospel was, by this reckoning, antithetical to the kind of ‘self-consecration’ with which a good missionary should be endowed. Missionaries could never rid themselves entirely of their dependence on native speakers’ expertise in their own languages, however. For example, even after 18 years of missionary work among the Xhosa, by which time he was able often to preach without an interpreter present, and was considered as the foremost missionary expert in the language, John Bennie confessed that he could still be baffled or misled by unfamiliar metaphors or figurative language.8 The work of Scriptural translation, furthermore, was particularly reliant on native speakers as interpreters, assistants, or translators. On the one hand, the authority of native speakers in determining appropriate usage in their own language could hardly be disputed – as, indeed, the Rharhabe Xhosa minister, writer, and translator Reverend Tiyo Soga argued forcefully, when criticizing the Reverend Appleyard’s Xhosa version of the New Testament (Appleyard 1867). On the other hand, the empowerment of native speakers in matters of translation posed a threat to missionaries’ authority over the language. Cust, writing later in the century, described the process in such a way as to assign to native speakers of African languages a safely subordinate and circumscribed role in the production of ‘Scholastic and Religious literature’: This literature is perhaps one of the most marvellous phenomena that the World has ever seen. A Language, that a few years previously had never been committed to writing, and which had not developed words to express abstract ideas, is modulated by skilled

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A man or woman can care but little for the Souls of the Heathen, when he will not trouble himself to understand their words, and let them understand his. […] I think poorly of the man who shirks this obvious duty. It shows a want of self-consecration. (Ibid., p. 25)

Of Translation and Transformation

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It was the ‘skilled hands’ of missionaries that steered the work of language development and religious translation. These processes were allied with a developmental movement from concrete to abstract language (even as late as the 1880s, Cust was able apparently confidently to describe African languages as inherently lacking in abstraction). To them was also attributed the transformation of the language’s speakers into Christian subjects who, ‘no longer savages’, could be accorded a secondary role in the translation and printing of their own sacred texts. For Cust, and for those who thought like him, the movement – figured as evolution – from orality to literacy, from non-Christian to Christian belief, from the concrete to the abstract, and from savagery to civilization, were implemented simultaneously through the processes of religious translation. Given the apparent importance of appropriating languages to the causes of mission, there was a fairly swift movement from the kinds of ad hoc linguistic written materials produced by learners – manuscript word or phrase lists and grammatical notes – to the development of a published corpus of linguistic texts. As soon as missions were established with any degree of perceived stability, it appeared necessary both to missionaries and to their parent societies that the languages in question be taken charge of and systematically recorded, as European vernaculars had been in grammars and dictionaries. In writings about missionary linguistics both by the missionary practitioners themselves and by the societies who encouraged and funded their work, the significance of grammars and dictionaries to the task of the missionary in general is everywhere apparent. Commending the Reverend Appleyard’s Xhosa grammar, The Kafir Language, the Minutes of the Wesleyan District meeting (1849) record the comment that The work itself is calculated to serve the Mission, not only as forming a valuable help to Missionaries studying the language, but also as suggesting useful hints to those on whom the duty and honour devolves of completing translations of the Holy Scriptures into the Kaffir tongue. The applications of such texts were therefore at least twofold. First, they presented an opportunity to share linguistic knowledge acquired

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hands so as to answer all the requirements of the highest Civilization, and the natives themselves, no longer savages, are trained to aid in the Translation, and in the setting up of the types. (Cust 1883: I, pp. 18–19)

in the field with other missionaries, even potentially allowed the task of language-learning to commence prior to departure from Europe. The image of the would-be missionary poring over his language manual is vividly illustrated by St John Rivers in Jane Eyre, as he ‘pondered a mystic lore of his own: that of some Eastern tongue, the acquisition of which he thought necessary to his plans’, finally persuading Jane herself to help him in learning ‘Hindostanee’ before his departure for India (Bronte 1847, p. 417). There is plenty of evidence that linguistic texts for Xhosa and Zulu were also used in this way by missionaries preparing to emigrate, or en route to South Africa (see for example Barter 1866, p. 9; Smith 1881, p. 49). Secondly, the grammar and dictionary also provided a foundation and corpus for the tasks of Scriptural and other translation. In both of these applications, language manuals allowed missionary linguists to offer their accumulated knowledge as a resource for others. And so, to a greater or lesser extent, missionary grammars, dictionaries, phrase books, and other language manuals all set out to help learners to acquire, or to improve their mastery of, the language in question. In South Africa, as in other parts of the European empires, most missionary linguistic texts focused upon one language, although some did contain short sections of comparative material, or incorporated two or more related languages. Dictionaries were bilingual; most were arranged alphabetically by English terms, some by Nguni terms, and some were two-way. They ranged from the relatively brief and basic, listing single terms only, to thick volumes containing numerous examples for each entry. Grammars, as is typical of missionary grammars more generally, were based on the traditional Western grammatical model. This is frequently noted as one of the defining features of missionary linguistics, and indeed, is one of the reasons for the marginalization of missionary language work within the history of linguistics, which has generally concerned itself with ‘professional’ scholarship and dismissed missionary work as derivative, or otherwise uninteresting.9 As Peter Mühlhäusler puts it, The connotations associated with the missionary position in another sphere of life, of being unexciting and deserving a dismissive giggle, have been extended to the domain of language, and missionary language work has typically been written off as amateurish [  ] and unworthy of serious study. (1999, p. 339) As Richard Steadman-Jones points out, however, the classical grammatical categories served as a discursive framework for linguists to work

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within: this was not a rigid matrix, and was open to question and reinterpretation (1998, p. 116). It is also important to note that, as in Van der Kemp’s early representation of Xhosa, the deployment of the Greco-Roman model served a number of crucial functions. First of all, missionaries needed a theoretical model from which to begin in their attempts at grammatical exposition. Representatives of the various missionary societies varied extremely widely in their educational profile; Methodists missionaries, for example, were drawn largely from artisan backgrounds, whereas Anglicans were often university-educated. All, however, would have had at least a basic grammatical training based either upon elementary Latin grammar or upon school English grammars also founded on the Latin model (Hovdhaugen 1996b, p. 18).10 Indeed, this had been the prevailing framework for grammatical description in Europe for centuries; and it provided the most obvious discursive template for missionary linguists attempting to represent grammatical structure. This air of familiarity was equally important pedagogically: language learners were likely to be as acclimatized as the grammar writers to the customary structure of Western grammars. For this reason they were more likely to be willing, and to be able, to undertake the task of language-learning if it were presented within this familiar format. A number of key questions circulate in missionary writings on languages in general, and Nguni languages in particular. Was the language sufficiently complex, and systematic, to be an appropriate target language for the Christian message? Could Christian concepts be expressed in the language? Would changes need to be made to it and, if so, what would they be? Did the language have enough speakers, and were those speakers likely enough candidates for missionary attention, to be worth the trouble of learning? Addressing these questions in their writing, missionary linguists’ intentions appear as much persuasive as informative, stressing and seeking to impress on their readers the suitability of particular languages for study. Certain conventional features common in nineteenth-century language manuals could be used creatively to persuade readers to think about a particular language in a particular way. In particular, it was quite usual for language manuals to contain a variety of prefatory material such as dedications, introductions, and prefaces, which could serve contextual, directive, and justificatory functions. Such ‘paratexts’, to use Gérard Genette’s term, were often the place for a missionary linguist to set up certain criteria – what Genette calls ‘a word of advice’, even a ‘command’ – to guide the reader in interpreting the linguistic material that followed (1997, pp. 10–11). Centrally, as I have suggested, this involved legitimation: arguing on

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Of Translation and Transformation

various grounds that the language or languages in question were worthy of study, and appropriate to the tasks of evangelism. As we shall see, missionaries making such arguments often also demonstrated an explicit awareness of – and desire to exploit – the role of language study in the developing colonial order. In conclusion, missionary language study is marked by a preoccupation both with linguistic structure and with social practice. Thus, languages were seen not as nomenclatures, but as plastic systems for the communication of new meanings and new ideas. As a corollary to this, languages were no longer simply markers of their speakers’ identities (although, as we shall see, they were certainly still that too) but also markers of their speakers’ potentiality to become Christian subjects. Missionaries, studying African languages, looked for ‘entry points’ to turn those languages into Christian signifying systems (Jeater 2001, p. 456). Missionary arguments about potentiality – the capacity of particular languages to become vehicles for Christian meaning – revolved around identifying, and highlighting, these perceived entry points. And if all of this sounds as though it was carried out without much overt reference to native speakers, then that is because, often, that was the case. As I have suggested above, since the work of missionary linguists involved, in profound ways, the appropriation of languages and the assertion of their authority over them, this had to take place through either the negotiation, the appropriation, or the occlusion, of native speakers’ roles in knowing, speaking, and, by implication, possessing their own language. How this mediation of the identity and position of native speakers was carried out through the formal and discursive properties of missionaries’ linguistic texts is a central concern of the chapters that follow. Specifically, I want to trace the ways in which these strategies were inflected by particular colonial, theological, and scholarly discourses, the operation of which was in turn contingent upon, or suggested by, the political and social circumstances in which missionaries were working. The relationship of particular groups of speakers to colonial authority was a crucial factor in the descriptive appropriation of their language. To do this, we will examine two selections of missionary linguistic texts. The first, to which we now turn, involves a return to the eastern Cape, to look at the development of a corpus of work on Xhosa – lexicography and grammatical description – by Methodist missionaries from the 1830s to the 1870s. Methodists dominated work on Xhosa in this period and, as we will see, their approaches to the language were crucially determined by the need to legitimate the Xhosa language as a

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medium for evangelism and Scriptural translation, while acknowledging its speakers’ relationship to the colonial order of the Cape. From the 1830s, Xhosa resistance to colonial authority saw them cast in colonial discourse as violent and unpredictable, threatening in particular to the stability of British settler society in the eastern Cape, with which Methodist missionaries were entirely imbricated. The ways in which missionary descriptions of the Xhosa language negotiated the changing relationship of Xhosa-speakers to the colonial order is what centrally concerns me in the following chapter. In Chapter 4, I turn to make a comparative examination of a range of texts produced by Protestant missionaries in Natal, describing the language spoken there, Zulu. In Natal, a British colony from 1843, Zulu-speakers were colonized subjects on whom the colonial economy depended, and whose cultural practices and customary law were appropriated and adapted to serve the needs of the colonial government. Their very different relationship to colonial authority, as an apparently unresisting and contained class of colonial subjects, was reflected in missionaries’ preoccupations from the outset with interpreting ‘Zulu culture’ and knowing ‘the Zulu mind’.

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Of Translation and Transformation

0

Zuurveld 1779–1819

Cape colonial boundary after 1854

100

200 miles

Ceded territory 1819 District of Victoria 1847

Natal’s colonial boundary after 1843

British Kaffraria 1847

ZULU Thu

kela

Kraals of Zulu chiefs Pietermaritzburg Durban / Port Natal

MPONDO Atlantic Ocean

THEMBU

am

to

os

ys nda Su

G

XHOSA

Great Kei

Grahamstown Keiskamma Great Fish Bushmans

Cape Town

Port Elizabeth

Map 1 Map of southern Africa

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Indian Ocean

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66

Cape colonial boundary before 1847

Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’: Methodist Linguistics in the Eastern Cape

By the end of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, the Xhosa language featured as part of travellers’ ethnographic accounts of the complex social, political, and linguistic relations in the eastern Cape frontier zone. Writers like the colonial official John Barrow, whose communication with Xhosa people had often been experienced as fraught or confusing negotiations, used the lens of natural science to try to re-present language as orderly and knowable, against a backdrop of social relationships which were frequently anything but orderly and knowable. Around the ‘open’ frontier, relations between Xhosa, Khoikhoi, San, and Boers were complex and protean, based upon struggles over land and resources in a context where no one authority was recognized as legitimate by all parties. The first decade of the nineteenth century, however, saw social and political relations in the region shift dramatically. When the British reclaimed the Cape from the Batavian administration in 1806, the concerns of the new administration lay with the establishment of a stable civic society in the colony, with clearly demarcated territorial boundaries; in both of these undertakings, the eastern frontier zone presented a particular challenge. As we have seen previously, there were a number of reasons why this might be so. It was a region characterized by tension and struggles over land and resources, in which different social groups operated in shifting relations of conflict and co-operation with one another. It marked the zone of contact between the colony and the independent, relatively powerful Xhosa chiefdoms. Moreover, it was still anything but a clearly defined ‘border’: the British had inherited from the Dutch an eastern boundary which was supposedly defined as the Fish River, by a treaty agreed in the late-eighteenth century with the Rharhabe Xhosa Chief Ngqika. According to this treaty, neither Xhosa 67

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3

nor colonists could cross the river without consent from their respective authorities. Other Xhosa chiefs, however, already living to the west of this ‘border’, did not recognize the treaty; and Boer colonists in the frontier zone, accustomed to trading with or employing frontier Xhosa, were just as unwilling to abide by it. All of these features of the eastern frontier zone were immediately perceived as threats to colonial stability by the new British regime, and its first approach was aggressively exclusionary. Although the frontier zone had seen several conflicts between colonial and Xhosa forces from the early 1780s onwards, Colonel John Graham’s military campaign of 1811–12 was different in kind from those that had gone before. Specifically intended to inculcate ‘a proper degree of terror’ in the Xhosa, it swiftly and brutally drove them across the Fish River, out of the Zuurveld (Cradock to Lord Liverpool, 7 March 1812, cited in Maclennan 1985, p. 128). This Fourth Frontier War marked the culmination of what Giliomee (1989) terms the ‘closing frontier’, in which the colonial government established its authority over the Zuurveld, and attempted to seal the border of the colony. For most of the nineteenth century, these were the preoccupations of colonial policy in the eastern Cape: to fully transform this socially heterogeneous, politically volatile zone of contact into a clearly defined, stable boundary between the developing colonial order and the dangerous disorder which supposedly reigned beyond (Lester 1997, p. 637). The shattering 1811–12 war was also a turning point for the Xhosa, who began to recognize in the British a threat to their power and, ultimately, to their autonomy (Peires 1981b, pp. 65–6). The two decades that followed saw the Xhosa turn increasingly to guerrilla methods of cattle raiding and house-burning in order to assert their land claims and expel colonists. In the aftermath of the Fifth Frontier War (1818–19), the Cape Governor Lord Somerset demanded not just agreement on the Fish River boundary, but also the expulsion of Xhosa from the rich land between the Fish and Keiskamma Rivers. Initially this region was defined as neutral territory; but almost immediately, it became regarded by Somerset as ‘ceded’ to the colony, interposing a protective barrier between the Xhosa and the colony proper. The ‘Ceded Territory’ rapidly became the locus of an escalating cycle of violence and disorder, between Xhosa raids and colonial reprisals, just as the Zuurveld had been (Peires 1989b, pp. 480–4). It was partly in an attempt to provide a further buffer between the Xhosa and the colony that in 1820 the British parliament took up suggestions of a state-aided settlement scheme; £50,000 was set aside

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68 Grammars of Colonialism

as a grant for the emigration of British settlers to the eastern Cape. The aims of the project were twofold: to alleviate destabilizing domestic pressure growing as a result of social unrest in Britain, and at the same time to boost white settlement in the Zuurveld – now the district of Albany – in order to provide what was conceived as a ‘formidable barrier’ between the colony proper and the Xhosa to the east.1 These colonists, numbering nearly 4000, became known as the 1820 settlers. The settlers were predominantly Methodists, giving the new settler community a distinctly Wesleyan character. In contrast to other nonconformist groups like Congregationalists and Baptists, who largely retained a Calvinist belief in the redemption only of a particular group, the ‘elect’, Methodism proclaimed a gospel available to every individual (Bebbington 1992, pp. 10–14). Emphasis was placed upon the individual religious experience, and the central Methodist tenets of universal redemption and entire sanctification, promising the love of God to all humanity, gave the Church, at least in principle, a fraternal inclusiveness (Findlay and Holdsworth 1921: I, pp. 31–4). Methodism also emphasized the experience of conversion and personal faith through Scripture, the value of hard work and discipline, and deep personal involvement in the life of the Church – values which had spoken irresistibly to many working people in the new British industrial towns and cities, who in turn made up the majority of the British settlers in Albany. Devolved and inclusive, yet hierarchical and orderly, Methodism also suggested an ideal template for social and religious organisation in a new frontier society (Le Cordeur 1981, pp. 67–8; Keegan 1996, pp. 66–7). These, then, were some of the defining characteristics of the mostly Methodist, mostly lower-middle and working class, 1820 settlers. The largest group, and among the most influential, was Hezekiah Sephton’s Methodist party from London, who included the minister William Shaw, a man of uncommon missionary zeal. Sephton’s party occupied a valley about 25 miles south of Grahamstown, and Shaw began his ministrations among the inhabitants of this new community, Salem. Soon, however, he also turned his attention to the frontier Xhosa. On his arrival at Salem, Shaw had noted with dismay that ‘there is not a single missionary between my residence and the northern extremity of the Red Sea’, and began to formulate plans for a series of Methodist missions stretching up through the eastern coastal region (Shaw cited in Du Plessis 1911, p. 173). In 1823 he founded the first of his mission stations, Wesleyville, between the Keiskamma and Buffalo Rivers, in the territory of the Gqunukhwebe Xhosa. Over the next 7 years another six stations

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Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 69

were established, stretching north 200 miles. Although other Protestant missionary societies had already begun work among the Xhosa, Shaw’s efforts were to see Methodism uniquely associated with the eastern Cape (see for example Peires 1989b, pp. 486–7; Keegan 1996, p. 132). The dual aspect of Shaw’s pioneering work – commitment to preaching among the Xhosa, coupled with a sense of allegiance to the British settler community – is indicative of the nature of Methodist missionary work and attitudes in the eastern Cape more generally. From the outset the Methodists identified closely with the British settlers, drawing upon them for funding and personnel, and often espousing their opinions and supporting their causes. At the same time, they also rapidly established themselves as the dominant group in proselytizing among the Xhosa (Le Cordeur 1981, p. 68; Keegan 1996, p. 132). The early optimism of the Methodist missionaries regarding the capacity of the Xhosa for Christian conversion did much to shape the attitudes of the emergent settler community in the 1820s, which, informed by a liberal humanitarian ethos influenced by abolitionism, tended to view the Xhosa positively (Bank 1995, pp. 189–90). In concord with Cape humanitarian liberalism, many settlers opposed the colonial government’s separatist policies of frontier control, seeing the frontier zone not only as a barrier against, but also as a means to reach, the Xhosa. This attitude can be seen illustrated in settler support for Shaw’s project of Methodist mission stations among the Xhosa, and also in trading links established across the frontier, which many among the new mercantile bourgeoisie in the settler community saw as crucial to the developing colonial economy (Keegan 1996, pp. 69–74). Through the later 1820s and into the early 1830s, the cycle of violence around the frontier zone intensified, but, at least initially, settler liberalism was more inclined to blame Xhosa raids on the frontier policy of the Cape Governor Lord Somerset rather than the Xhosa (Le Cordeur 1981, p. 11; Bank 1995, p. 199). In the growing violence and disorder in the early 1830s which preceded the Sixth Frontier War, however, strains of anti-Xhosa thought began to emerge more stridently among the British settler community. Increasingly, some began to view the proximity of the powerful, independent Xhosa with anxiety – both as a threat to political and social stability and as a barrier to further colonial settlement and expansion. But it was the frightening experiences of the Sixth Frontier War of 1834–35, by far the bloodiest confrontation yet, which were to be decisive in turning settler attitudes against the Xhosa. In the aftermath of the war, the dominant view of the Xhosa became one of irreclaimable

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70 Grammars of Colonialism

savagery (Bank 1995, p. 189; Lester 2001, p. 63). Increasingly, settler propaganda cast the Xhosa luridly as vicious and treacherous, violent spoilers of land and property, and a serious threat to the colonial order (Keegan 1996, p. 74; Lester 1997, pp. 643–5). Methodist preachers, bound up with settler society, defended the actions of colonists and sympathized with their cause (Le Cordeur 1981, p. 68). But equally, they retained their commitment to proselytization among the Xhosa, albeit with less optimism than they had arrived with.

Methodism and the study of Xhosa The problems of communication in the mission field, both of learning the Xhosa language and of relying upon interpreters, were immediately apparent to the Methodist missionaries working in Shaw’s circuit of mission stations. Some talented linguists among the Wesleyans apparently learned to speak Xhosa very quickly – H. H. Dugmore, for example, was supposedly able to do without an interpreter after only 3 months (Eveleigh 1920, p. 105) – but most missionaries found the task rather more problematic. Preaching through an interpreter, meanwhile, was ‘troublesome and disadvantageous’: it was slow and laborious, and it was hard to judge the accuracy of the translation or the impact upon its hearers (Ayliff 1971, p. 65; Shaw 1972, p. 124). This was particularly the case where a double interpretation was necessary, as the Methodist missionary linguist John Ayliff discovered: The Missionary on entering Kafirland was necessitated to obtain an interpreter, who was either a Hottentot, or some other native speaking the Dutch language, no others then being procurable; to make himself understood by his interpreter, he had to study the Dutch language, and the acquirement of the Kafir necessarily became a secondary consideration. (Ayliff 1846, pp. iii–iv) Such problems in communication compounded the already quite profound difficulties of proselytizing among the Xhosa, who were, for all the Methodists’ initial optimism, largely resistant to the missionaries’ teachings, and prone to asking difficult or searching questions about what they were hearing. As the Methodist missionary William Shrewsbury wryly put it, ‘they are much more ready at raising objections against divine truth, than at receiving it with a meek and lowly mind’ (Shrewsbury 1867, p. 232).2

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Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 71

72 Grammars of Colonialism

Truly religious persons, – zealous for the propagation of the Gospel, – able to read the Scriptures in some one language at least, – they should also possess a ready utterance, as well as a correct acquaintance with the languages from which and into which they interpret.3 The Methodists’ work among the Xhosa was, certainly in the early years, reliant upon such talented interlingual and intercultural mediators. The minor Xhosa chief Dyani Tshatshu, for example, who worked for a time as William Shaw’s interpreter, was indispensable to him not only as a translator, but also in advising him on all aspects of Xhosa social practice, and as a lay evangelist (Shaw 1860, pp. 331–6). But while the work of reliable, committed interpreters was sometimes celebrated, the need for their intercession was still largely considered to be problematic. The Methodists’ central aim in publishing language manuals was to relieve these impediments to missionary work, by rendering ‘the acquirement of the Kafir language a matter of greater facility’ (Ayliff 1846, p. iv). This ‘facility’ had a dual function: it would help missionaries in conversing with and preaching to Xhosa-speakers, and also make them better able to assist in Scriptural translation. This latter task, given the Methodist emphasis on salvation through Scripture, was a matter of particular urgency. The men who were carrying out this work were usually one and the same: the Methodists’ celebrated linguists were also their most prolific translators. They generally came from fairly modest backgrounds, and were certainly not university-educated – Methodist evangelical doctrine placed far more emphasis on piety than on cultured book-learning, which was often viewed with suspicion (Chadwick 1971, p. 377; Bebbington 1992, pp. 3–5).4 Nevertheless, the Methodist missionary linguists had usually had some sort of linguistic training in terms of the study of English grammar at the very least, and some had had a theological education which included the study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew (Brash 1935, p. 41). William Shaw and the Secretaries of the Society looked out for missionary recruits with a facility for languages or a good education who could be groomed for translation work and linguistic research. And, rapidly, this work came

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Regulations approved at the Albany District Meeting in 1837 attempted to address these problems by stipulating criteria for the appointment of interpreters. They should be able to speak both Xhosa and English; they should also be Christians and, ‘where possible’, members of the Society:

to represent – certainly, to themselves – another aspect of Methodist involvement with, or even monopoly over, the Xhosa. Particularly after 1835, the Methodist missionaries conducted their work in negotiation with several different kinds of frontier discourses on the Xhosa. Official concerns lay with the stabilization of the colonial order, either through total exclusion or through carefully regulated incorporation of the Xhosa on the colonial margins. Evangelical Methodist doctrine insisted that the Xhosa were capable of religious transformation, while on the other hand, increasingly aggressive settler discourses represented them as irredeemably savage. Arguments about the nature and purposes of language study in the colonial frontier zone were necessarily imbricated with these interwoven but often contradictory attitudes to the Xhosa: for the Methodist grammarians of Xhosa in particular, William Binnington Boyce and John Whittle Appleyard, linguistic description was a complex negotiation between notions of incorporation and exclusion, familiarity and difference. Above all, it was a means to posit the possibility of transformation. For, while the Xhosa were no longer considered as inherently noble and virtuous, as they had been earlier in the century, perceptions of their language as elevated, systematic, and melodious only intensified as Methodist missionaries learned more about it. Thus the Xhosa language became regarded as the locus and evidence of the capacity of its speakers to become Christians. But this work was also, and equally importantly, carried out – certainly until the end of the 1850s – in the context of persistent failure and anxiety in the work of evangelism. The Xhosa were not, until the later 1850s, receptive to Christianity in any concerted way. Meanwhile, the political situation in the frontier zone remained volatile, and the position of Methodist missionaries was often precarious, as they attempted in various ways to mediate between the demands of the Xhosa and the settler community.

William Binnington Boyce’s Grammar of the Kafir Language The Reverend William Binnington Boyce was a Yorkshireman, Grammar school-educated, who had worked as a banker in Hull until his calling to the Methodist ministry. In a Church whose ministers were generally men of modest backgrounds, Boyce’s education was a thing of particular note: he was well-read, knew Latin and Greek, and had been a founding and active member of the Hull Literary and Philosophical Society (Gunnar 2003, pp. 1–9). Boyce arrived in the eastern Cape early in 1830, and the Albany District Meeting immediately assigned

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Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 73

him to establish the northernmost link in the Methodist chain of mission stations, among the Mpondo of Chief Faku. Before he set off to do so, however, he spent some months with William Shaw, travelling with him around the circuit of mission stations already established among the Xhosa. During this time, Shaw marked Boyce out as a potential linguist. He later described how impressed he had been by Boyce’s ‘remarkably quick perception’, as well as with his educational background, and how he had begun to discuss with him the experiences of Methodist missionaries in trying to learn the language of the Xhosa: I therefore in conversation with him frequently entered into full details and explanations relative to our existing knowledge of the language, and especially the nature of the difficulty which had hitherto baffled all our efforts. According to Shaw, Boyce had the education, and the enthusiasm, to undertake the study of the Xhosa language for his Methodist brethren. He was also a young man, ‘unmarried and unencumbered with distracting cares’, and therefore able ‘to “give himself wholly” to this study’ (Shaw 1860, p. 544). Boyce was accompanied to his new mission station among the Mpondo by a Xhosa Christian convert named James Burton, who spoke both Xhosa and Cape Dutch and was to be his interpreter. Burton’s wife travelled with them, as well as a British settler trained in construction, Richard Tainton, who was to build the mission station and act as catechist. The party arrived at Faku’s Great Place in November 1830. Faku, who had requested that a missionary be sent to him, allocated Boyce a spot on which to found the mission station. Tainton began the building work, while Boyce set about preaching. He was fortunate to have the ‘pious and consistent’ Burton as his interpreter – a man whose rhetorical powers Boyce greatly admired, and who was invaluable as a cultural intermediary in his evangelical work.5 In mid-1831, too, a 15-year-old boy, Theophilus Shepstone, arrived with Boyce to continue his education and – as the son of a fellow Methodist minister, who had grown up in the Xhosa territory and spoke Xhosa – to act as an assistant in Boyce’s linguistic research. Shaw had charged Boyce with the task of deducing the workings of Xhosa grammatical structure. The Methodist missionaries had for a long time been aware that the language was governed by some sort of system of agreement which made it sound ‘euphonious’ – accounting for that

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74 Grammars of Colonialism

‘musicality’ or ‘fluency’ in the language which had been commented on by earlier travellers. Boyce thus began from the assumption that his task was to discover pre-existing ‘fixed and invariable rules’ by which the language was governed. His method was inductive, working to deduce general principles from specific examples. To do this, he began transcribing phrases – mostly, these were given to him by Burton, and by Shepstone, as well as Mpondo people around the mission station. Working to classify this data, with the help of Burton and Shepstone, he tried to use it to reveal the ‘rules’ of the language (Sadler 1967, p. 83). Eventually, he reached what is commonly described as his breakthrough: he ‘discovered’ the system of concordial agreement in Xhosa, governed by the distribution of nouns into different classes. In this system, which governs Xhosa morphology as well as those of other Bantu languages, all the dependent elements in a sentence are linked to the noun by means of concords, which are derived from the noun class prefix and which they closely resemble. It is this resemblance which gives the language its apparent ‘euphony’. Deciding that it was the desire for euphony, not merely for concordial agreement, which governed it, Boyce dubbed the system the ‘Euphonic Concord’. His friend and fellow linguist Reverend H. H. Dugmore later represented Boyce’s ‘discovery’ as a combination of dogged inductive methodology and divine inspiration: Passing backwards and forwards one evening in front of his house, the rule for the general application of the Euphonic Concord flashed suddenly upon him, like a ray of light from heaven. With the almost literal Eureka of Archimedes, he rushed into the house exclaiming ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ And taking the application of the rule by following it through endless varieties of construction through a sleepless three days and nights, he established the correctness of his principle with a success triumphant and complete. (Dugmore cited in Mears 1971, [n.p.]) Discovering the ‘rules’ of the language ‘with a success triumphant and complete’ did not enable Boyce to speak it correctly, however, and he remained glaringly aware of his own shortcomings. In March 1832, he wrote to the Secretaries of the Methodist Missionary Committee in London that ‘after two years’ experience, I am fully convinced that the obstacles in the way of an adult European acquiring a perfect knowledge of the Caffre language are insurmountable’. The source of this difficulty, Boyce added, lay not with the ‘clicks’ in the Xhosa phonological system (as problematic as these might be to learn), but precisely in

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One principal word in a sentence governs the initial letters or syllables of the other words; this independent of any grammatical concord, or variety of inflexion; thus, in speaking the language, the following points must be ascertained in order to insure correctness: first, the principal or governing word in a sentence; second, the principal letter in that word, to the sound of which the initial letters or syllables of the other words must be assimilated; third, the changes which must be made in the initial letters or syllables of the word which is governed by this euphonic concord; fourth, the words which remain uninfluenced by this euphonic concord. Even once this system was correctly understood, still the usefulness of this understanding in the short term was debateable: Now, though it may be possible in time to find out the rules for all those changes, yet the practical use of those rules in assisting Europeans to speak the language readily is very doubtful. Children brought up in the country, and who learn the language as their mother tongue, will of course become perfectly acquainted with it, and they alone.6 It is not hard to deduce in Boyce’s arguments his awareness of his own shortcomings as a speaker of Xhosa, as well as his more general anxieties about language-learning; Europeans could not, he wrote from experience, own the language by learning its rules. In fact, Boyce never learned to speak Xhosa fluently (see for example Shaw 1860, p. 537). These anxieties notwithstanding, Boyce continued his work on a grammatical description of the language. Initially, he described his own role in the project as one of ‘collecting facts’, and ‘arranging them’, crediting William Shaw alone with the expertise needed to complete the work.7 In 1833, however, in Shaw’s absence, Boyce took over the work himself, publishing it as the Grammar of the Kaffir Language. This, the first separately published grammatical study of Xhosa, appeared in a limited print run on the Methodist mission press in Graham’s Town, for circulation primarily among missionaries in the region. The work was published in early 1834, in the midst of an ever-worsening cycle of violence between colonists and Xhosa around the colonial frontier,

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that ‘peculiarity of the language, which may be termed the euphonic or alliteral concord’, which he reported with considerable frustration that he was still trying to work out:

which by the end of the year was to escalate into the bloody and protracted Sixth Frontier War. By this time, Boyce had been rotated to the mission station at Mount Coke, near the Buffalo River, among the Ndlambe Xhosa. Boyce dedicated this, the ‘first Kaffir Grammar’, to Shaw, the ‘first Wesleyan Missionary in Kaffraria’, the ‘Pioneer’ of missionary work in ‘the moral wilderness’ beyond the colonial border (Boyce 1834, p. 3).8 In a short Preface, he addressed the work to a readership made up mostly of missionaries working among the Xhosa, as well as perhaps ‘a few literary characters’ engaged in comparative studies. Since both sets of readers would be ‘well aware of the difficulties which attend the composition of the first Grammar of any language’, Boyce absolved himself of the need to apologize for his work’s inevitable ‘errors and omissions’, which he asked his brother missionaries to help him amend by using interleaved copies in which they could note corrections and insertions (ibid., p. 5). In the 1834 Grammar, Boyce’s stated aim was brevity, attempting to ‘illustrate the Grammatical principles of this curious language as briefly as possible’. The work represented a clear, if strikingly abstract, delineation of the key ‘rules’ of the language as Boyce understood them, laid out under the headings of classical grammar. Not long after its first publication, however, he began to expand and amend the work for a wider readership. For the second edition, another Methodist linguist, the Reverend William Jafferd Davis, contributed a short vocabulary and phrase book, and produced a series of practice exercises to assist the learner. Davis took this revised version of the grammar to England in 1839, and it was made available to Methodist missionaries sailing for the Cape in that year. It was finally published in London in 1844 (Boyce 1844, p. xix; Smith 1881, p. 49). In this second edition Boyce included the dedication to Shaw, but replaced the brief and rather cautious Preface with a far longer Introduction adapted from one he had written for James Archbell’s grammar of Tswana in 1837. Although the first edition had been addressed only to fellow-missionaries and a few scholars, Boyce now took as his audience ‘the Christian public’, both in Britain and in South Africa (Boyce 1844, p. xvii). This Introduction was driven by a new kind of ambition – by the conviction not only that the Xhosa language could be learned from the Grammar (the language’s structure apparently no longer insurmountable), but also that the onward march of missionary linguistic research held the key to expanding the dominion of British commerce and missionary work throughout Africa.

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The man who has the moral courage to dare to expose at once the extent of his knowledge and of his ignorance, with no other object in view than that his colleagues and successors may profit by both, is entitled to a candid and courteous reception of his labours from the few who alone are qualified to form an estimate of their utility. (Ibid., p. v) Boyce painted a bleak picture of life for the pioneering missionary linguist in South Africa: a lone figure labouring with little assistance and little hope of recognition or reward. His current situation was defined by a series of negatives: his was a culturally barren working environment, without ‘literary treasures for edification or amusement’, and without ready access to the sort of ‘learned natives’ whose assistance was so important to the work of orientalist linguists in India. To scholars in Europe and to the British and Cape governments, his labour was invisible. But while this ‘voluntary ignorance’ on the part of scholars and politicians alike might be justified, perhaps, ‘if the SouthAfrican dialects were mere barbarous jargons, unsusceptible of cultivation, and defying all attempts at systematization’, the work of the missionary linguist could reveal that ‘on the contrary, these languages are regular in their formation, copious and harmonious in a high degree’ (ibid., p. vi). We shall return to these key arguments shortly. Boyce located the Grammar in the colonial frontier zone, casting it as a means to fill the barren emptiness of the ‘moral wilderness’. First, he suggested ways in which neglect of the Xhosa language reverberated in political relations around the frontier. Officials selected for work there had no knowledge of the native languages, and consequently remained entirely reliant on interpreters. The undesirability of this situation could be gleaned from the fact that until very lately, these Were chiefly selected from native convicts, undergoing, for various crimes, the doubtful process of reformation on Robben Island, the common receptacle of Cape irreclaimables. (Ibid., p. vii) If the use of convicts as interpreters suggested the dangers of communication in the frontier zone, and the instability of the colonial boundary,

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Boyce’s Introduction began with a survey of the current state of scholarly and colonial knowledge regarding the languages of South Africa, and a discussion of the context out of which the Grammar had emerged. He opened thus:

then colonial language-learning offered a solution. Boyce strongly advocated the recruitment of talented government officers able to speak Xhosa, as ‘advantageous to the public service’. Without referring explicitly to the threat of violence, Boyce posits language-learning as a means to control the danger to the colony’s stability emanating from the colonial margins in the aftermath of the 1834–35 war, as a means to promote peace through diplomacy (ibid., p. viii). Boyce had already set out his views on the disastrous events of the Sixth Frontier War, and of colonial policy on the eastern frontier, in Notes on South African Affairs, published in 1839. In it, Boyce blamed the colonial administration’s high-handed and inconsistent policies regarding the Xhosa for the region’s ongoing instability, and defended the actions of the British settlers. His criticisms were many, including an attack on the humanitarian lobby in Britain and at the Cape (Boyce 1839, p. 102). In the short term, the solutions he proposed were both military and diplomatic, and included the reoccupation of settler farms on the frontier (ibid., pp. 105–18). In the longer term, however, he argued that the only way to deal with the ‘warlike, predatory, and heathen’ Xhosa (ibid., p. 34), and to secure the colonial boundary, was through their cultural and religious transformation: Comprehensive plans of a christianizing and civilizing tendency, adapted to work efficiently on the whole body of border Kaffers, can alone afford a sufficient security against the continuance of petty depredations, and the recurrence of lamentable inroads, similar to that which signalized the year 1835. (Ibid., p. 113) In the Introduction to the 1844 Grammar, Boyce applied this vision of the compatibility of militarized colonialism, effective diplomacy, and vigorous evangelism, to his justification for the study of Xhosa. The colonial boundary would be secured through the work of colonial officials able to speak the language, and thus able to both explain and enforce the demands of the colonial government. The work of missionaries (particularly Methodist missionaries) in language study, Scriptural translation, and proselytization, meanwhile, constituted the ‘christianizing and civilizing’ forces which would radiate outward from the by-now secure colonial border, tending towards the security of the colony as well as the ‘best interests of the African races’ (Boyce 1844, p. xv). As the Introduction progressed, Boyce looked forward and outward, with ever-greater ambition, aligning the interests of the colonial

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The importance of the Kaffir and Sechuana languages, as opening to us the means of communicating with all the tribes of Africa south of the Equator, renders every attempt to facilitate their acquisition interesting to the merchants and traders of the Cape colony. [  ] A Kaffir and Sechuana version of the sacred Scriptures would form the basis of many others, spoken by some millions of the human race. (Ibid., p. xvi) The concerns of earlier commentators like Barrow and Lichtenstein with linguistic relatedness, with the relationship between ‘tribes’ and ‘nations’, ‘dialects’ and ‘languages’, were pursued further by Boyce, with a concern for spatial demarcation which was far less prominent in those earlier writers. As Patrick Harries has pointed out, this concern with space was a common feature of Western linguists’ work on African languages in the nineteenth century. Working within a post-Enlightenment paradigm in which the world was conceived as divided into discrete, analysable categories, and languages and speech groups were considered as geographically and ethnically isomorphic, linguists sought to produce ‘a concept of the world rendered neat, well-ordered and understandable [  ]. Homogeneity replaced heterogeneity; unity and reason replaced disunity and confusion.’ This homogenizing, ethnolinguistic ordering also served the demands of mission, and of colonial control, in arranging African people into ‘manageable units’ classified according to one standard language, and one supposedly unified set of cultural attributes (Harries 1988, p. 25). However, although Boyce’s definition of ‘Kaffir’ was partly motivated by the urge for homogeneity and unity, equally it was driven by more immediate political considerations. While he proposed the scope of the language to encompass all the forms of speech from the eastern border of the Cape Colony to Delagoa Bay – including modern-day Xhosa and Zulu – his real emphasis lay upon the language of the Xhosa around the colonial frontier (Boyce 1844, p. xii). These were, after all, the people among whom missionary work in the present day was concentrated, and upon whom colonial stability most closely depended; Boyce was also reiterating a preoccupation with the Rharhabe and other frontier Xhosa which had been prevalent among European theorists since the 1770s. Thus, ethnolinguistic identities were seen as radiating outward from the frontiers of the colony.

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government, colonists, and missionaries more closely as he went. The notion of linguistic relatedness is key to much of his argument; as, for example, in

At the same time, this meant that the scope and relevance Boyce could claim for his work on ‘Kaffir’ was extensive, and in this he also invoked a connection between missionary linguistics and the work of other Europeans in Africa. The labours of missionary linguists were of fundamental importance because, he argued, they would provide the ‘merchants and traders of the Cape colony’ with the means of acquiring languages vital in ‘opening to us the means of communicating with all the tribes of Africa south of the Equator’. Boyce concluded thus, asserting the need for further penetration into Africa, with evangelism following hot on the heels of trade led by ‘the enterprising youth of this colony’, whose work would in turn be facilitated by missionary linguistic endeavour: The extension of British trade and influence would afford openings for missionary labour, of which many zealous men would be ready to avail themselves. The Missionary Societies now occupying Southern Africa must be directed to consider their present operations but as stepping-stones to a still wider and more important sphere of operations: and, above all, prayer must be made before God continually, that it may please Him to hasten the time when ‘Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God’. (Ibid., pp. xvii–xviii) Writing from and locating his arguments within the ‘moral wilderness’ of the colonial frontier zone, Boyce posited language study as the engine of religious, cultural, political, and economic change, drawing on colonial, settler, and evangelical discourses in order to do so. But therein lay, at least potentially, a problem for the writer of ‘the first Grammar’ of Xhosa. Following the Sixth Frontier War, anxieties about the Xhosa were at an all-time high. The perceived destabilizing threat posed to the colony by the Xhosa on its eastern periphery was reflected in their representation within colonial discourse: The Xhosa remained not only ‘other’, but dangerously so, neither fully within nor without the colonial edges. Colonial discourses concerning them continued to reflect their threatening status as an external other, but with a very active and unsettling presence within the margins of the colonial order. (Lester 1997, p. 647) The Albany settlers, shaken by the experiences of the 1834–35 war, were generally unified in a negative vision of Xhosa people as ‘irreclaimable savages’: untrustworthy and devious, even rapacious

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Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 81

and bloodthirsty, and an incommensurable threat to the developing civilization in the eastern Cape (Lester 2001, pp. 62–7). Humanitarians, meanwhile, in Britain and the Cape, were deeply critical of colonial and settler attitudes. They read the situation on the colonial frontier as demanding both intensified missionary activity and concerted colonial involvement in order to modify and ‘improve’ the Xhosa (Lester 2001, pp. 43–4). Methodist missionaries, including and even especially Boyce, were deeply embroiled in this controversy over the nature and future of the Xhosa. There is an obvious tension here, between the anxious desire for segregation emanating from settler and colonial discourses representing the Xhosa as violent and unpredictable, and humanitarian and evangelical approaches which regarded the Xhosa as capable of transformation through Christianity and civilization, in such a way as to make them commensurable with the moral order of the colony. And this was a problematic at the heart of Boyce’s work, since missionary language manuals, in teaching the Xhosa language, were in essence templates for communication with the Xhosa. Thus he sought, in effect, to mediate between strategies of exclusion and transformation by casting Xhosa-speakers as ‘savages’, but not as ‘irreclaimable’, within his model of language study. As we have seen, Boyce argued strongly for the value of acquiring the Xhosa language to both missionaries and colonial representatives, who could thereby set about the business of transforming the Xhosa, via processes of Christianization and civilization which would fit them to the colonial order. This assumed the potential of Xhosa-speakers to be reconciled to European values in the future, despite their current threatening and liminal status. The potential for future transformation is the theme that runs through Boyce’s Grammar. The possibility of transformation sat uneasily, however, with settler and colonial interpretations of the Xhosa as violent, untrustworthy, and irreligious; or, as Boyce put it elsewhere, ‘warlike, predatory, and heathen’. In the Grammar, therefore, Boyce resisted the ethnographic functions of linguistic description, by which languages might be seen as emanations of the culture and beliefs of their speakers. This was by no means an easy task: the assumption that ‘barbarous’ people would speak a ‘barbarous’ language was a commonplace of European linguistic thought, from the popular to the academic (Steadman-Jones 1998, p. 25). Boyce, however, studiously abstracted the Xhosa language almost entirely from its cultural context, barely mentioning the Xhosa people themselves. By occluding the Xhosa language’s connection to its speakers, he enforced the dictum that the reader should judge it on its merits alone. And, at the same

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time as apparently dispassionately describing the language’s defining features and grammatical structure, he assessed them according to a series of evaluative criteria and comparative strategies that together seem designed to persuade his readers to evaluate the language positively. In Boyce’s argument, the Xhosa language was not an index of its speakers’ supposedly barbarous and debased culture in the present; rather, it was the locus and index of their spiritual and cultural potentiality. Legitimizing the language: Copiousness, regularity, philosophy, and euphony Even before laying out a set of external arguments about the political, evangelical, and mercantile applications of the Xhosa language, Boyce had contended that Xhosa was inherently worthy of study because of its internal features. As he argued, If the South-African dialects were mere barbarous jargons, unsusceptible of cultivation, and defying all attempts at systematisation, some excuse might be made for voluntary ignorance, where knowledge would be productive of no profit; but [  ] on the contrary, these languages are regular in their formation, copious and harmonious in a high degree. (Boyce 1844, p. vi) Xhosa was distinguished, according to Boyce, by copiousness, regularity, systematicity, and philosophy. These terms drew their significance from European debates over vernacular languages stretching back at least as far as the sixteenth century, being the properties commonly claimed for the European classical languages, Greek and Latin – and, taken together, these features were those from which their elevated status was commonly argued to derive. Consequently, the challenge of the European vernaculars to the dominance of Latin, following the Reformation, had been mounted in the self-same terms. For a language to be copious and philosophical meant that it was adequate to express all the categories and relations demanded by reason and experience (Steadman-Jones 1998, pp. 25–6). Regularity and systematicity, meanwhile, marked the language as predictable in its formation, governed by discernible rules. Thus Boyce’s argument did two things. It established the right of the Xhosa language to be considered as a language, rather than as a ‘barbarous jargon’ – a debased and irregular form of speech, lacking in these features.9 And it did so in a way which had specifically religious overtones, since its terms of reference echoed debates regarding

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Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 83

the suitability of the European vernaculars for the demands of Scriptural translation. In asserting that Xhosa was regular, systematic, copious, and philosophical, Boyce suggested key points of similarity with the ancient and modern languages of Europe, and the capacity of Xhosa to fulfill analogous functions, particularly in a religious context. But in addition to these merits, Xhosa also possessed one particular defining feature, according to Boyce, and this was euphony. This, above all else, was the unique key to the language: The Kaffir language is distinguished by one peculiarity, which immediately strikes a student whose views of language have been formed upon the examples afforded by the inflected languages of ancient and modern Europe. With the exception of a change of termination in the ablative case of the noun, and five changes of which the verb is susceptible in its principal tenses, the whole business of declension, conjugation, &c., is carried on by prefixes, and by the changes which take place in the initial letters or syllables of words subject to grammatical government. As these changes, in addition to the precision they communicate to the language, promote its euphony, and cause the frequent repetition of the same letter as initial to many words in a sentence, this peculiarity, upon which the whole grammar of the language depends, has been termed the EUPHONIC or ALLITERAL CONCORD. (Boyce 1844, p. 7) Here Boyce suggested that the ‘peculiarity’ of Xhosa, its structural divergence from ‘the inflected languages of ancient and modern Europe’, might shock and surprise the new student (as, indeed, it had done him). But the system of ‘euphonic concord’, the governing principle of the language, although novel, would be found to provide it both with ‘precision’ and with ‘euphony’. As a consequence of this feature, not only was the language entirely regular and systematic, it was also pleasing to the ear. And so, Boyce turned the very unfamiliarity of Xhosa (and perhaps, too, its difficulty for the learner) into its greatest virtue, by asking his readers to examine the idiosyncrasies of Xhosa structure while fitting it into established value-laden categories laid out within Western linguistic thought. Where Xhosa was most at odds with the structural norms of Indo-European languages – in its system of noun-class agreement – was precisely where Boyce insisted it most closely fitted a Western mould of linguistic value. In effect, he extended the model of linguistic value or potentiality, by adding this further criterion of euphony.

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Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 85

Legitimizing the language: Grammatical description

The usual division of words into nine classes, namely, the article, noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection, suits with equal propriety the words of the Kafir language. (Ibid., p. 6) In operating within the traditional categories of grammar, Boyce worked to demonstrate how these supposedly universal categories were instantiated within this specific language. Visually, the form of the Greco-Roman grammar also served to underline Xhosa’s regularity and systematicity, by presenting data in columns and rows, laid out in tables, filling numbered lists of declensions – all staple tools of the grammarian, but which also had a persuasive function in impressing on readers the rule-governed orderliness of the language. However, the ‘fit’ between Xhosa grammatical structure, and the classical grammatical categories, was not by any means an easy one. No sooner had he asserted the ‘propriety’ of fitting Xhosa into ‘the usual division of words into nine classes’, than Boyce confessed that ‘properly speaking, there is no article in the Kaffir’, noting that instead, ‘its place is supplied by the prefixes of the nouns and the demonstrative pronoun’. He added that The adjectives of the Kaffir language are very few; and in their prefixes resemble the noun-substantives. Certain forms of the verb are used as adjectives, and are subject to all the changes of prefix to which adjectives are subject in their union with the nouns which they qualify. (Ibid.) In this way, Boyce repeatedly redefined the grammatical ‘classes’ as functional categories, shifting the emphasis from exact formal correspondence, to the fulfilling of analogous functions. Thus, in spite of its profound structural divergence from Indo-European languages, Xhosa could still be proven to instantiate all the categories and relations which Western logic demanded of it. Strategies of comparison also helped to explain how complex, unusual, and perhaps surprising features of the language could be interpreted. More familiar languages – notably, Hebrew and Latin – could

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The familiar categories of the Greco-Roman grammar supported Boyce’s representation of Xhosa, by suggesting a formal correspondence with the European vernaculars and classical languages. As he asserted,

be invoked in order to help clarify particularly confusing or troubling aspects of Xhosa grammar. In discussing the causative form of the Xhosa verb, for example, formed by the causative affix -is-, Boyce explained by analogy with the Hebrew active causative form, Hiphil. He explained the reflexive form of the verb, formed by the reflexive affix -zi-, by reference to the Hebrew reflexive form, Hithpael (ibid., pp. 50–1). Ostensibly, this comparison serves an expository function, suggesting a correspondence between the (more familiar) Hebrew and (less familiar) Xhosa verb forms in order to better explain the workings of the latter. Hebrew morphology served as a particularly useful point of comparison because Hebrew, like Xhosa, but unlike Indo-European languages, uses infixes – grammatical markers which are placed ‘in the middle of words’ – as well as prefixes and suffixes, which are placed at the beginning or end. Boyce had already noted this in his Introduction: The frequent use of what grammarians technically term ‘epenthetic and paragogic letters or syllables’ reminds the learner of a similar peculiarity in Hebrew and Arabic grammar. (Ibid., p. xii) This comparison provided a means both to explain the formation of Xhosa verbs and to familiarize their construction: Xhosa verb inflection goes between the verb stem and final vowel; Hebrew verb forms – including the active causative form, Hiphil – also include infixes. It also, under the guise of explanation, worked to persuade. Boyce’s comparison suggested an analogy and invited a comparison for ‘the learner’ between the experience of studying Xhosa and the experience of studying Hebrew or Arabic. The notion of infixing might perhaps be surprising, since it was not to be found in Indo-European languages – it would require some consideration, the abandonment of certain assumptions on the part of the learner. But surely, Boyce’s comparative argument implied, if such a construction was good enough for Hebrew – the language of the Old Testament – then his reader should certainly accept it as legitimate in Xhosa. This is what Richard Steadman-Jones has described as a ‘moment of shock’, in which evidence from other, ostensibly more advanced languages forces the reader for a moment to compare and acknowledge the similarities between the two (Steadman-Jones 1998, p. 80). This dual function of comparison – to illuminate the ways in which the language works by analogy to another, and also thereby to legitimate it – is one which can be seen repeatedly at work in Boyce’s Grammar.10

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Boyce’s grammatical description of Xhosa drew the reader’s attention repeatedly to similarities between languages as a means to deduce and explain – and also, often, to justify – the distinctive features of Xhosa grammar. Sometimes, the comparisons which he made were surprising or even audacious, suggesting similarities where readers would least expect to find them: between Xhosa and Hebrew, or Xhosa and Latin. In the place where readers might most expect to find similarity, however – in South Africa itself – Boyce pointed to difference. Earlier scientific travellers had, as we have seen, used linguistic comparison in order to reify and order the eastern Cape frontier zone by means of ethnolinguistic distinctions between Khoi-San and Xhosa languages and their speakers. Boyce extended these strategies in order to suggest an absolute typological distinction between these groups which encompassed and ordered the whole of South Africa. In this way he developed a comparative grid predicated upon relations of similarity on the one hand, and dissimilarity on the other, partly in order to further establish Xhosa’s potentiality to be transformed into a Christian system. Boyce separated the languages of South Africa into two groups: the first, which included ‘Namacqua’, ‘Bushman’, ‘Korana’, and ‘Hottentot’, was set off as categorially distinct from the second, comprising ‘Kaffir’ and ‘Sechuana’. He ascribed to each a set of polarized phonological, lexical, grammatical, and conceptual characteristics, which together constituted their potential for Christianization. Of the former division, he wrote that These dialects are entirely different in grammatical construction from the Kaffir and Sechuana language: they abound in those peculiar and barbarous sounds called ‘clicks’; and, from their harshness, and the limited nature of their vocabularies, appear to be barriers in the way of religious and intellectual culture, and, as such, doomed to extinction by the gradual progress of Christianity and civilization. (Boyce 1844, pp. ix–x) Here Boyce instituted a series of binary oppositions reminiscent of the representative strategies of earlier writers. Where Xhosa and its cognates were characterized by copiousness and harmoniousness, KhoiSan languages were distinguished by their poverty and barbarity of expression. And whereas Xhosa was presented as a potential vehicle for

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‘Barriers in the way of religious and intellectual culture’: The nature of ‘Bushman’ and ‘Hottentot’

religious teaching, these languages were ‘barriers in the way of religious and intellectual culture’. Boyce placed ‘Hottentot’ (Khoi) and ‘Bushman’ (San) languages together as related speech forms sharing largely the same degraded features. In this his attitudes fell into an already wellestablished pattern of representation, describing Khoi and San languages as bestial and unintelligible – languages of the body, rather than of the mind. The implications of these associations for missionary language study are clearly illustrated by Boyce, for whom ‘Bushman’ languages were utterly degraded and unusable, while ‘Hottentot’ fared little better. These languages were apparently problematic in two ways. The first was the notion that they were incomprehensible, unlearnable, and unwritable. The second was the animalistic and degraded attributes associated with them, deriving, as we have seen, from attitudes to both the languages themselves and their speakers. In order to locate and define both Khoi-San languages and their speakers, Boyce had a particular vocabulary of representations at his disposal, pivoting around the key tropes of inarticulacy, barbarism, and bestiality. These associations had specific and troubling relevance for missionary linguistic discourse, since languages which were supposedly barbarous, degraded, and unsystematic could hardly be considered fit media for the word of God. Boyce was bolstered in his arguments by the ongoing decline of KhoiSan languages, which throughout the first half of the nineteenth century were rapidly being lost in favour of variants of Dutch, and to a far lesser extent English – it would, of course, have been far more difficult to justify the wholesale abandonment of widely spoken languages in a state of rude health. Boyce, for his part, faced the imminent death of Khoi languages in the eastern Cape with something like relief: The writer of the Kaffir Grammar, in the indulgence of his curiosity, once engaged in the task of compiling a sketch of the grammatical peculiarities of the Hottentot language, as spoken by the Gonaquas now scattered in Kaffirland; but relinquished the undertaking in consequence of its apparent inutility: for it is evident that the prevalence of Dutch and English among the few tribes which yet speak these uncouth and inharmonious dialects will soon supersede the necessity of further literary labours, which in this language appear hitherto to have been more curious than useful. (Ibid., p. x) Utility, according to Boyce, rather than curiosity, was a legitimate motivation for linguistic research. If languages were dying out, why spend time

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studying them? But this was a prospect to be greeted with equanimity because Khoi-San languages were incompatible with the demands of Christian culture.11 What, then, was the fundamental purpose served by Boyce’s inclusion of descriptions of Khoi-San languages in his grammar of Xhosa? In Chapter 1, we saw the development of strategies of ethnolinguistic classification in the eastern Cape frontier zone by European scientific travellers as a means to assert order, attempting to transform mutable and confusing social relations and communicative experiences into stable, comprehensible categories. Boyce’s ‘two divisions of South African languages’ reiterate the linguistic and ethnic bifurcation of the colonial frontier, which as we have seen was well established as a feature of descriptions of the region, and in which Khoi-San languages and their speakers were treated as the antithesis of Xhosa. Boyce adapted this distinction according to the key criterion of potentiality. Early on in the Introduction, he set up an opposition between ‘mere barbarous jargons, unsusceptible of cultivation, and defying all attempts at systematisation’, and Xhosa and its cognates – in modern terms, Bantu languages – which were ‘regular in their formation, copious and harmonious in a high degree’ (ibid., p. vi). Effectively, he established two distinct categories of language: those suitable for the purposes of Christian teaching, and ‘barbarous jargons’. The initially nebulous category of ‘barbarous jargon’ quickly came to be filled by ‘Hottentot’ and ‘Bushman’ languages, with their apparently peculiar sounds, bestial connotations, and lack of systematicity. A series of binary terms established Khoi-San languages to be all that Bantu languages were not: systematic versus unsystematic, euphonious versus inharmonious, elevated versus barbarous, copious versus impoverished, language versus jargon. This representational strategy suggested a particular way of interpreting the complex linguistic situation in the eastern Cape, and in South Africa more generally: that the key distinction was not between European and African languages, but between those languages that were capable of being used for Christian teaching, and those that were not. In this way, Xhosa was brought further in line with other languages in the region – English and Dutch – by being contrasted with KhoiSan languages, cast as supremely and irredeemably alien. John Barrell’s formulation of ‘this/that/the other’ provides an analytical framework for understanding the function of Khoi-San in asserting relations of proximity between the categories of Xhosa and European in Boyce’s argument:

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The terms self and other can be thought of as superseded by ‘this’ and ‘that’, in a narrative which now says, there is this here, and it is different from that there, but the difference between them, though in its own way important, is as nothing compared with the difference between the two of them considered together, and that third thing, way over there, which is truly other to them both. The significance of this tripartite terminology is that It seems to dramatise how what at first seems ‘other’ can be made over to the side of the self – to a subordinate position on that side – only so long as a new, and newly absolute ‘other’ is constituted to fill the discursive space that has thus been evacuated. (Barrell 1991, p. 10) In the context of missionary linguistics, these arguments have a specific relevance. Setting out to validate the Xhosa language as a medium for Christianity, in a context in which its speakers were considered barbaric and threatening to the colonial order, Boyce at least partially effaced this sense of danger and ‘otherness’ by contrasting Xhosa with KhoiSan languages. Such negative associations as bestiality, degradation, and poverty of expression, were loaded onto Khoi-San languages, which – rather than Xhosa – were represented as fundamentally incompatible with Christianity. Boyce’s strategies in representing the grammatical structure of Xhosa, its defining features, and its relationship to other languages in South Africa, served clear legitimating as well as expository functions. In emphasizing relations of similarity (to Hebrew, Arabic, and IndoEuropean languages) on the one hand, and difference (from Khoi-San languages) on the other, he established a comparative grid through which Xhosa’s virtues and latent potentiality might be revealed. This emphasis upon the imminent capacities of the Xhosa language to become a Christianized and civilized tongue was set up, crucially, entirely without reference to Xhosa-speakers, their history, culture, beliefs, and practices. Whereas earlier representations of the Xhosa language had treated it as an emanation of its speakers, suggesting language and culture to be inextricably connected, Boyce’s linguistic work struggled to abstract the Xhosa language from its cultural context. Boyce’s appraisal of Xhosa culture Like many of his colonial and missionary contemporaries, Boyce regarded the culture of the Nguni peoples living beyond the Cape

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The Chiefs and influential men are foremost in every species of excess and wickedness: they do not appear to possess anything like a moral sense: the present state of society here awfully exemplifies the natural debasement of human nature, when unrestrained by the influence of the Holy Spirit. However it is in vain to attempt to convey to the minds of men living in countries where Christianity is professed, any adequate conception of the moral state of a people, who are literally without any notion of a God and who thus are left to the corrupt workings of their own hearts, unchecked by the thoughts of judgement to come, and unrestrained by even the lowest standard of conventional morality.12 Like other European commentators on the Xhosa, including Van der Kemp before him, Boyce assumed that the Xhosa had no religious thought, and no concept of God. Therefore he, and other Methodist missionaries, used the term uTixo, originally a borrowing from Khoi, to indicate God. In the Grammar, Boyce was silent on the topics of religious thought or morality, simply employing the term uTixo without comment. And in fact, insofar as the speakers of Xhosa, their culture, or their beliefs were mentioned at all, they featured through a series of absences. At the outset, in the dedication to Shaw, Boyce wrote from the ‘moral wilderness’ – situating the speakers of Xhosa in an empty space where morality should be, a wilderness to be tamed and cultivated by the Christian missionary. Later, he pointed out how his linguistic work was made all the more difficult by the absence of ‘learned natives’, on whose assistance he might depend (as would be the case in India). And, describing the cultural attributes of Bantu-speakers at the outset of the Introduction, Boyce simply insisted that Excepting the hope of being useful, there is nothing in South Africa to stimulate philological inquiry. The languages of the Aboriginal tribes offer no literary treasures for the amusement or edification of the student. A few war-songs are extant in every tribe: among the Amapondos, even satirical songs may be occasionally heard; and among the Amazulu, songs embodying sentiments indicative

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colonial borders as marked by notable absences; as he reported soon after his arrival among Faku’s tribe, ‘the natives afford a singular specimen, of a people, in all things too superstitious, without any Religion, true or false, to blame for it’. Both religious thought and morality were lacunae in the Nguni culture Boyce observed around him:

of a more than ordinary sensibility, are said to exist; but, generally speaking, the African intellect does not appear to advantage in the exercise of the imaginative faculties. In forensic debates, in legal pleas and cross-examinations, the native talent of a Kaffir and Mochuana appears to advantage, and no one can witness such displays of intellectual gladiatorship without being convinced that, in their case, intellect has not been affected by the distinction of colour or clime. (Ibid., pp. vi–vii) Boyce’s condemnation of Nguni cultures is striking, among other things, for the way in which it maps an increase in cultural productivity along a trajectory away from the Cape colonial frontier. Most celebrated are the ‘sentiments’ of ‘more than ordinary sensibility’ which can be found among the Zulu; next come the ‘satirical songs’ of the Mpondo; both in their different ways represent minor exceptions to Boyce’s general rule that Nguni people lacked both ‘literary treasures’ and ‘imaginative faculties’. Coming to the Xhosa, his argument rested solely on potentiality rather than on actuality. The intellectual capacity of the Xhosa was not to be doubted, argued Boyce, while at the same time their imaginative abilities and culture were almost beneath notice. This is an important distinction: Boyce thereby demarcated the Xhosa as culturally barren, yet still marked them as appropriate subjects for evangelism, since intellectual ability was evidence of their potentiality for amelioration and Christianization. This potentiality, marked in the Xhosa intellect as in the Xhosa language, meant that the cultural and imaginative void surrounding Xhosa people could be filled by the experiences of Christian revelation and personal faith. Thus, perhaps perversely, Boyce’s legitimation of Xhosa largely worked by resisting the ethnographic functions of linguistic description as they had been established by earlier writers on the language. On the contrary, the logic of Boyce’s arguments lay precisely in sealing off the language from association with its speakers in the present, removing it from its cultural context and representing it as an abstract, self-enclosed system. The representative strategies by which he presented this system, meanwhile, constituted a set of arguments for its as-yet unrealized capacity to become Christianized. In this way, Boyce’s linguistic description played its part in an ethnographic representation not of the past and the present of the Xhosa people, but of their future – an ethnography of potentiality, in which the latent attributes of the Xhosa people, as revealed solely through their language, marked their capacity for Christian conversion. Rather than reflect communicative scenarios

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Davis’ vocabulary and phrase book The exercises, vocabulary, and phrase book contributed to the 1844 edition of Boyce’s Grammar by William Davis present a model of language-learning in the colonial frontier zone which underscores the dual aspect of Boyce’s representation of Xhosa. The exercises were included in order for learners to practice applying the grammatical rules independently, and the vocabulary gave the learner a lexicon to use with the grammar. The phrases, meanwhile – which are what concern us here – allowed the reader to deduce syntactic information, which Boyce had not covered in the Grammar, and at the same time suggested communicative scenarios in which the learner might employ the language. These phrases are listed alphabetically, but although this gives them a heterogeneous feel, in fact they can be reduced to four categories: religious statements and exhortations, imperatives and directions, wage labour, and war or conflict. To take a fairly representative selection: Alarm the people, and gather them together, All my friends are dead, Believe in God, Faith is the gift of God, You frighten me very much, Idle people are always poor,

I say, you man, Leave (forsake) these customs, Prepare to meet thy God, Prepare the waggon for starting, Your wage shall be four rix-dollars per month, We are come to receive our wages,

vusa abantu u ba hlanganise. [  ] zonke izihlobo zam zi file. [  ] kolwa ku-Tixo. [  ] ukolo lu kukupa kuka-Tixo. [  ] uya d’oyikisa kakulu. [  ] abantu aba qenayo bangamahlempu gamaxa onke. [  ] wa umfundini. [  ] yeka lamasiko. [  ] u zilungisela uku thlangana noTixo wako. lungisela uku mka in qwelo. [  ] uya ku zuza i-rix-dollar zibene genyanga inye. [  ] si zile ukwamkela umvuzo wetu (Boyce 1844, pp. 176–97).

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which would reveal the unchristian, apparently depraved Xhosa present, Boyce’s Grammar suggested the possibility of using language to initiate them into a new set of communicative domains, recreating them as Christianized and civilized.

The phrases have certain things in common, notably that they represent an almost entirely unidirectional model of communication. There are no interrogatives at all, and almost all of them, apart from requests for employment or for wages, appear to be phrases – many imperatives, as well as statements – to be uttered by the language-learner to his or her (silent) Xhosa interlocutors. Thus, they represent a model of interaction as talking to, rather than with, Xhosa-speakers, and up to a point, this is suggestive of relations of colonial control. The phrases relating to missionary work and employment implicitly incorporate Xhosa-speakers (and overwrite their resistance) by inserting them into a Christian worldview and a colonial wage-labour system. However, the demand that Xhosa-speakers ‘leave (forsake)’ their (undisclosed) customs, and all the phrases relating to violence and warfare – not least, ‘you frighten me very much’ – are reminders of the resistance of Xhosa-speakers and the perceived physical and moral dangers of the frontier zone. If the silence of the Xhosa interlocutor in Davis’s phrases might be taken as acquiescence, it also hints at less accommodating responses. Taken together, the phrases suggest, as does Boyce’s Grammar itself, both the sense of the Xhosa as a threat, and the processes of ‘christianizing and civilizing’ through which they might be absorbed into the colonial order.

The Reverend John Whittle Appleyard’s The Kafir Language Boyce’s revised Grammar, together with Davis’s exercises, vocabulary, and list of Xhosa phrases, was made available to a party of Methodist missionaries sailing for the Cape from Britain in 1839. Among these was the young minister John Whittle Appleyard, who was to become Boyce’s successor as the Methodists’ premier linguist in the eastern Cape. Appleyard came from staunch Methodist stock: the eldest son of a minister, he had attended Kingswood School in Bath, founded by John Wesley. On leaving Kingswood he was apprenticed to a bookseller and printer, and worked at this trade while dedicating his spare time to lay preaching before entering the Methodist seminary at Hoxton, London, where he was one of the first trainee ministers to benefit from the theological – and linguistic – education available there. As well as studying English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at the seminary, Appleyard indulged his taste for language scholarship by attending lectures on Oriental languages and literatures when possible, and by undertaking the study of the Aramaic languages Syriac and Chaldee in his own time (Smith 1881, pp. 12–18). For a missionary, and particularly for a Methodist missionary, he was unusually scholarly in his dedication to language study.

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South Africa was not Appleyard’s first choice as a missionary field; partly inspired by his interest in orientalist philology, he had wanted to go to India. However, he accepted his posting to the eastern Cape as God’s command. When the mission party set sail aboard the Methodist missionary ship the Triton, they were given copies of the second edition of Boyce’s Grammar, with the exercises produced by Davis. They also had Davis himself as their teacher aboard ship, so that their study of the Xhosa language could commence in earnest. As Appleyard’s fellow missionary the Reverend Thornley Smith later recalled, The study of [Boyce’s Grammar] occupied a good deal of our time on board the ship; and I remember the fun it often produced, when we miscalled words, or introduced into a word a wrong click, thus giving it a very different meaning from the true one. (Ibid., p. 49) The mission party arrived in the eastern Cape in 1840. For a short while, Appleyard was appointed as assistant to Boyce, who was then stationed in Durban, in Natal. Soon, however, he was rotated to the mission station at Beka, in the Xhosa territory, a move he welcomed because he felt it would speed up his acquisition of the Xhosa language. To this end, he applied himself to the intensive study of Boyce’s Grammar, going through it repeatedly and taking notes, while at the same time taking notes on grammar and lexicon from his discussions with native speakers (ibid., p. 50). In June 1842 he wrote longingly in his diary, May the Lord assist me both to learn and speak the languages correctly, that I may be made the more effectually a blessing to those amongst whom it is my appointed lot to dwell! (Appleyard 1971, p. 14) Appleyard was evidently a fast learner, because soon he felt his prayer had been answered. In April 1843, with his interpreter absent, he tried speaking Xhosa on his own with native speakers for the first time. Three months later, he declared himself confident enough to preach in Xhosa (Appleyard’s journal, cited in Smith 1881, pp. 36–7). His missionary work was interrupted by the frontier war of 1846–47, in the aftermath of which another swathe of Xhosa land was incorporated into the colony. During this time, he published a series of articles in the South African Christian Watchman and Missionary Magazine, discussing Xhosa and its cognate languages in historical, ethnological, and philological terms,

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Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 95

influenced by developments in European comparativism. Three years later he published his detailed – some said, too detailed – grammar of Xhosa, The Kafir Language, which also incorporated this material. To a great extent, Appleyard described and legitimated the Xhosa language using and building upon the representative strategies established by his predecessor Boyce, whose Grammar he had studied so carefully. At the same time, however, the contours of Appleyard’s argument also reflect the changing relationship of the Xhosa to settler society and to colonial power, as well as his own philological inclinations towards comparative scholarship of a kind which owed as much to the new philology coming from Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, as it did to missionary traditions of pedagogical grammar. Appleyard set out several interlocking aims for The Kafir Language, and addressed himself to a diverse readership. In one sense, the work was supposedly pedagogical, aiming ‘to afford assistance in the acquisition of the Kafir language’ to those who might require it (Appleyard 1850, p. v). This readership was taken to comprise missionaries first and foremost, for whom learning Xhosa was not just ‘a desirable attainment’, but ‘an indispensable one’, but also colonial administrators, traders, and colonists (ibid., pp. vi–vii). At the same time, Appleyard also directed his work to a philologically-minded readership, both amateur and professional, seeking ‘to encourage and stimulate inquiry in reference to South African dialects in general’ (ibid., p. v). That Appleyard considered these aims achievable, and compatible with each other, suggests much about the changing relationship between the Xhosa and the colony. By this time, political relations in the eastern Cape region had shifted significantly, and the onus now fell upon the colonial government to preserve its grip on newly won power over the Xhosa. In 1847, following the Seventh Frontier War, Xhosa power had been weakened – although Xhosa resistance had not been quelled – and a further vast swathe of territory had been taken by the British. The land from the Fish to the Keiskamma Rivers was absorbed into the Cape Colony, becoming the district of Victoria; territory between the Keiskamma and the Kei was annexed as British Kaffraria. Concomitantly, colonial policy had swung away from exclusion, further towards forcible domination, surveillance, and partial incorporation as means to manage the perceived threats posed by the Xhosa. The new administration of British Kaffraria, under the control of Harry Smith, was to govern by military rule rather than colonial law, attempting to further consolidate power over the Xhosa by concerted efforts to erode chiefly power; and a scheme was set in place to export

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From the late-1840s [  ] the colonial order was extended to encompass the Xhosa more on its own terms. The frontier Xhosa remained very much a culturally constructed other within hegemonic colonial discourses, but as a population integral to the eastern Cape order, they were partially subjected to networks of control. (Lester 1997, p. 647) These strategies were instituted, as earlier policies of separation had been, as an attempt to neutralize or mitigate the sense of the Xhosa as a dangerous presence on the colonial margins, resistant to British domination. The situation in the newly annexed Xhosa territories remained unstable – in fact, not long after the publication of The Kafir Language, in late 1850, the Ngqika Xhosa in British Kaffraria once again rose up in armed struggle against the British (joined, this time, by large numbers of Khoikhoi). That Appleyard might allude to this sense of threat from the Xhosa in The Kafir Language is not surprising. He was, like other Methodists, imbricated in British settler society, which maintained its violent antipathy to the Xhosa; and he had himself been caught up in and witnessed some of the bloodshed of the 1846–47 frontier war (see Appleyard 1971, pp. 39–118). He referred to this conflict, and to the earlier 1836–37 war, when he described the frontier Xhosa in The Kafir Language as The people who have become so notorious as plunderers of the Colony, and who have twice, within the short period of twelve years, taken up arms against the British Government, and each time desolated some of the fairest portions of the Eastern province. (Appleyard 1850, p. 36) Here Appleyard rearticulated the stereotype, particularly prevalent among British settlers, of the frontier Xhosa as ‘plunderers’ – violent and unpredictable, motivated by greed, enemies of the British government and despoilers of land and property. The inclusion of this representation of the Xhosa points to the problematic which underpins Appleyard’s work, as it had Boyce’s: how to negotiate the relationship between strategies of exclusion and incorporation, using linguistic description as a means to manage the threat posed by the Xhosa in the present, while asserting their potentiality for future transformation according to the criteria of Christianity and civilization.

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Xhosa youth from British Kaffraria into the colony as labour (Lester 2001, pp. 152–3). All in all,

Appleyard’s vision of the role to be played by language-learning on the colonial frontier suggested strategies for containing and managing the troubling presence of the Xhosa. Echoing Boyce, he lamented the fact that the Cape government placed no requirement on its civil officers to learn indigenous languages, as was the case in other parts of the Empire: relations in the newly annexed territories would be greatly improved by knowledge of Xhosa among colonial officials. Colonist farmers, he added, who were now being encouraged to inhabit the district of Victoria, should also be able to speak the language of their new African employees: It may be worth consideration, accordingly, whether its [Xhosa’s] study would not be advantageously included in the education of those who are ultimately intended for agricultural pursuits, in which they will chiefly require the service of Kafirs and Fingoes [Mfengu], and to whose moral and intellectual welfare, it will be their duty as far as possible to attend. (Ibid., pp. vi–vii) Appleyard associated his contention for the importance of language study not only to the process of Christianization, but also with colonial expansion and the incorporation of Xhosa labour into the colonial economy, envisioning the day-to-day running of settler farms as an extension of mission. In this he combined a vision of sustained colonization and orderly colonial governance in Victoria, with a typically Methodist willingness to blur the boundary between clergy and laity. The business of evangelism need not, Appleyard asserted, be conducted only from the pulpit: the activities of laical colonists, who would both direct the labour and attend to the ‘moral and intellectual welfare’ of Xhosa and Mfengu employees, could contribute to the onward march of Christianization and civilization through their working practices, by learning to speak Xhosa. Appleyard suggested language-learning as a means to domesticate the colonial margins through a set of not-entirely-distinct processes: negotiation and diplomacy between Xhosa and colonial officials, settlement and the establishing of a stable colonial order incorporating regulated Xhosa labour, and the cultural transformation of the Xhosa through the operation of evangelism. Like Boyce before him, Appleyard drew upon settler, colonial, and evangelical discourses. Differences between the arguments of the two Methodist grammarians reflected the shifting relationship of the Xhosa to colonial power; but both sought in language study a model of colonial relations on the frontier which was stable

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and governable. In this manner, they placed their grammatical texts in the frontier zone, presenting them as orderly means of mediation – and transformation – between colony and periphery.

Appleyard’s strategies in legitimating Xhosa as an object of study drew heavily on the criteria of potentiality laid out by Boyce. Invoking the same set of key characteristics ascribed to ‘Kaffir’ and ‘Sechuana’ by Boyce, he wrote of Xhosa that it was ‘highly systematic’, ‘truly philosophical’, ‘harmonious’, and possessed of a copia verborum ‘greater than one would expect to find in the language of an uncivilized people’ (Appleyard 1850, pp. v, 26, 69). He also, as Boyce had done, established these criteria for Xhosa by contrast with Khoi-San languages – further entrenching the distinction by using the authoritative language of philological and ethnological classification. In the section of The Kafir Language entitled ‘Classification of South African dialects’, he named the two ‘classes’ for their ‘distinctive features’: the ‘Click class’ and the ‘Alliteral class’. The ‘Click Class’ were characterized by ‘uncouth and jargonish sounds, which totally disqualify them for becoming successful media of instructive communication’. They were categorically distinct from ‘the Alliteral class’, which ‘forms the second and principal division of South African languages’: Its various dialects are of a much higher order than those of the Click class, being highly systematic and harmonious in their construction, and well worthy of receiving a literature. (Ibid., p. 26) Appleyard’s arguments have a striking temporality about them, distinguishing between the two ‘classes’ of language in terms of a Christianized and civilized future time. The ‘Alliteral class’ of languages possessed what I have been calling potentiality: certain qualities represented as latent capacities for development into Christian languages, through a series of transformative processes: systematization, expansion, the ‘receiving’ of ‘a literature’. In contrast to Xhosa and its cognates, however, Khoi-San languages presented a barrier to transformation, rather than the means by which it might be carried out: ‘they are uncouth and unharmonious, rendering any attempt at their systematization a matter of almost insuperable difficulty’ (ibid., p. 9). It was for this reason that In the way of literature nothing has been accomplished in the Bushman language. In fact, it would seem to be quite incapable of

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Thus, Appleyard’s construction of these apparently divergent and unequal languages in the present was tied to a vision of their divergent and unequal futures.

Comparative grammar and historical reconstruction Appleyard’s classificatory focus lay not only on the future, but also on the past, particularly in discussing the ‘Alliteral’ languages of Africa. Early in The Kafir Language, he considered the possibility of historical reconstruction through the tracing of linguistic ‘affinity’, on the basis of grammatical structure rather than lexis. He discussed the relationship between this and other, more familiar language ‘families’ – noting that no relationship of ‘affinity’ existed with ‘Indo-Germanic’, but that ‘some resemblance, however, may be traced between the Kafir and Semitic families’, although this suggestion remained tentative given the current state of research.13 Appleyard’s argument here is striking for the way in which it suggests that the ‘Kafir family’ was as appropriate an object of comparative research as the two language ‘families’ most familiar to any relatively educated European reader of the period, the Indo-European and Semitic. He thereby implied that the techniques developed in Indo-European philology were appropriate as means to interpret the linguistic data he was about to set out in The Kafir Language. Reflecting contemporary debates in Indo-European studies about original forms, he went on to discuss the possibility of finding which of the related ‘Alliteral’ languages might be the most original ‘parent language’ (ibid., pp. 6–7). And, although he admitted that the results of such inquiry might be at this point inconclusive, the extensive ‘sound-shifting’ tables which he devised, demonstrating regular vowel and consonantal shifts between Xhosa and Tswana, suggested emphatically that the sorts of methods devised by Jacob Grimm for IndoEuropean might be applied to the ‘Alliteral’ languages of Africa (ibid., pp. 51–6). Appleyard did not draw firm historical conclusions from his philological speculations; instead, however, he suggested that the historical findings of comparative philology in South Africa were eventually likely to corroborate current theories regarding the origins of the Xhosa,

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having any. Humanly speaking, it appears necessary to teach the Bushmen, and the same remark applies with almost equal force to every Hottentot tribe, a new language, in order to [sic] their Christianization and civilization. (Ibid., p. 16)

Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 101

On many accounts, there are good grounds for supposing that they are of Ishmaelitish descent, and consequently, that they are of the same origin as many of the tribes of Arabia. The twelve sons of Ishmael were the princes or heads of as many different families, and whose descendants occupied a tract of country, extending from Havilah on the Euphrates [  ] to the wilderness of Shur. (Appleyard 1850, pp. 7–8) Appleyard accorded the Xhosa a place in the Scriptural genealogy, by associating them with the wandering tribes of Arabia. They were therefore descended from the same stock as the modern Muslims of that region. The history of the Xhosa was, by this account, one of deterioration from an originally more elevated state, and it followed that this should be equally true of their language: The Kafir language, although at present spoken by a race of people only just emerging from a state of complete barbarism, bears strong internal evidence of having been used, at one time, by those who must have constituted a much more cultivated order of society. Time has probably effected a deterioration in some of its parts, considering in whose possession we find it; yet even now it does not seem to be the legitimate property of an uncivilized people. (Ibid., p. 2) Though it had come to exist in its present form through a process of ‘deterioration in some of its parts’ over time, the central features of the Xhosa language nevertheless manifested remnants of its more worthy past – indeed, the language appeared in marked contrast to its speakers, hardly seeming to belong to this ‘uncivilized people’. Interpretation of the history of the Xhosa people through a Biblical paradigm therefore provided them with legitimacy, marking them with the potential for linguistic, cultural, and spiritual amelioration. If they had once ‘constituted a much more cultivated order of society’, if their language did ‘not seem to be the legitimate property of an uncivilized people’, and if they descended from the monotheistic sons of Ishmael, then their elevation to Christianity could be that much more readily achieved. However, the

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and discover any still-extant ‘parent form’ ‘amongst the tribes which occupy the interior regions to the south or south-west of Abyssinia’. Here he drew on arguments first formulated by William Shaw, which used the Biblical chronology to locate the Xhosa as Arabs, descendants of Ishmael, son of Abraham (Chidester 1996a, p. 91):

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On the frontier, most European theorists preferred a theory of degeneration, especially if they could trace a higher origin of the Xhosa to a part of the world as remote as Arabia. If they originally belonged in the Middle East, the Xhosa did not belong in southern Africa – that is, not any more than the European settlers did. (1996a, p. 113) So, significantly, Appleyard’s historical account further validated his arguments for the potentiality of Xhosa, while preserving the British right to the eastern Cape. Even the Khoikhoi, considered to be the ‘first inhabitants’ of the region (Appleyard 1850, p. 9), had arrived through processes of migration from further north, and whatever their original rights to the land, they were nonetheless being rapidly assimilated into the colonial order. The Xhosa, meanwhile, were Arabs. Their ancestral home was far away (albeit not, of course, as far as that of the colonists). Just like Xhosa, Khoi-San languages too were, according to Appleyard, products of degradation from a purer original language – degradation which had taken place, perhaps, during the processes of migration. Embedded within his discussion of ‘clicks’ as the ‘lowest grade of articulate sounds’, for example, is the following passage: Their present barbarous state, as regards vocal expression, can hardly be supposed to be their original one. It seems more likely to have arisen by a gradual process of innovation, during the long period which the several Hottentot migrations are conjectured to have occupied, and in the course of which, the people seem to have descended from one stage of intellectual degradation to another, till they arrived at that extreme point of barbarity in which they were first found by Europeans. An early date may be assigned for the commencement of this innovatory process. When they arrived at their present condition, it is impossible to say; but, judging from external evidence, no material change can have passed over them for some centuries. The conclusion to be deduced from these remarks, is, that if it were possible to divest these languages of their uncouth and jargonish sounds, which totally disqualify them from becoming successful media of instructive communication, and restore those for which they have been successively adopted, they would perhaps prove to be in closer alliance with some other African tongues, than is usually imagined. (Ibid., p. 17)

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assignation of Arabic origins to the Xhosa also had one more politically significant implication, as David Chidester makes clear:

Again, Appleyard located the present state of the language within a temporal framework which was in line with the Biblical account of human history. The Kafir Language is laced with references to Biblical chronology, and Appleyard, like many earlier commentators, considered it likely that Khoikhoi and San people were descendants of the cursed sons of Ham (ibid., p. 13).14 His arguments provided the Khoikhoi with a genealogy and a history; they also accounted for the present state of their language, culture, and morality. The language, Appleyard informed his readers, had come to exist in its current form through a process of corruption, which in turn was figured as a by-product of its speakers’ spiralling ‘intellectual degradation’. Therefore the ‘present barbarous state’ in which it was to be found was a feature as much of the ‘Hottentots’ themselves as of their language. The history and state of the language, in other words, were indivisible from those of its speakers. Appleyard’s understanding of linguistic change, in line with the Scriptural model of human history which perceived languages as moving from purity to degradation, was a common one among colonial missionaries.15 It was also the fundamental guiding principle of British ethnologists like James Cowles Prichard, who had been influential on Appleyard’s work.16 Early language was not represented by the utterances of ‘savages’, but by the irreplaceable purity of Edenic speech. This Biblical framework offered a Christian conceptual model for interpreting African realities; a perception of language change as deterioration permitted Appleyard to account for Khoi-San languages, conceived of as extremely debased and alien, in a manner which nevertheless preserved a sense of common humanity and the potential for amelioration. The reference to ‘divest[ing] these languages of their uncouth and jargonish sounds’, fanciful though it may have been in real terms, had a serious implication: if one were to excise these marks of ‘degradation’, the purer form left behind would manifest clearer signs of its common origins with other forms of speech. Even this ‘barbarous’ and ‘degraded’ language, therefore, was evidence of human monogenesis. Within Appleyard’s interpretation of language development through the Biblical historical narrative, both Khoi-San and Xhosa-speakers had arrived at their present state through a lengthy process of deterioration. Nevertheless, its significance was markedly different for the two groups. Khoi-San languages were Hamitic in origin, and the deterioration they manifested was so extreme that, according to Appleyard, they were simply unworkable in Christian terms, incompatible with the demands of evangelism and progress. Xhosa, on the other hand, was Semitic in

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origin, bearing ‘strong internal evidence’ of its speakers’ history as ‘a much more cultivated order of society’. Thus although the Xhosa people were regarded as degraded in the present, their past was nevertheless an elevated one, a fact which suggested they were capable of amelioration in the future. Their language was the marker of this. It signalled its speakers’ potential for redemption, and it represented the means by which this redemption would take place.

How to learn a different language: Studying Xhosa ‘according to its own analogy’ While Appleyard’s arguments in The Kafir Language aimed to legitimate Xhosa as capable of becoming a Christian system, however, he certainly did not suggest that this capacity would make the language an easy or familiar object of study for a European learner. Emphatically, potentiality and familiarity were not at all the same thing. At the outset, he offered a word of advice to the prospective language learner about the perhaps uncomfortable experience of difference involved in a first encounter with Xhosa. This encounter would, he emphasized, probably demand some hard work in intellectual and conceptual re-orientation on the part of the learner: To those who may be about commencing to learn the Kafir language, a caution may perhaps be needful in their entering on the study of a language, which is used by a people living in a widely different state of society to that in which they themselves have moved, and which belongs to a class of languages totally distinct, in many of its features, from any to which they have been previously accustomed; lest, on the one hand, they endeavour to bend it to preconceived rules, in which case they will fail to understand it; or, on the other hand, they hastily condemn it as barbarous and unphilosophical, when, in all probability they will be discouraged, and disinclined for further progress. The Kafir language must be allowed to stand upon its own merits, and be studied according to its own analogy. If this be done, it will be found superior to many in ingenuity of form, and inferior to few in the expression of thought. (Ibid., p. viii) The experience of distance from the familiar, in encountering Xhosa for the first time, was emphasized as both a disorienting and a liberating one. It was a distance which would force the reader first to recognize, and then necessarily to abandon, his or her own ingrained

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linguistic and cultural assumptions – thereby entering into a relationship with the Xhosa language of such close proximity that he or she might assess it ‘upon its own merits’, and ‘according to its own analogy’. In other words, do not compare it to other languages, do not expect it to do the things that other languages do, in the same ways, because this is to risk fundamentally and perhaps dangerously misinterpreting Xhosa’s true nature. Appleyard issued a challenge and an invitation to his reader to enter unfamiliar conceptual territory in studying Xhosa. It was only by studying and assessing it in and of itself that the learner could see its ‘merits’, its ‘ingenuity’, as they really were. On the one hand, it was the uniqueness of Xhosa, its lack of resemblance to more familiar languages, which Appleyard celebrated as the greatest of its virtues. It was this which underpinned the admiration he expressed for this language as ‘one of the most curious and ingenious ever known’ (ibid., p. 66). Notably, unlike Boyce, who as we have seen relied in part on strategies of comparison and analogy for the purposes of grammatical exposition, Appleyard made no reference to other languages in explaining and justifying the workings of Xhosa grammatical structure. In this sense, he drew a distinction between philological comparativism, and the comparison of the pedagogical grammarian. As we have seen, he advocated comparison for the purposes of historical reconstruction, typological classification, and for determining familial relatedness, but he did not sanction comparison for the purposes of grammatical exposition. The latter was inappropriate, it seems, because to understand and learn the grammar of a language one must treat it ‘according to its own analogy’. Like Boyce, Appleyard used classical grammatical categories as a foundation for his description of Xhosa, although he suggested that these were flexible structures within which he could carry out refinement or adjustment in order to represent the language descriptively. In his huge section treating ‘Of the Verbs’, for example, he utilized the ambiguity of the aorist tense – its name denotes undefinedness, being without limits – for his own purposes. As he put it, This tense is properly indefinite with regard to time, and hence its name. It is more generally employed to denote the verbal action as completed in some indefinite period of past time. But in other of its usages, and especially in some of its copulative ones, it appears to be wholly indefinite, the reference being, in such cases, neither to the time nor to the state of the action, but simply to the action itself

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In many ways the sheer detail and complexity of Appleyard’s grammatical description of Xhosa makes it look like a work of love and admiration. Certainly his desire to represent the language as fully as he could, as he understood it, stood in conflict with the need to produce a grammatical exposition of the language for teaching purposes – his 34-page conjugation of the regular Xhosa verb, for example, would probably have sent most learners running for cover. Frequently however, Appleyard appears poised between awe and dismay in his interpretation of the language. At one moment, for example, he admired the agglutinating form of the Xhosa (in which grammatical information is conveyed by attaching affixes to roots and stems, and in which compounding is common) for its precision and economy. It was, he wrote, the means by which ‘ideas, considerably modified and extended, are expressed in the united and compact form of a single word’ (ibid., p. 67). This moment of admiration was reversed a page later, however, as Appleyard suggested Xhosa’s remarkable ‘precision of expression’ in fact constitutes a form of excess, and a flaw in the language: The Kafir language is also distinguished by a remarkable precision of expression. The minuteness with which the idea is often expanded and developed in the external form, is almost extreme. [  ] Yet this very minuteness of expression by the outward form, is attended in some degree by disadvantage. In our own and similar languages, the flow of thought is never interrupted, but both ideas and words glide on smoothly and harmoniously together. The Kafir language, however, does not possess this degree of perfection. The easy and rapid flow of thought, is evidently sacrificed for the sake of external connexion. Hence the form, whilst it contributes to the precision of the language, at the same time refuses, as it were, to follow the idea; and the flow of thought, accordingly, receives a temporary interruption. Thus, one cannot say, in Kafir, ‘A good man loves God:’ that is, he cannot express such a proposition, as to its outward form, in an exactly corresponding manner: but the language employed, is – Umntu olungileyo uyamtanda u-Tixo: A-man who-is-good he-him-loves God. (Ibid., p. 68)

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as connected with a preceding one. The aorist, Indicative, therefore, forms an important as well as peculiar feature of the Kafir verb, and is extensively used. (Ibid., p. 169)

Here, Appleyard drew on a common idea in the philosophy of language, in reiterating ‘two time-honored axioms about the nature of language’ proposed by such thinkers as Horne Tooke – that ‘its first aim is to communicate our thoughts, its second to do so quickly [  ] in order to make the speed of discourse more nearly approach the speed of thought’ (Aarsleff 1967, p. 46). In Xhosa, Appleyard insisted, the direct relationship between expression and thought is sacrificed to excessive concern with ‘external connexion’, or syntactic agreement. He also echoed current philological theories about linguistic typology, developed by such comparativists as Friedrich von Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt, in asserting the categorical superiority of inflectional over agglutinating languages. Appleyard’s position in relation to Xhosa, at moments such as this, seems to oscillate. At one moment, he is close to the language, marvelling at its expressiveness, economy, or efficiency; the next, he contextualizes his admiration by invoking supposedly universal facts about language in order to highlight the relatively greater ‘perfection’ of Indo-European languages.

‘Well worthy of receiving a literature’: The aims of language study and perceptions of Xhosa culture Appleyard’s ambivalence about the virtues of Xhosa grammatical structure – admiring on the one hand, perturbed on the other – is symptomatic of a more general ambivalence which pervades The Kafir Language, and has at its heart an ambivalent attitude to the Xhosa themselves. As Boyce had done, Appleyard treated the latter largely as an absence; indeed, his assertion of the virtues of the Xhosa language was systematically abstracted from association with contemporary Xhosa culture: Though they [‘Alliteral class’ languages] are spoken by tribes confessedly illiterate and uncivilized, yet they are neither irregular in their formation, nor barbarous in their construction. On the contrary, they are highly systematic, and truly philosophical. Though destitute of literary treasures, whether for instruction or amusement, they are by no means wanting in such peculiarities as are amply sufficient to gratify and repay the most careful attention. (Ibid., pp. v–vi) Appleyard uncoupled conventional associations in order to mark the promise of the language off from assumptions about the current state of its speakers. Illiteracy did not imply irregularity; the ‘uncivilized’ nature of the Xhosa did not make their language ‘barbarous’; and though

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Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 107

culturally ‘destitute’, the language itself would provide gratification to the student. The logic of Appleyard’s argument here, as had been the case with Boyce, lay in assessing the Xhosa as culturally barren, but imbued with the potential for transformation. Appleyard cited in full Boyce’s comments on the cultural poverty of the Xhosa, asserting that while showing all the evidence of ‘intellect’, the Xhosa in particular were possessed of little in the way of ‘imaginative faculties’ (ibid., p. 47). But, partially contradicting this picture of apparent cultural destitution, he went on to acknowledge the creative use of figurative language and personification in Xhosa (ibid., pp. 70–1), and to instantiate this creativity by including the hymn, often cited in missionary writings of the nineteenth century, composed in the late 1810s by the Xhosa Christian prophet Ntsikana – or, as Appleyard has it, ‘the first Christian song, it is believed, ever attempted by the Kafir mind’ (ibid., p. 47).17 In Appleyard’s account, Ntsikana’s hymn is reproduced in Xhosa-English translation thus:

KAFIR HYMN Ulo-Tixo umkulu ngosezulwini. Unguwena wena Kaka lennyaniso. Unguwena wena Nqaba yennyaniso. Unguwena wena Hlati lennyaniso. Unguwena wen’ uhlel’ ennyangweni. Ulo ‘dal’ ubomi, wadala pezulu. Lom-Dali-Dali wadala nezulu. Lom-Enzi wekwenkwezi nozilimela. Yabinza inkwenkwezi, isixelela. Lom-Enzi wemfama, uzenza ngabomi. Latet’ ixilongo, lisibizile. Ulonnqin’ izingel’ imipefumlo. Ulomkokeli wasikokela tina. Ozandhla zako zinamanxeba wena. Ulonnyawo zako zinamanxeba wena. Ulogaz’ lako liyimrozo – yinina? Ulogaz’ lako lipalalele tina. Lemali enkulu-na siyibizile. Lomzi wako-na-na siwubizile. Thou art the great God – He who is in heaven. It is Thou, Thou Shield of Truth. It is Thou, Thou Tower of Truth.

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It is Thou, Thou Bush of Truth. It is Thou, Thou who sittest in the highest. Thou art the Creator of life, Thou madest the regions above. The Creator who madest the heavens also. The Maker of the stars and the Pleiades. The shooting stars declare it unto us. The Maker of the blind, of thine own will didst thou make them. The Trumpet speaks, – for us it calls. Thou art the Hunter who hunts for souls. Thou art the Leader who goes before us. Thou art the great Mantle which covers us. Thou art He whose hands are with wounds. Thou art He whose feet are with wounds. Thou art He whose blood is a trickling stream – and why? Thou art He whose blood was spilled for us. For this great price we call. For thine own place we call. (Ibid., pp. 47–8) As Janet Hodgson (1980) makes clear, Ntsikana’s hymn is profoundly syncretic both in form and in content: creatively adapting a Xhosa form, the izibongo or praise-poem, to Ntsikana’s distinctive theological vision, combining Christian with Xhosa cosmology (see also Peires 1981b, pp. 72–4). Appleyard, however, saw not adaptation but rupture, representing the hymn as an image of the Xhosa imagination transformed by Christian revelation into a new subjectivity and a new creativity: Ntsikana, under the influence of his conversion to Christianity, starting to speak the language of the Methodist hymnal. Compare, for example, Jeff Peires’ translation of lines 12–14: He is the one who brings together herds which oppose each other. He is the leader who has led us. He is the great blanket which we put on. (1981b, p. 73) Working to dislodge Ntsikana’s hymn from its Xhosa cultural setting, marking it as a break with rather than a continuation of existing Xhosa religious practices, Appleyard made it emblematic of the Christianization of the Xhosa ‘mind’ as a process not of creative adaptation and incorporation, but of absolute transformation. There is, nevertheless, a tension here. On the one hand, the Xhosa language’s worthiness

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Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 109

to ‘receive a literature’ vouchsafed its Christian future, while at the same time casting it as a passive target for the attentions of missionary linguists. This vision of linguistic transformation implied, simultaneously, the unresisting acquiescence of Xhosa-speakers to the total reconfiguration of their culture, values, and beliefs. On the other hand, however, Appleyard’s discussion of the creative possibilities of Xhosa figurative language suggested a richness of culture independent of Christianity, and the inclusion of Ntsikana’s hymn provided evidence of the capacity of Xhosa-speakers to interpret Christian theology syncretically, incorporating it into existing Xhosa belief systems and cultural practices.

Models of correctness: Displacing the native speaker The writer of a grammar of Xhosa, as Appleyard remarked, was in a fortuitous position. Being a language of astonishing, unsullied regularity, the grammarian would need no lengthy lists of ‘arbitrary variations, usually termed exceptions’ to its grammatical rules, as were often to be found in other languages. Moreover, it was important to emphasize that this regularity was not an artificial construction, a fantasy of the prescriptive grammarian; on the contrary, it was descriptive of the language as it was used in everyday speech: It is worthy of remark, also, that it is correctly spoken by all classes of the community, which is not the case, perhaps, with our European tongues. As a very general, if not invariable, rule, a Kafir will never be heard using an ungrammatical expression, but he will always connect his words together, so as to preserve the proper system of alliteration throughout the same proposition. (Appleyard 1850, pp. 67–8) On one level, this was a somewhat unsettling assertion to make to English-speaking readers: Appleyard was, after all, celebrating Xhosaspeakers’ mastery of their own language through disparaging comparison with the languages of Europe. However, he also, at the moment of celebrating native speaker authority, displaced it. Appleyard’s argument effectively established the correctness of native speaker competence in Xhosa, by comparison with criteria of grammaticality versus ungrammaticality laid out in his own exposition of the ‘proper system’ in The Kafir Language. Put the other way round, rather than subordinating his own competence to that of native speakers of Xhosa, Appleyard’s statement established the authority of his written grammatical description as a representative model of native speaker competence, and therefore

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The Grammar which follows, is chiefly the result of an exact and careful analysis of the most approved translations and writings, tested in all needful cases by a reference to oral testimony. (Ibid., p. viii) Appleyard subordinated spoken to written language: it was the ‘translations and writings’ of missionaries, ‘approved’ by missionaries, which carried authority. ‘Oral testimony’ of native speakers played a legitimate but secondary role by validating (where ‘needful’), but never originating, the examples Appleyard used. And, true to his word, he relied almost solely on examples drawn from Scriptural translations – notably, his own. Consequently, the learner could find out how to say ‘Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt!’ in Xhosa, but would struggle to acquire much conversational or idiomatic language from Appleyard. As a model for communication, this strategy displaced Xhosa culture, re-creating the Xhosa language as a vehicle of Christianity. It also de-emphasized two-way dialogue in favour of unidirectional communication, both written and oral, modelled on preaching – what Appleyard tellingly described, elsewhere, as ‘speak[ing] forth the words of truth and sound doctrine’ (Appleyard 1971, p. 20, emphasis added). Thus, while Appleyard at times entertained the possibilities of interlingual and intercultural encounter with excitement and awe, these possibilities were contained within a model of communication from which Xhosa-speakers, in the present day, were apparently almost entirely removed. The Methodist grammarians’ approach to Xhosa relied to a large extent upon the seemingly problematic task of removing the language from its cultural context. It was represented as encapsulating a potential for Christian amelioration which could be realized by processes of development undertaken by missionary linguists. This potential was located solely in the language itself, however, as an abstract system, and not in the practices or utterances of its (unchristianized) speakers. Methodist austerity could account in part for this rejection of Xhosa culture, but more significant were the political conditions around and beyond the eastern colonial frontier. The persistent resistance of Xhosa people to the colonial government, and to settler encroachment on their land,

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one against which even the real utterances of real native speakers might be judged. This reversal of authority – subordinating the competence of native speakers to that of the missionary linguist – is among the most striking features of The Kafir Language:

was a source of ongoing unrest until the late 1850s, and both Boyce and Appleyard were entangled in the conflict. As we have seen, Boyce was caught up in the events of the 1834–35 war, and his subsequent commentary on its causes and implications signalled his equivocal feelings regarding the ‘warlike, predatory and heathen’ Xhosa, as well as his sympathies with the settler community. A decade later, Appleyard wrote The Kafir Language in the aftermath of the 1846–47 war. Colonial policy had swung towards the incorporation of the Xhosa as a means to manage their perceived threat. However, conditions in the newly annexed Xhosa territories were still unstable, and Appleyard had been witness to the war. Those memories emerged on the pages of The Kafir Language itself, when Appleyard described the Xhosa as the ‘people who have become so notorious as plunderers of the Colony’. Both missionaries held the view that the Xhosa had to be utterly changed, their culture radically reconfigured, through the influences of mission and colonial governance. For Appleyard, as for Boyce, the Xhosa language represented the medium through which its speakers’ potential for amelioration and incorporation could be both recognized and realized. The language had to be disjoined, however, from its cultural context, and inserted into a new Christian paradigm. Thus the Methodist grammarians’ work divided the practices of the Xhosa people in the present, from their potential in the future to be transformed into faithful – and, by implication, peaceful and obedient – Christian believers and colonial subjects.

The Cattle Killing, the incorporation of the Xhosa, and the Reverend Davis’s Dictionary In 1863 Boyce’s Grammar appeared in its third edition, but no other Wesleyan works on Xhosa were produced until 1872, when William Davis published a new Grammar of the Kaffir Language, incorporating aspects of Boyce’s and Appleyard’s grammatical work, and also the first, ‘Kaffir-English’ volume of his two-volume Dictionary of the Kaffir Language: Including the Xosa and Zulu Dialects. In 1877, he published the companion ‘English-Kaffir’ volume. Davis had first written on Xhosa when producing the vocabulary, phrases, and exercises for the 1844 edition of Boyce’s Grammar. Now he presented yet another triumph for the Methodists, the ‘first Dictionary of the Xosa Kaffir’ (Davis 1872b, p. vi). He dedicated his dictionaries, as Boyce had done four decades earlier, to William Shaw – aligning his work with the legacies of both

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men, and asserting a long and unbroken history of Wesleyan evangelical and linguistic successes in the region:

When the first Kafir Grammar was published by the Reverend W. B. Boyce in 1834, it was dedicated by him and his brethren in South Africa to you, as the First Wesleyan Missionary in Kaffraria. The same feelings of respect and affection which dictated that dedication have prompted the compiler of this the first Dictionary of the language to inscribe it to yourself. More than fifty years have passed since you entered upon your noble evangelistic labours in South Africa. During that period the work begun and so long personally superintended by yourself, has prospered and widened until, under the Divine blessing, the various plans by you so judiciously adopted among the Kaffirs have resulted in the establishment of prosperous churches, numbering many thousands of members, who have been raised from the darkness of heathenism to Christian light and civilisation. (Ibid., p. iii)

Davis thereby aligned his work with that of his Methodist predecessors, missionaries and missionary linguists, looking back over 50 years to the arrival of the ‘first Wesleyan Missionary in Kaffraria’, William Shaw, and the production of Boyce’s ‘first Kaffir Grammar’, also dedicated to Shaw. His vision of Methodist work among the Xhosa was, however, an optimistic and confident one, far removed from Boyce’s ‘moral wilderness’. ‘Darkness’ had been replaced by ‘light’. Davis looked forward confidently into the future and declared that soon,

This, to some extent, tentative edition may be so improved as to become a Standard Dictionary of the Kaffir Language. (Ibid., p. vii)

Davis’s work may have been tentative, but it also displayed a burgeoning confidence and security. He addressed it primarily to a missionary readership, but one with some curiosity about languages. He focused on Xhosa, but this was also arranged comparatively with Zulu, so that, as Davis explained, the student might use the dictionary to understand both languages, and also to analyse the relationship between

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Dear Sir,

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In order to facilitate the use of this Dictionary it is necessary to make a few prefatory remarks. 1. The author, from a long residence in Kaffirland, and among the Zulus of Natal, has had acquaintance with both the XOSA KAFFIR, spoken by the Amaxosa tribes, who live in Kaffirland beyond the Eastern Frontier of the Cape Colony, and also with the ZULU KAFFIR spoken by the Zulu tribes in the Natal colony and the country on its borders. 2. In many respects these languages are identical. They have the same grammatical construction, and a large majority of the words are the same both in form and meaning. But many words which are the same in form in both languages differ in signification, and others are different both in form and meaning; and yet in many instances in which this diversity obtains, the original root from which these words are derived is evidently one and the same; and in the case of others, the root will be found in one language and the derivatives in the other. 3. In this Dictionary both the words of the Xosa and the Zulu Kaffir are given. This will enable the Kaffir student to trace out the analogies of the two languages, and also the points of divergence; thus giving material for an interesting investigation to those who feel an interest in such studies. (Ibid., p. v) Xhosa was now a clearly defined and regulated object of study – it was spatially demarcated, it had roots which could be traced, it would submit to scholarly comparative analysis. Once again Xhosa-speakers’ pre-colonial culture was dismissed from notice: they had, as Davis put it, been ‘a people sunk [  ] low in ignorance and barbarism’ before the coming of the missionaries (ibid., p. vi). However, they had been transformed by Christianity and civilization, and as a consequence their language now offered up knowledge both academic and practical. Davis’s dictionaries contained the Xhosa language within a classificatory, comparative framework, emphasizing the close relationship and analogy between Xhosa and Zulu and tempting the reader to elide the practical business of language study with the pleasant pursuit of an ‘interesting investigation’.

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them. Thus Xhosa was represented not only as an appropriate medium for religious communication, but also as suitable material for philological study:

The context in which Davis wrote was one in which the Xhosa had been more fully incorporated into the colonial order, after a series of calamitous events, and under a colonial policy of cultural assimilation. The 1850s had been marked by yet more conflict between Xhosa forces and the colonial power, in which forced relocations and removals of Xhosa who had been ‘disloyal’ were accompanied by an increase in white settlement in Victoria and then British Kaffraria. Subsequently colonial policy had become increasingly integrationist, aiming at the control of the Xhosa through their assimilation and ‘civilization’. At the same time, there arrived from Europe a lethal cattle disease, lung sickness, which decimated the herds of the Xhosa – destroying their livelihood and, particularly because of the centrality of cattle to Nguni culture, throwing them into still deeper disarray and despair. In 1856, a prophet emerged among the Xhosa, a 16-year-old girl called Nongqawuse, whose visions told her that only the wholesale slaughter of Xhosa cattle would bring about a new beginning, by ending colonial rule. As word spread, believers in the truth of Nongqawuse’s prophecy set about fulfilling it. As Thompson writes, The scale of the catastrophe was appalling. It is estimated that the people destroyed 400,000 head of cattle and that at least 40,000 Xhosa died of starvation. By the end of January 1858 another 33,000 had moved inside the Cape Colony to become laborers on farms or in the towns and villages as far away as Cape Town. (Thompson 1990, p. 79)18 After the Cattle Killing, the Xhosa no longer posed a serious military threat to the colonial government. Impoverished and defeated, they became subject to Governor Grey’s assimilationist agenda which sought to incorporate them into the colonial order. We will examine some of the implications of these developments for the study of the Xhosa language by Europeans again towards the end of this book, in looking at the work of the comparative philologist Wilhelm Bleek. But in Davis’s dictionaries too the impact of Xhosa incorporation may be seen. Still, the presence of Xhosa culture in the dictionaries is found only as a brief reference to the Xhosa’s ‘ignorance and barbarism’ before the coming of the missionaries. However, the colonial government’s efforts at ‘the cultural absorption of the Xhosa’, reducing their disturbing and marginal status by ‘recreat[ing] them as useful beneficiaries of the enveloping colonial order’ (Lester 1997, pp. 650–1), are reflected in both the structure and

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Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’ 115

the tone of Davis’s work. As the Xhosa became subject to processes of assimilation into the economic and cultural order of the colony, so their disturbing ‘otherness’ came to be neutralized. Davis’s approach – looking towards the regulation of Xhosa in a ‘Standard Dictionary’ – was in line with work by missionaries and others, from the late 1850s onwards, to appropriate and incorporate both the Xhosa language and Xhosa culture into colonial structures of knowledge. The Compendium of Kafir Laws and Customs, compiled largely from missionaries under the direction of Colonel Maclean and first published in 1858, is a striking example of this new drive towards surveillance and incorporation. So, too, are the works of men among the growing Cape intelligentsia who began to regard the Xhosa as an appropriate object of knowledge for various kinds of comparativist scholarship. The professional philologist Wilhelm Bleek (to whom we will return in Chapter 5) began from the later 1850s to incorporate Xhosa as a key element in his overaching theories of language development and language typology; and from the early 1870s, the historian George McCall Theal began to amass his collection of ‘Kaffir Folk-lore’, incorporating the Xhosa into theories of comparative mythology developing in Europe (see for example Theal 1882); as did the work of the South African Folk-lore Society, founded in 1879.

Conclusions The work of the Methodist linguists on the Xhosa language represented an articulation of evangelical concerns which was imbricated with colonial discourses on the nature and status of Xhosa-speakers. I have largely focused on the work of the grammarians Boyce and Appleyard, who sought strongly to justify the study of the Xhosa language and to legitimate it as a medium for Christian teaching. They explained the nature and the workings of Xhosa in a manner which was intended to persuade readers of its worth as an object of study, and its value as a medium of communication in a colonial and an evangelical context. At the same time, however, their representation of the language was bound up with the relationship of the Xhosa to colonial control, which stood in tension with their legitimating agenda. Frontier discourses cast the Xhosa as rebellious, marginal, and troubling to the colonial order; as a corollary, it was commonly asserted that the Xhosa possessed neither religion, culture, nor morality. Methodist representations of the Xhosa language attempted to mediate between the demands of evangelical and colonial discourse by legitimating it while simultaneously reflecting these perceived absences,

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occluding Xhosa culture and practice. Thus both Boyce and Appleyard sought to wrest the Xhosa language from its troubling connotations by obscuring its connection with the existing culture and belief systems of its stigmatized, resistant speakers. Instead, it was taken to be a marker both of this group’s elevated past and of their potential in the future to be changed utterly and incorporated into a Christian colonial order. At the same time, as we have seen, the gradual incorporation of the Xhosa into the colonial order was accompanied by a more ambitious approach to language study which sought to render Xhosa as an object conforming to metropolitan frameworks of classificatory and comparative knowledge. Although Methodists were not university men, their ambitions in this regard were nevertheless striking; they recognized, and tried to cater to, the interests of philologists and ethnographers, as well as colonial officials and administrators, and ordinary colonists. Appleyard, himself influenced by the methods of European comparative philology, also had his work taken up by metropolitan scholars, notably Max Müller, who used data from The Kafir Language in his influential and best-selling Lectures on the Science of Language (Müller 1861–64). Increasingly, as time went on, and particularly after 1857, the Cape colonial policy became one of surveillance and assimilation of the Xhosa. Concomitantly, political, scholarly, and missionary discourse began to try to incorporate Xhosa culture as an object of knowledge and control. Meanwhile, further east, missionaries working with the Zulu language were coming to different sets of conclusions. Linguistically, their circumstances were very similar – as we have seen, Xhosa and Zulu were considered for a time as language – but the political and social environments in which they worked were quite different. Influenced by other combinations of religious and colonial beliefs, they saw their object of study as pervaded with the culture and identity of its speakers. For this and other reasons, as we shall see, the missionary study of Zulu in the mid-nineteenth century took very different forms to that established by the Methodists for Xhosa.

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Language, Culture, and ‘the Native Mind’: Missionary Language Study in Natal

As we saw in the previous chapter, the Western assumption that southeast Africa was populated by ‘Kaffirs’, a more or less homogeneous group speaking one language, came to be reconsidered as British interests developed further east, and in particular once the British annexed Natal as a colony in 1843. Although as late as 1844, the Reverend Boyce could claim that one ‘Kaffir language’ was spoken throughout southeast Africa, in fact American Board missionaries stationed in the Zulu country, north of the Thukela River, had already begun to study and transcribe an apparently separate although closely related language, only partially mutually intelligible with the Xhosa language of the eastern Cape frontier, which they were calling ‘Zoolah’.1 The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had despatched two mission parties to southeast Africa in 1834, and one of these groups became the first missionaries to establish a station among the Zulu people, being received for a short time by the Zulu chief Dingane. By the end of 1837, there were six American Board missionaries in Natal and the Zulu kingdom, and Francis Owen of the Church Missionary Society had also started a mission at Dingane’s capital, Mgungundlovu. The Americans abandoned the Zulu kingdom in 1838, when Piet Retief’s party of Voortrekkers were killed by Dingane’s troops. But, although this early period of missionary activity in Zulu territory was short-lived, it was productive of attitudes to language which were to have long-lasting effects.

Defining the Zulu language The American missionaries had arrived in the aftermath of a period of enormous and violent upheaval in the region. The disturbances took place under the influence of a complex range of social and 118

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4

political factors, against a background of unprecedented population growth and climate change, which brought about new conflict over land and resources. In the midst of this instability, the rapid growth of several chiefdoms through the absorption of others, and particularly the aggressive expansionist state-building policies of the Zulu chief Shaka from 1818 to 1828, served to violently transform the region. In the course of the mfecane the Zulu kingdom incorporated all the northern Nguni chiefdoms. In addition, increased European activity around Port Natal – bringing in traders, land speculators, and slave raiders – impacted seriously upon the area (Chidester 1996a, p. 119). The result was profound and violent disruption and the large-scale displacement of people: groups were incorporated, often by force, into the Zulu state, thousands were killed and thousands more fled as refugees south of the Thukela River into Natal and beyond. This was the unstable situation into which the American missionaries arrived, aiming specifically to start their evangelism with the Zulu court. Their remit was to make contact with ruling elites, in order to effect the conversion not of individuals but of whole nations. The American Board considered this to be the optimum means of effective evangelism – an approach modelled on their perceived successes in Hawaii, where missionaries had effected considerable change through the allegiance of the traditional leadership. Determined to repeat this success, they had set off on the intelligence that the Zulu chief, following the depredations of the mfecane, held some kind of centralized power throughout Natal and the Zulu country, and that consequently he would be a suitable and effective target for their activities. Thus the group despatched to the Zulu country tried immediately to make contact with the chief, Dingane, although their reception was lukewarm at best, and they were granted a site for a mission station in an isolated spot far from the royal kraal (Dinnerstein 1983, pp. 11–20). Despite this shaky start the American missionaries set to work on their evangelical labours – a task that, as they were well aware, however, could only be effectively commenced once they had learned to speak the language of the local people. In fact, they had already conducted some preliminary linguistic research, in the eastern Cape, where the members of the mission party had acquired ‘a knowledge of the Zoolah language’ from the missionaries working among the Xhosa there: Between the Zoolahs and Caffres and their languages a strong affinity is supposed to exist; and by acquiring the language of the Zoolahs, they would be able to communicate with Dingaan [Dingane] without

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120 Grammars of Colonialism

On arrival at Dingane’s court the American missionaries rapidly came to the conclusion that the language of the region, ‘Zoolah’, was spoken not only in the Zulu kingdom, but also south of the Thukela River around Port Natal. As Aldin Grout wrote soon after his arrival at Natal: Most of the white men have under them Zoolahs and control them as chiefs. There are also at and about Natal some two or three thousand Zoolahs and Caffers, some runaways from Dingaan [Dingane], and some remnants of tribes destroyed by Chaka [Shaka] and Dingaan. [  ] These natives all speak the same language as Dingaan, and missionary labor among them, so far as reducing the language to writing is concerned, would be the same as among Dingaan’s people. (Grout to Anderson, 12 February 1836, cited in ibid., p. 339) Grout was convinced that this region was linguistically homogeneous, and therefore that only one set of missionary linguistic labours would be required to ‘reduce the language to writing’. The region around Port Natal, he informed his correspondent Anderson, was inhabited by ‘Zoolahs’ and ‘Caffers’ who were ‘runaways’ and ‘remnants of tribes’ scattered by the events of the mfecane, who considered themselves ‘under the protection of the whites’. These people spoke a version of the language of the Zulu court of Dingane. This account of the situation was founded in a combination of evangelical policy, linguistic chauvinism, and political expediency. The early American missionaries’ attitude to language, of which Aldin Grout’s letter cited above is a typical example, shows evidence of the hierarchical approach and preoccupation with the structures of power in the region which were so central to their attitude to mission. From the outset, the Americans’ dedication to the acquisition of the Africans’ language for evangelical purposes was matched by a fascination with the key role played by language in establishing and demarcating Zulu identity and in supporting the position of the Zulu elite. For language did indeed have a central position in this regard – one that fitted admirably both with Western linguistic attitudes and prejudices and with the specific demands of missionary language study. Particularly under the rule of Shaka in the first two decades of the century, when the Zulu state was expanding rapidly, cultural indicators had a crucial ideological role to play in the consolidation of power and

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incurring a risk, which is often great when intercourse is held with a savage, jealous and despotic chief, by means of an interpreter. (Missionary Herald, 1836, pp. 4–5)

the maintenance of political and social stability. At the centre of Zulu society was the king, encircled by an aristocracy and powerful central groups, all linked both by notions of kinship and by a set of cultural markers. As they were absorbed into the growing Zulu power structures, surrounding commoner chiefdoms were also encouraged to consider themselves as Zulu (in a limited sense) and consequently to adopt these features as their own: To foster the growth of a sense of corporate identity among them, people in this category were encouraged by their Zulu rulers to regard themselves as being of distant common descent, viz. amantungwa (or ‘upcountry’) descent. In time many of them did, in fact, come to think of themselves as sharing a common origin and culture. (Hamilton and Wright 1990, p. 16) Linguistic markers had a crucial part to play in this policy of maintaining social cohesion through ideology. Patrick Harries describes the function of language in the pre-colonial Zulu state thus: While streams, hills, and other elements of the landscape delineated the physical borders of the kingdom, a series of markers defined its expanding cultural space. The language of the royal family was defined by drawing a boundary between Zulu and surrounding language forms that, qualified as tekeza and tefula, were associated with non-Zulu peoples, pejoratively called Tonga and Lala. Hence the language of the royal family was adopted by conquered peoples because of its perceived status. It was also adopted because of a policy of nkukulumanje, or the purposeful ‘slaughter’ by the Zulu language of surrounding linguistic forms. (Harries 1993, p. 107)2 The Zulu language, therefore, was a high-status form, dictated by the court and used as a marker of social cohesion in the expanding Zulu state. Surrounding speech forms, by contrast, were stigmatized as corrupt and impure versions of the Zulu ideal. Missionaries writing later in the nineteenth century placed these factors at the centre of their understanding of the development of language in the whole region. The Reverend Döhne, in his Zulu-Kafir Dictionary of 1857, for example, described the ‘Origin of the Zulu-Kafir’ as follows: [Shaka’s] ambition seemed not so much to destroy the neighbouring tribes, as to subdue and incorporate them with his own. It was

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a particular point of his policy to locate all the subjugated chiefs at his own residence, and, having distributed their people among his own, to keep them in strict subordination and constant fear of himself. Those of them who spoke another dialect than the Zulu were prohibited from doing so in his presence, and addressed him by means of an interpreter. This was continued until they were able to express themselves properly in the Zulu language, which was on that account called the Ukukuluma, i.e. the high language, while all the inferior dialects are called the Amalala. In this manner the great Zulu king founded and secured his dominion over many tribes. (Döhne 1857, p. xv) The appeal of such a language form to the American missionaries early in the century could hardly be overestimated, fitting as it did their hierarchical attitude to mission, and also the particular requirements of evangelical language policy. Here was a prestige form of language, already associated with social and political status. Moreover the conscious policies of linguistic conservation practised by the Zulu elite, as they were interpreted by the missionaries, imbued the language with associations of purity and stability. In view of the Americans’ evangelical intentions these factors took on additional significance, since together they made the language look like an ideal vernacular medium for Scripture. Such considerations were of paramount importance when the American Board chose a location for their linguist, Champion, to begin work upon translation: Some progress has been made in the language; and for this purpose is Mr Champion stationed in the Zoolah country, that the language most generally in use may be correctly acquired, and the Bible translated. (Champion, Grout, and Adams to Anderson, 11 August 1836, cited in Missionary Herald, 1837, pp. 121–2) The language of the Zulu state was thus considered by missionaries to represent ‘the language most generally in use’, and the key to ‘correct’ acquisition, because of its perceived attributes of prestige, purity, and stability. However, there were also significant political reasons for promoting this model of linguistic relations: it complemented the generally accepted and expedient view of local power structures. European reports since the very first sustained contacts with the region in the 1820s had placed exclusive emphasis upon the significance of the Zulu

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nation. Accounts of the mfecane, in this period and for long afterwards, typically accounted for all movement and unrest in the region as direct consequences of Zulu expansionism and violence. As a result, the Zulu were represented as the only legitimate – albeit tyrannical – cultural grouping in the region, and it was concomitantly believed that all other Africans there were displaced or disempowered, detribalized people. This reading of power relations, as David Chidester points out, was a politically expedient one: Reports from the frontier emphasized the importance of the Zulu. However, that emphasis was not merely a response to the rise of a recently obscure clan to political power under the leadership of Shaka. British propagandists portrayed the Zulu king as the legitimate, but tyrannical, authority in the region for purposes of establishing diplomatic relations, trade agreements, and treaties, even if faked, that ceded land for European settlement. Traders operating from the European settlement at Port Natal had an interest in reporting that the region had been recently cleared of its African population by the tyrant Shaka because they were trying to establish claims to large tracts of land at a time when the Cape government was attempting to prevent further acquisition of territory. Along with their financiers in Cape Town, they promoted British annexation of Natal by depicting Shaka as a dangerous monster. As Chidester concludes, ‘these two themes – the vacant, depopulated land and the dominance of the Zulu nation under the tyrant Shaka – whether exaggerated or fabricated, persisted in the earliest European reports from Natal’ (Chidester 1996a, p. 119). As a result, Westerners arriving at Port Natal could represent the Africans thereabouts as recent immigrants, fleeing the Zulu country or the depredations of the Zulu armies. Consequently they had no rights to land but were instead living under the benevolent protection of their settler employers or, later, the British crown. One of the effects of these representative strategies was to encourage Westerners to cast the Zulu as the norm against which to measure Africans in Natal and surrounding areas. If the Zulu were the dominant political grouping, and other groupings had been fractured and fragmented to the point where they need no longer be recognized as having any legitimacy, then it followed that in cultural terms, too, the Zulu should be accorded superior status. These attitudes were mapped onto language study. The Zulu state was regarded as the arbiter of correct

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language, possessing one central optimum linguistic form, and other African groups, south of the Thukela River, were taken to speak lesser, corrupt forms of this pure original. This representation of linguistic relations rapidly took on the status of fact, so that the first detailed published accounts of the Zulu language, produced after Britain’s annexation of Natal in 1843, represented it as the language of the new colony. The American Board missionary James Bryant wrote that The language spoken by the aborigines in the colony of Natal, is the same or nearly the same as that of the Zulus who still inhabit the country north-east of this colony. (Bryant 1849, p. 385) His fellow missionary Lewis Grout echoed him: I shall, in the first place, endeavour to present some of the most important characteristics and principles of the Zulu dialect, which is the language of the natives in the colony of Natal, and of the Amazulu, to the north-east of this colony. (Grout 1849, p. 399) The missionaries’ opening remarks clearly delimited their object of study: a unitary language, called Zulu, spoken from the western border of Natal (the extreme limit of ‘Kaffir’/Xhosa) right up through the colony, and also by the independent group of Africans living to the north, called Zulus. This classification proved to have great potency: the inhabitants of the colony, speaking Zulu, came rapidly to be described as Zulu people too. Ethnically and linguistically they were considered to be almost the same as, although generally inferior to, the Zulu people north of the Thukela, whose vassals or victims they were supposed to have been before the intervention of the British. Continuing to represent the language situation in this way, missionary linguists did two things. First, they justified Britain’s control of Natal – the Africans in the colony could be regarded as victims of Shaka’s violence or as displaced refugees being protected by the just rule of the British, rather than as colonized people who had been deprived of land to which they had prior claim. Secondly, at the same time they legitimated their linguistic object of study through the trope of the ‘pure’ language of the Zulu court, which served a significant ideological function. A passage written by Lewis Grout in the 1850s illustrates both the beliefs shared by most missionaries as regards the Zulu language, and the linguistic, historical, and ideological assumptions upon which this specific construction of the language was based:

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The Zulu language is spoken not only by the native inhabitants of Natal, who are supposed to amount to a hundred and thirty or forty thousand, but also by the entire nation of the Amazulu, and some of their tributaries, to the North and East of the Tugela [Thukela] river, the north-eastern boundary of the Colony. To be sure, there are many slight dialectic and tribal modifications of this language. Nor is this strange, when we consider that the Zulu nation, as it now exists, and has existed for the last thirty-five or forty years, is made up of several smaller tribes, which were conquered and consolidated in the days of Chaka [Shaka]. It is evident, however, that the language of all these tribes, or clans, was substantially one, even before the days of Chaka; as it is also evident that, since that time, there has been a steady refining elevating process, the language of the conquered being gradually fashioned to the higher standard and more fixed character of their superiors. Nor can we believe that any of the African languages or dialects come to us, at the present time, in a state of greater original purity than the Isizulu. (Grout 1859, pp. xix–xx) The region, claimed Grout, was substantially linguistically homogeneous before the reign of Shaka. The processes of cultural domination which characterized his rule, however, had had the effect of unifying the speech of the whole region still further, and in such a way as to elevate, purify, and stabilize it. Given the potency of these arguments, the logical conclusion would be for the missionaries to continue the ‘steady refining elevating process’ by promoting a version of the language of the Zulu elite as the standard written language for the entire region. Grout, in other words, proffered a vision of language policy which was entirely and explicitly bound up with an interpretation of existing power relations; the language of the ‘superiors’, his readers were invited to conclude, must be a ‘superior’ language. Bishop Colenso, writing in 1871, approached the subject in a similar vein, aligning political with linguistic dominance: The Zulu-Kafir Language is properly the dialect of a small tribe, the amaZulu, who, under their famous chief uTyaka [Shaka], and his brothers and successors uDingane [Dingane] and umPande [Mpande] have acquired and maintained, for the last fifty years, the supremacy over the natives along the S.E. coast of Africa, excepting, of course, those who have been living under British protection since Natal came under our government [  ]. On this account it has a right to be

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British colonial rule in Natal, the growth of missionary activity, and the development of language study And so, when the British annexed the colony of Natal in 1843, the Zulu language, with its associations of purity and prestige, came to be regarded as the standard form for the whole of the new colony, and concomitantly, the inhabitants of the colony also became known generically as Zulus (Harries 1993, p. 109). After the British takeover the study of Zulu rapidly took off in Natal, in the context of a boom in missionary activity encouraged by a regime keen to run its new colony at minimal cost. By the early 1870s, missionaries had produced journal articles on the Zulu language, substantial Biblical translations, dictionaries, grammatical treatises, and an ethnographic literature including transliterated stories, songs, histories, and accounts of religious beliefs and practices. Since Zulu was apparently so close to Xhosa linguistically – they had, after all, been considered for a while to be one and the same language – it is to be expected that in certain important points missionaries’ accounts of Zulu mirrored representations of Xhosa. The Methodists had established a descriptive paradigm, and a framework of legitimacy and potentiality for Xhosa, dependent upon its internal features, which offered a resource for linguists in Natal. However, representations of Zulu also differed in certain crucial regards. The status of Zulu and Zulu-speakers were in significant ways different to those of Xhosa, and consequently a new set of interconnected and sometimes conflicting concerns shaped missionary attitudes to language in Natal. The associations established early on between the language of Natal, the language of the Zulu court, and the linguistic policies of Shaka, as discussed above, had a profound impact on missionary attitudes. The language was held to possess attributes of prestige and purity which influenced missionaries’ views of its significance. Just as important was the status of the language’s speakers, who were held to be in a very different relationship to colonial authority and ‘civilization’ than that of the Xhosa. Speakers of Zulu fell into two groups. First, the independent Zulu nation to the north of Natal, controlled by the elite who were recognized by the British (for the time being, at least) as legitimate rulers, who were held to be the rightful masters of the language. Although after the British takeover Natal became the focus of missionary activity rather than the

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considered the standard dialect of this part of Africa; though other varieties of the Kafir Language are spoken by different tribes within, and far beyond, the borders of the colony. (Colenso 1871, pp. 1–2)

Zulu kingdom, the trope of the language of the Zulu royalty retained its potency, standing as a symbol of the language’s purity and status. Moreover it was still widely considered that the closer one came to the Zulu court, the greater the purity of the language (see for example Bleek 1855–56, p. 1). More immediately, however, the Zulu language was considered to be the language of the African inhabitants of Natal, which was now a British colony. The British had annexed Natal only reluctantly, largely in a bid to protect the Cape Colony’s endemically turbulent frontiers. Emigrant Boers from the Cape had established the Voortrekker Republic of Natalia in the region in 1839, and, fearing that clashes between the Voortrekkers and Zulu or Mpondo forces might cause chaos which could spread to the borders of the Cape Colony, the British government had been forced to act. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, claiming that Britain was intervening to protect the region’s African population, stipulated that the new colony of Natal should be run at minimal cost to public funds and should become economically self-sufficient as soon as possible. The colonial administration were faced with the task of achieving this economic self-sufficiency, as well as maintaining political and social stability, in a colony in which whites were vastly outnumbered by Africans. The solution to which the British administration came was one of semi-segregated containment for Natal’s African population, and an early version of ‘indirect rule’. They established a system of reserves, termed ‘locations’, in which it was intended that Africans would live, growing foodstuffs for the colonial market while leaving the rest of the land in Natal free for white occupation. By 1864, there were 42 such locations. Policies regarding the African inhabitants of Natal were largely the responsibility of the Diplomatic Agent to the Native Tribes (later, the Secretary for Native Affairs), none other than Boyce’s former translation assistant, Theophilus Shepstone, who held office from 1845 until 1876. It was Shepstone’s original intention that all Natal’s African inhabitants should be moved to locations, but not enough land was set aside for this to prove feasible; the rest of the African population lived on white-owned land, often as labour tenants, or on mission reserves. These reserves were provided for missionary societies by the colonial government, who recognized the ‘civilizing’ potential of missions as a crucial means to promote stability and progress at minimal cost. Thus the colony saw a rapid surge in missionary activity, the societies spurred on by the availability of land for stations, and the opportunity to reach such large numbers of Africans with their evangelizing efforts. A wide

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range of denominations made Natal a focus of their activities; Norman Etherington’s (1978) study of missionary work in the region makes clear the popularity of the field. Shepstone’s policies also saw to it that colonial stability was maintained – cheaply – by the incorporation of (versions of) Nguni cultural practices into the new colonial order. The colony was ruled via a dual legal system, in which colonial Roman Dutch law, as developed in the Cape Colony, prevailed among whites, while a version of customary Nguni law, as interpreted by Shepstone, was used among the African population. The whole location system, meanwhile, represented a method of surveillance and control which treated African traditional practices as an adjunct to colonial power. Within the locations, chiefs were used as subordinate colonial officials, appearing to retain their pre-colonial power while effectively acting as intermediaries between their people and the colonial government. In the meantime, Natal’s African population were also integral to the colonial economy not only as labourers and producers, but also as the primary source of tax revenue. In 1849, the colonial government introduced a ‘hut tax’ of 7 shillings annually, and heavy taxation was also levied on goods imported for mainly African use (Welsh 1971, pp. 14–24; Lambert 1995, p. 19). What the above suggests is that – unlike the Xhosa of the eastern Cape – Zulu-speakers within Natal were considered as contained, colonized subjects, from the 1840s onwards; and, crucially, that official policy, colonial discourse, and missionary attitudes were predicated upon the possibility of appropriating and refashioning aspects of Zulu cultural practices into media for social and political organization, labour control, and evangelism in the new colony. Rather than being avoided or occluded, Zulu culture was debated, analysed, and – at least in theory – appropriated. Concomitantly, missionaries writing in Natal represented language studies as a means to interpret Zulu culture and thereby to unlock ‘the native mind’ of Zulu-speakers, which in turn was crucial to facilitating their civilization and conversion (Golan 1994, p. 46). Many missionaries were filled with optimism at the prospect of rapid success in the latter undertaking, seeing the Zulu-speakers in Natal as ripe for Christianization; although, as Norman Etherington makes clear, these missionaries rapidly found Nguni resistance in Natal to be diverse, entrenched, and effective (1978, pp. 47–70). The sections that follow look at the work of four missionary linguists for whom, in very different ways, Zulu language, culture, and identity were inextricably connected: Lewis Grout, John Colenso, Jacob Döhne, and Henry Callaway. Each represented the study of the Zulu language

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as an experience of intercultural encounter, and considered the possibilities of Christian transformation mediated through engagement with Zulu culture and belief, and interpretation of ‘the native mind’ or ‘the native point of view’. All of them, to varying degrees, brought to bear on their researches the influence of metropolitan comparative disciplines which theorized the relationship between language and culture. Grout and Döhne both incorporated aspects of comparative philology in their studies of Zulu; Colenso engaged in comparative religion (leading, ultimately, to Biblical criticism); and Callaway’s work on comparative religion, mythology, and folklore won him scholarly fame in Europe as the foremost nineteenth-century expert on Zulu culture and belief.

Knowing the ‘native mind’: Reverend Lewis Grout’s The Isizulu Lewis Grout, the American Board’s foremost Zulu linguist, arrived in Natal in 1847, in an atmosphere of renewed evangelical optimism. The Board’s mission to the Zulu kingdom had been abandoned in 1838, when Piet Retief’s party of Voortrekkers were killed by Dingane’s troops, and the missionaries had become so demoralized that they seriously considered abandoning southeast Africa. However, the British takeover changed all that. When Natal was annexed by the British in 1843 the American Board missionaries resolved to stay, hoping that colonial rule would provide the stability necessary for their labours. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions decided to concentrate efforts and resources on this mission field, hoping that success there would stimulate flagging interest in missionary work at home (Etherington 1978, p. 25). By 1865, the American Zulu Mission (AZM) had established 16 mission stations in Natal. The American Board was a non-denominational organisation, dominated however by New England Congregationalism (Dinnerstein 1976, p. 235). Its ethos, and that of the missionaries it despatched to South Africa, was extremely ambitious, for nationalist as well as religious reasons: The members of the AZM [  ] had undertaken their missions in that optimistic era in American history that followed the War of 1812. A conviction of America’s ‘manifest destiny’ underlined not only continental geographical ambitions but also evangelical ones. The evangelical zeal that the Congregationalists brought to Natal clearly

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This optimistic zeal had another strand to it. Congregationalists, in common with many other denominations, believed that these were the last days before the second coming of Christ. This widespread millenarianism lent a sense of urgency to the dissemination of the Gospel, since the missionaries would be preparing the way for the coming of Christ (ibid., p. 7). Indeed, so eager were they to fulfil their task as quickly as possible that when they despatched their original party to Natal and the Zulu country in 1834, the Board hoped that the whole Zulu nation could be converted within one generation (Etherington 1978, pp. 24–5). Lewis Grout was one of those who answered this pressing call to the ministry. Prior to his departure for the mission field, he had been educated at Yale University, Yale divinity school, and Andover Seminary – institutions at the heart of the Congregationalist church’s efforts to provide ‘a learned ministry’ (Pearson 1969, p. 70). The American missionaries had conducted ad hoc linguistic work on and in Zulu since the 1830s, but they had published no grammars, dictionaries, or other works for learners of the language. When Grout arrived, however, the British had recently taken over Natal, and the future appeared to the American missionaries to be secure. It was the ideal time to begin publishing linguistic studies of Zulu, to meet the needs of new missionaries who would come to Natal, and to lay down a foundation for future research. As soon as he arrived, Grout set to work. He produced his first grammatical representation of Zulu, in an article on ‘The Zulu and other dialects of southern Africa’ for the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2 years after his arrival, alongside another by his fellow missionary James Bryant (Bryant 1849; Grout 1849). He continued with his studies, publishing reports and journal articles, and in 1859 he completed his magnum opus, a grammar of Zulu entitled The Isizulu. The Isizulu and Grout’s ‘genuine Zulu literature’ Grout set out to justify the study of Zulu, just as the Methodists had already done for Xhosa some years earlier. Indeed in many ways his case for the value and uniqueness of Zulu echoed the Wesleyans’ representations of Xhosa, showing in particular the influence of Appleyard’s work. He made use of the theory of euphonic concord both to explain the system of noun-class agreement in Zulu and to accord the language the

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entailed not only the message of Christ but also an enlightened American way of life. (Dinnerstein 1983, p. 85)

generic characteristic of ‘euphony’ as a guiding principle in its formation (Grout 1859, p. 28). However, in contrast to the Wesleyans’ Xhosa scholarship, Grout’s focus in legitimating Zulu rested neither on its euphonic characteristics nor on arguments about copiousness and regularity. As we have already seen, Grout considered the language of the Zulu court to have exercised an elevating and homogenizing influence upon the speech of the whole region. Stationed in northern Natal, near the Thukela River, this was the ‘pure’ language he claimed to be representing: It is evident [  ] that the language of all these tribes, or clans, was substantially one, even before the days of Chaka; as it is also evident that, since that time, there has been a steady refining elevating process, the language of the conquered being gradually fashioned to the higher standard and more fixed character of their superiors. Nor can we believe that any of the African languages or dialects come to us, at the present time, in a state of greater original purity than the Isizulu. (Ibid., pp. xix–xx) Two key features, therefore, were considered to characterize this language: prestige, and purity. Expanding on the latter theme, and drawing on contemporary theories about human migration, Grout argued that not only the policies of language planning practiced by the Zulu state, but also the geographical and historical circumstances of the region, had contributed to the great purity of Zulu in comparison to its nearest neighbours: If we look at the history of nations and languages, we shall find, generally, that those have been most affected and modified in character, which have come most into connection and collision with other nations and languages; and, so again, that those which have retained their original character longest and least affected, are such as have been most isolated from nations and languages of a different character. Again, nations and languages have generally gone in waves one after another over the different parts of the earth, the foremost wave being the last to feel the influence of those which follow. And we have examples of nations and languages, retiring into some nook, or lodging under the lee, as it were, and there retaining their original character to a wonderful extent, for ages; while their more

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exposed neighbours have, in the mean time, undergone most rapid and wonderful changes. Now there is reason to believe that this general and very natural law has held in respect to the nations and languages of this continent; and that there is no part of South Africa, where foreign influence has come in later, or been felt less, than in case of the language and tribes of which we speak, particularly the Zulu. (Ibid., p. xx) In common with other contemporary theorists, Grout assumed that Bantu-speakers had arrived in southern Africa in migratory waves from further north. The ‘southern extremity’ and ‘foremost wave of the Zulu class’, the language of the ‘Kafirs or Amakosa’, had come into contact with and been affected by languages of a quite ‘different character’ – feeling the impact of that of the ‘Hottentots’, and then English and Dutch. The speech forms at the northernmost extremity of this ‘class’, meanwhile, had been influenced by Arabic and other languages. Only the Zulu language, isolated in the middle, had apparently been shielded from external influence. Thus, Grout concluded, In a word, all historical analogy and facts go to indicate that, in this part of Africa, we may properly suppose that the original characteristics of that great family of languages, to which the Zulu, Sechuana, Kafir, and other sisters belong, have been preserved most perfect. This view of the subject invests the study of the Isizulu with a peculiar interest, and makes a knowledge of it highly subservient to a right understanding of some of the apparently anomalous forms and principles of kindred dialects. (Ibid., p. xxi) De-emphasizing both the linguistic diversity of Natal and the Zulu country, and the evidence of language contact and borrowing in Zulu, Grout represented a language which was homogeneous, stable, ‘original’, and ‘perfect’, and which therefore had the greatest claim upon linguistic scholarship. In the Preface to The Isizulu, Grout described the background to his own language studies in Natal. Preparing to leave America for the mission field in 1846, he had searched for materials which would help him learn the language of his intended flock, the Zulu people, but all he could find were a few words here and there from travel narratives. On his arrival, he found other sources: a brief grammatical outline in manuscript form, and Boyce’s grammar of Xhosa – useful materials, but

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For here were older missionaries, ready to answer many practical questions; and here, too, were the natives themselves, by hundreds and thousands, all expert in the use of their own tongue. To these I at once applied myself; and, from that time to the present, both as a source of pleasure, and from a sense of duty, I have made the study of language, and especially the language of this people, a part of my pursuit. (Ibid., p. vi) Of the three aspects of language-learning which Grout outlined – drawing on the expertise of older missionaries, drawing on the expertise of native speakers, and engaging in ‘the study of language’ by reading other linguistic texts – it was the authority of native speakers of Zulu, ‘expert in the use of their own tongue’, which he highlighted. This authority, however, was partly undermined by the fact that in key respects Zulu-speakers were ‘ignorant and destitute’ in relation to their own language: Without an interpreter; without any thing that could be called a grammar of the language; with only a small vocabulary, written in a singular, insufficient, inappropriate alphabet; and among a people alike ignorant and destitute, not only of a grammar, but also of all those terms – nouns and verbs, number and person, mode and tense, roots and formatives, vowels and consonants – of which the student and author of grammar needs to make the most frequent use; moreover, without a page, without a single sentence, of genuine vernacular composition, with which to commence the study of their own tongue in its purity, – it was evident, from the first, that an attempt to analyze their language, and reduce its elements and forms to a complete system, would require much time, and hard, patient study. (Ibid., p. vi) Although Grout was eager to acknowledge and privilege the status of native speakers in relation to their own language, he was equally keen to lay claim to a different and, by implication, superior kind of expertise, founded on his capacity to ‘analyze’, to ‘reduce its elements and forms to a complete system’ through the deployment of the grammarian’s terminology – ‘nouns and verbs, number and person, mode and tense, roots and formatives, vowels and consonants’ – through

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still woefully inadequate. But, he continued, more significant resources also presented themselves:

which native speakers’ oral competence could be refracted into an appropriate object of knowledge. Linguistic knowledge, in Grout’s epistemology, was identical with Western grammatical discourse. But while this was undoubtedly the case, his work also drew its authority from its claim to represent the language as it was used in debates, songs, stories, and everyday conversation – and it was only in ‘continuous discourse’ by native speakers, Grout suggested, that the structural and conceptual richness and complexity of Zulu could properly be recognized. In Zulu verbs, for example, the relationship between grammatical tense and time is not absolute; Grout celebrated this feature of the language, by claiming it as a source of sophisticated creativity in Zulu narrative. If the learner was confused, then this was because they were accustomed to the excessively rigid and limited English verb: While the Isizulu finds no difficulty in allowing an interchange of some of its modes, particularly the imperative, potential, and optative, and displays great freedom in the interchange of tenses, sometimes representing the past or future as present, and even the present and future as already past; it is also able, & particular, to employ those modes and tenses which give a correct expression of the sense intended. REMARK. – On many of these points, the Zulu language bears a close analogy to the Greek. So true is this remark, that we may say, almost in the language of another concerning the Greek, that the Isizulu ‘has the power of giving to narration a wonderful variety, life, and energy, from the freedom with which it can employ and interchange its tenses. Without circumlocution, it can represent an action as continued or momentary; as attempted or accomplished; as introductory or conclusive. It can at pleasure retard or quicken the progress of a narrative. It can give to it dramatic life and reality by exhibiting an action as doing, or epic vivacity and energy by dismissing it as done. It can bring a scene forward into the strong light of the present, and instantly send it back into the shade of the past. The variety, vivacity, and dramatic character of Zulu narrative can be preserved but imperfectly in translation, from the fact that the English has, comparatively, so small a variety of tenses and so little freedom in uniting the past and present.’ The truth of these remarks, and of the above statement, or rule, may be seen in [  ] the manner in which these are combined and employed in continuous discourse. (Ibid., p. 343)

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In adapting an argument about the problem of translating from classical Greek to English, Grout referred the reader to the controversy at the heart of current debates about New Testament interpretation: many scholars and clergy considered that the meaning of Scripture was rendered opaque because of the inadequacy of English as a target language.3 Grout’s argument implied a similarity between classical Greek and Zulu; and it also implied that, for this reason, Scriptural translation into Zulu would be in some ways easier than Scriptural translation into English. Zulu, he asserted repeatedly, had a capacity for precision which was lacking in English: In English, the phrase devastation of the people might mean what they wrought, or what they suffered; but uku/ita kwabantu would express the former, the subjective; and uku/itakala kwabantu, the latter, objective, without ambiguity. [  ] So, in English, we talk and read of ‘the temptation of Satan,’ and the ‘temptation of Christ;’ ‘our minister,’ and the ‘minister of Christ,’ and have other like forms, in which, for accuracy and precision, the Zulu language is superior to our own. (Ibid., p. 270) And so although Grout, like almost all missionary linguists working in colonial settings, devoted space to the problems of Scriptural translation into a new target language, his concerns were limited only to a brief discussion of the need to introduce key theological terms and concepts into Zulu (ibid., pp. 41–3). Instead, he focused on the problems of translating from Zulu to English in such a way as to preserve for English-speaking readers the subtleties and complex meanings of the source utterance. Customary arguments hinging on issues of translation were thus reversed, as Grout surveyed the admirable creativity of the Zulu language (see for example pp. 419–20). Grout’s arguments for the value of Zulu were grounded in discussion of the language as it was used by native speakers. This, he insisted, was the site of the true ‘genius’ of the language.4 It did not derive its legitimacy by being reconstructed as an abstract system, wrested from its cultural environment, as the Methodists had done in attempting to separate the Xhosa language from the utterances of Xhosa people. On the contrary, its flexibility and potentiality were precisely demonstrated by examining the language in its cultural setting. As a corollary to these arguments, it followed that appropriate written matter designed for the learner should in some way reflect the language as used by native speakers. In his ‘Preface’ Grout had lamented the inadequacy

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of the materials with which he had begun his own language-learning process: ‘genuine vernacular composition’ was what was required to understand the language ‘in its purity’. It was for this reason that most of the linguistic data in The Isizulu came either from the writings of Zulu-speaking Christian converts, or from Zulu-speakers’ narratives and songs, transliterated by Grout. His term for this was ‘genuine Zulu literature’, and he described his rationale for its deployment in this way: Nothing could be done towards writing a genuine Zulu Grammar without a genuine Zulu literature. ‘What is wanted and expected of a grammar,’ as the writer has said in another place, ‘is that it give a clear statement and correct illustration of the forms and principles, the genius and idioms, of the language of which it treats.’ Hence, most of my examples, especially those of any length and particular importance, as in Syntax, which makes a large part of the work, have been taken, not from a foreigner’s translation of other languages into this, but, in some instances, from the correspondence and other compositions of the natives, in their own tongue; though chiefly from their conversation and discussions, narratives and speeches, on affairs of their own and of deepest interest to themselves, – their words and sentences being caught at the time they were spoken, and written out verbatim et literatim from the lips of the speaker. (Ibid., p. v) Grout insisted upon the ‘genuine’ nature of The Isizulu. This was, he asserted, as close as he could bring readers to an understanding of the language as it was used by native speakers. He dissociated himself from the more usual missionary strategy of using ‘a foreigner’s translation of other languages into this’ for the purposes of language-teaching, a strategy which, as we have seen, the Methodists had largely employed in representing Xhosa. Grout, on the other hand, claimed to be presenting the reader not with a distillation of the language, but the language as it was used, ‘verbatim et literatim’. Grout’s collection of ‘Zulu literature’ was the source of the examples in the grammatical portion of the work, and he also included a longer selection of songs, stories, and other extracts as an Appendix to The Isizulu. This would not only provide the reader with ‘authentic’ materials to use for the purposes of language-learning, but also situate the Zulu language in its sociocultural context, providing readers with a vision of the world in which Zulu-speakers lived, viewed from their own perspectives:

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As a means of enabling the Zulu scholar to prosecute his studies, and to make himself familiar with the laws, genius, and idioms of the language, to a greater extent than would be possible from a perusal of isolated examples, I have made a selection of pieces, of a diversified, continuous character, from the manuscript literature on which the Grammar is founded; and have had these pieces printed as an Appendix. Taken, as they are, from sketches obtained from the more intelligent, though, for the most part, utterly heathen natives, who spoke from their own stand-point of feeling, belief, and observation; giving, as they do, an account of the Zulu kings and some of their wars; narrating the arts and performances of the izinyanga, a class of quasi-priests, or so-called doctors; exhibiting the views of the people respecting the abatakati, or so-called witches; and comprising a selection of the songs, prayers, and praises, which are wont to be said or sung, at home or abroad, to the living and the dead, – these selections help to give us some correct notion of the religious opinions and moral character, the social life and civil laws of the people, the forms and rules of whose language they serve to illustrate. (Ibid., p. v) On the one hand, Grout suggested that the reader could gain from these examples a broadly homogeneous, ‘correct notion’ of the beliefs and ideas of ‘the people’. Yet at the same time, he also emphasized the diversity of his collection. In fact, Grout’s collection of ‘native literature’, both embedded in the grammar itself and appended to it, illuminates a wide and sometimes conflictual range of ideas and opinions, suggesting ways in which Africans in and around Grout’s mission station in Natal were negotiating competing religious frameworks, cultural practices, historical narratives, and ideas about the nature of power. Testimonies of Zulu-speaking Christians to their faith, for example, were included alongside Zulu accounts of religious thought and of the origins of human mortality (see for example ibid., pp. 294, 348–9). And, while some excerpts refer to the superiority of white people, Grout also included a selection of isibongo in honour of Zulu kings that use blackness as a praise term (ibid., pp. 340, 419, 425). The benchmark by which these heteroglot views and opinions were to be interpreted, however, was through comparison to ‘intelligent, living’ faith, and ‘useful, enduring, worthy civilization’. In an ethnography published on his return to America, Grout reproduced English translations of some of the ‘native literature’ from The Isizulu, and wrote of it that

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These brief and imperfect samples of Zulu song will serve to give at once some notion of their genius and of their degradation. We see here what they count noble and valorous. In their low views of excellence we read the story of their fallen and savage condition, their need of elevation, of light, and all that Christianity confers on ruined man. (Grout 1864, pp. 199–200) Thus, the multiple religious and cultural perspectives embedded within The Isizulu constituted, for Grout, a kind of spiritual diagnostics intended to pave the way for radical transformation of Zulu thought, culture, and belief. As Myra Dinnerstein’s study of the AZM makes clear, the missionaries, Grout included, were deeply paternalistic in their approach to African Christian converts, while denouncing non-Christian Africans out of hand as licentious, wicked, and dishonest. Dinnerstein reads in these attitudes a combination of Calvinist religious dogma and cultural chauvinism on the part of an American culture ‘that considers itself far advanced’ (Dinnerstein 1983, p. 86). Thus it was a specific and most certainly circumscribed kind of intercultural dialogue which Grout proposed in The Isizulu. His vision of a Christianized future for Natal entailed the study of its inhabitants’ language, beliefs, and culture, preparatory to their radical transformation. And so, he invited his readers to engage in a linguistic and cultural dialogue, but at the same time it was implicitly assumed that they would simply reject the answers provided by their Zulu-speaking interlocutors where they conflicted with the tenets of Congregationalist Christianity and American civilization.

‘A wide highway for extensive and permanent good’: Language development and language standardization Nowhere is Grout’s transformative vision of Christian mission more clearly articulated than in his arguments about orthographic standardization in The Isizulu. Questions of orthography – how to transliterate the different phonological systems of African languages – were of ongoing concern to all missionary societies. So, too, was the danger of proliferating systems, as the various societies adopted different orthographies for their linguistic and translation work. The American Board missionaries’ view, to which Grout was a passionate adherent, was that a standard orthography was vitally important, and that its provision would also lead to a process of linguistic unification in southern Africa.

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Once languages shared a common writing system, this would be the crucial step to their developing into a common language; in particular, Zulu, with its greater purity, would exert an elevating influence on its linguistic neighbours (Grout 1859, p. vi). In the way in which it was expressed, this project inscribed the millenarian eagerness and ambition of American Congregationalism into a project for language development – seeing cultural, linguistic, and religious transformation as progressing hand in hand towards the grand consummation at Christ’s second coming. Grout had been an active member of the Committee appointed by the Board to address the issue of a standard orthography since shortly after his arrival in Natal, and in 1853 he had published an article on the subject in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Extracts from this 1853 paper also appeared in The Isizulu. Grout argued that a standard alphabet system for the whole of southern Africa – ideally that of Lepsius, which was ‘admirably suited to the Isizulu’ – would both ‘enrich’ and ‘consolidate’ the languages in question (Lepsius 1855; Grout 1859, p. xxxviii). The ambiguity of the latter term, meaning both to strengthen and to unite, indicated the dual ameliorative and homogenizing intentions of standardization. Languages would become enriched in ‘important terms’ through sharing with one another, and at the same time they would grow together. This argument had important religious overtones. Grout’s contentions tied the question of orthographic uniformity to the ambitions of Protestant missionary enterprise. His theme was unification – unification of orthography, unification of languages, unification of mission, and ultimately unification of Africa under Christianity. This was a preoccupation of the American missionaries more generally, as witnessed by the fact that much of Grout’s argument involves citing at length from a ‘Circular’ produced by the Committee on Orthography. The thrust of their orthographic arguments was that diversity and insularity had to be replaced by consensus and exchange in order to win Africa, and indeed the world, for Christ. They invoked the story of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9) to cast linguistic disunity as a mark of God’s displeasure – in merging languages together, the missionaries aimed to re-create the unity which had existed before Babel. This time, the gift of a ‘common language’ would not be tainted by humanity’s overweening pride and ambition, but would instead be used to ‘lift up one common shout of united intelligent praise to their common Lord’ (Circular cited in Grout 1859, p. lii). The authors of the Circular referred to the gift of tongues at Pentecost (Acts 2: 1–8) as a sign of their hopes.

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The American missionaries were equally convinced that linguistic unification and improvement, conceived of as indivisibly linked, could be associated with a more general process of development towards a perceived state of civilization – or, as Myra Dinnerstein puts it, ‘an enlightened American way of life’. The language of economics and exchange provided a resource of metaphor on which they drew heavily; Grout argued, for example, that A common alphabet [  ] would help to promote a general, affluent exchange, – would institute a kind of common currency, as favorable to commerce as commerce is to opulence and assimilation. (Grout 1859, p. li) In the conclusion of the Circular, cited by Grout, the themes of unification – orthographic, linguistic, religious, economic – are bound together in the following eschatological vision: Give to the cognate dialects of Africa a common orthography, and one step is taken towards giving her a common language, and opening a wide highway for extensive and permanent good. If the plan here proposed succeeds, as the different missions in different parts of the field extend their operations, and approach each other, and a knowledge of the Lord begins to cover the land as the waters cover the sea, shall it not then appear that even so small a thing as a common orthography, adopted among all kindred dialects in years long past, shall have done something towards hastening the grand consummation; so that the different heralds of the cross on the mountain tops, and the inhabitants of the valleys, shall lift up one common shout of united intelligent praise to their common Lord? At so little effort and expense can anything so extensively and permanently useful be done for Africa and all her sons, and for which future generations will more gladly rise up and bless their benefactors? (Circular cited in Grout 1859, p. lii) The indivisibly linked processes of religious and linguistic unification were plotted spatially: a common orthography would be but the first step towards a common language, which would in turn drive a ‘highway for extensive and permanent good’ through the region, a route by which Christianity, commerce, and civilization would flow in from outside. This ‘highway’ would connect Africa with the West, and it would also unify mission societies. Each mission station was represented as a node

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from which ‘knowledge of the Lord’ might flow out across the land and towards a future time, Christianity covering Africa ‘as the waters cover the sea’. In plotting the progress of linguistic unification and Christian transformation in such spatial metaphors, the American Board missionaries couched their religious theme in the language of trade and colonization. Johannes Fabian suggests that When one examines colonial pronouncements about language, certain ideological operators can be identified. These assured agreement in form and content among religious, missionary thought and secular political and economic ideas [  ]. Perhaps the most fundamental of these common notions were certain conceptualizations of space. Fabian argues that the spatial metaphors which pervade missionary writing on Africa – ‘military conquest, penetration, radiation, planting and cultivating, and so forth’ – represent an intersection between the discourses of religion, nationhood, colonialism, and economics (Fabian 1991, p. 145). This is undoubtedly true of the American Board’s ‘Circular’, with its paternalistic vision of Africa as a great plain to be covered by the beneficent waters of true religion and enlightened civilization, and as an empty space through which the ‘highway’ of a common language could drive the forces of progress, drawing the blessings of future generations of African people towards their ‘benefactors’. And it tied these ideas with the rhetoric of the last days, binding its themes together in a vision of ‘the grand consummation’ and the coming of Christ. British control of Natal, combined with the general confidence and ambitiousness of the American Board, permitted the kind of allencompassing transformative vision articulated here. It is clear that the AZM missionaries, with their millenarian preoccupations, saw the current position – a relatively stable colony, with many Africans living on locations, retaining their traditional cultural practices – as a stepping stone to something far grander, a future transformed by Christianity and civilization, in which language was to play a key role. Thus Grout, as well as the other American missionaries who wrote the ‘Circular’ with him, envisioned missionary language policy as a radically interventionist, normative project that simultaneously articulated a vision of rapid and far-reaching missionary success, which in turn was bound up with their millenarian priorities. Grout looked towards a future in which the cognate tongues of southern Africa would all merge into one

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purified, elevated language, as part of a process of linguistic, religious, and cultural transformation. Thus it is evident that Grout was very far from trying to promote any kind of tolerant or relativist cultural understanding through his model of language study and intercultural encounter. His model of mission was based upon rapid and radical interventionism; he was also, for example, an entrenched opponent of the acceptance of polygamists into the church: this was a position taken by the AZM as a whole, but articulated most vociferously by Grout, who wrote an attack on the more tolerant views of the then Bishop of Natal, John Colenso (Grout 1856). Operating within this model of mission, he conceived of language study as a form of moral diagnosis, empowering the missionary to know, judge, and thereby alter ‘the religious opinions and moral character, the social life and civil laws of the people’. In this way, the underlying purpose of studying the Zulu language and Zulu culture was to reveal the dire need of Zulu-speakers for both Christianity and ‘civilization’ – in other words, to reveal their sinful nature. At the same time, however, Grout assumed a confident position to engage with, interpret, and even admire aspects of Zulu language and culture, without being in any way affected or contaminated by Zulu-speakers’ supposed unsaved nature. The assumption which underlies Grout’s approach to language and mission – that his own identity and position were unassailable and uncontradictory – is called into question by a story told by Bishop Colenso about his first visit to the American Board mission stations in 1854. In this account, Colenso used arguments about language acquisition to animate what he saw as the American missionaries’ overly Calvinistic condemnation of Zulu-speakers.5 He suggested that, far from being aggressively confident about the security of their American identities in the intercultural and interlingual environment of northern Natal, the missionaries were – certainly when it came to their own children, brought up on the mission stations – deeply apprehensive and anxious: Nor was there any daily school for the little ones of the flock, at which I was all the more surprised, as with such a blooming family of children, some almost grown to maturity, and who had already learned, as their excellent father [Mr Lindley] told me, ‘to speak the native tongue with more or less fluency, for it was impossible to prevent this,’ it seemed so natural that this singular gift of nature should be improved, for the glory of God and the salvation of the poor dark souls around them. But I found upon inquiry, that there

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were serious objections to allowing a free intercourse between the white and the black children. The conversation of the latter is said to be so impure and disgusting, that a Christian parent cannot dare to commit his children to its contamination. And on this ground both Mr Lindley and Mr Lewis Grout, whose station I next visited, and who plainly told me that ‘he would not have his little girl learn one word of that filthy people’s language on any account, if he could help it,’ think it their duty to their children to protect them from such corrupting influences. (Colenso 1855a, pp. 235–6) The story turns on two opposing views of Christian mission. In Colenso’s view, Zulu children were not to be shunned as sinners, but rather pitied as ‘poor dark souls’ awaiting Christian revelation, which they would experience through ‘free intercourse’ with Zulu-speaking, white Christian playmates. The Zulu language, in other words, provided the key means for salvation through dialogue. To the American missionaries, however, Zulu-speakers (even, or perhaps particularly, children) could be seen as ‘corrupting influences’ poised to taint Christian children with any number of ‘disgusting’ impurities, should they be able to engage in unrestrained dialogue with one another. By implication, it was not only the ‘impure and disgusting’ content of Zulu-speakers’ utterances, but also the very nature of the language itself, which threatens to pollute the missionaries’ children. And so Colenso’s interesting story suggests, to say the least, a disjuncture in Grout’s thinking about the implications of learning Zulu and consequent exposure to Zulu culture and belief. While it was important that an adult missionary become familiar with Zulu ‘feeling, belief, and observation’, this was quite another matter than the forging of bilingual identities among missionaries’ children. The terminology used to describe this kind of intercultural encounter – contamination, corruption, impurity – suggest it as a kind of permeable boundary across which pollutants and infection might cross, rather than a space of moral diagnosis and religious transformation. It highlights not only the risks of ‘filthy’ conversation but also, by extension, the vulnerability of the children’s American identities themselves.6

‘Meeting the heathen half way’: Bishop John William Colenso’s mission as dialogue The story about the American Board missionaries animates a running theme through Bishop Colenso’s oeuvre as a whole: a vision of mission based upon dialogue with Zulu-speakers. Colenso is best remembered

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these days as the biblical critic and putative heretic whose book The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined served as a touchstone for British religious anxiety in the 1860s; and, later, as the defender of the Hlubi chief, Langalibalele. However, he was also – rather less notoriously – a linguist, producing a range of pedagogical Zulu language manuals from the 1850s to the 1870s. The Zulu language was, moreover, at the heart of his conception of mission; running through all of his writings, including his most controversial theology, is a pervasive concern with the purposes and implications of language-learning and communication in the mission field. Colenso’s biographer Jeff Guy has traced the development of his theology, drawing on the influences of Coleridge’s romantic idealism, and particularly on the teachings of Colenso’s religious mentor F. D. Maurice, who advocated a universalist Christian philosophy. Evidence for Colenso’s thinking on questions of missionary work prior to his departure for Natal is to be found in the text of a sermon he preached in March 1853: I believe that, by thus meeting the heathen, half way, as it were, upon the ground of our common humanity [  ] we may [  ] look for far greater success in Missionary labours, and far more of stability in the converts that may be made, than by seeking to make all things new to them – to uproot altogether their old religion, scoffing at all the things which they hold most sacred, deriding their fears, which alone have stood to them, for so many years long, as the representatives of the spiritual world. (Colenso 1854c, pp. 141–2) Even before he reached his new diocese, then, Colenso regarded the process of mission as integrative, working most effectively by engaging with existing systems of meaning, rather than by rupturing or displacing them. Mission meant ‘meeting the heathen half way’. Consequently, when he reached Natal, Colenso immediately set about investigating and recording the existing religious beliefs of the inhabitants of his new diocese as a foundation for the task of evangelism. In particular, he was concerned to discover whether they had any existing word for, and therefore conception of, a Creator. He conducted interviews with Zulu-speakers throughout his tour of the region, on mission stations and African homesteads, with the help of the Secretary for Native Affairs Theophilus Shepstone, who acted as interpreter, and presented his investigations in his account of the visit, Ten Weeks in Natal. Colenso was concerned to present his conclusions as the result

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of dialogue with indigenous Africans, particularly when it came to their word for God. He was alarmed to discover, from a number of Zuluspeaking informants in Natal and the Zulu country, that the missionaries’ recent introduction of uTixo, the term used among the Xhosa, had no meaning for the speakers of Zulu. He further discovered that, while the origin of the term was unknown, it was certainly a borrowing from Khoi and it was likely that it had originally signified ‘a species of mantis, which is called the Hottentot’s god’. With little meaning for those who spoke it, and with connotations of Khoikhoi insect worship, uTixo was hardly an appropriate name for God – a fact made even worse by the fact that it contained an ‘odious’ click (Colenso 1855a, pp. 56–7, 114–15). Colenso’s conclusion from his researches, however, was that Zulu already had a correct word for God: ‘uNkulunkulu’, or ‘Great-Great-One’; as well as ‘umVelinqange’, ‘The First Comer-Out’, ‘The First Essence, or rather Existence’. Thus, in Colenso’s view, a generalized religious knowledge among the Zulus, and specifically an understanding of the notion of a Creator, predated the arrival of Christian missionaries. The obligation of missionaries was, therefore, not to utterly disrupt existing patterns of thought and life, but to show the Zulu how the particularity of Christian revelation fitted with their existing religious knowledge: In every instance [  ] my inquiries led me invariably to the same point – namely, that these words have been familiar to them from their childhood as names for Him ‘who created them and all things,’ and as traces of a religious knowledge, which, however originally derived, their ancestors possessed long before the arrival of Missionaries, and have handed down to the present generation. (Ibid., p. 59) For Colenso, the African people he interviewed showed clear evidence of belief in a Supreme Being, but they had forgotten its significance. The present state of the Zulu, in other words, was to be understood as the result of a process of amnesia and deterioration which it was the purpose of mission to reverse: ‘the Christian mission would remind them of the true meaning of their own religious vocabulary’ (Chidester 1996a, p. 134).7 Colenso’s attitude to mission in Natal, therefore, was one in which existing beliefs were to be sympathetically comprehended, and could under certain circumstances be incorporated into Christian practice.

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This approach was compatible with Shepstone’s policies as regards ‘native affairs’, which were predicated upon the adaptation of Nguni laws and customs as a means to establish colonial stability while instituting gradual change. Thus Colenso’s approach, while relatively unusual in Protestant missionary terms, was still in keeping with a vision of sustained British control in the region and the long-term development of Natal according to Western norms. In the Preface to his Zulu-English Dictionary, for example, he wrote, I trust [  ] that this book may be of some use in promoting the study of a very elegant and expressive language, – one which has close affinities with the languages of all the other tribes of South-Eastern and Central Africa, as far north, in all events, as the Zambesi, – one, therefore, which cannot be expected to lose its interest, not only for the missionary, traveller, and trader, but also for the statesman, and the ordinary colonist of these parts, for many generations. (Colenso 1861, pp. vii–viii) Just as many other colonial missionaries had done, Colenso recognized the significance of providing linguistic knowledge not only for the prospective missionary, but also for the ‘traveller and trader’, the ‘statesman’, and ‘the ordinary colonist of these parts’ – a nexus of readers whose linguistic needs, according to Colenso, would be met by the missionary dictionary for ‘many generations’ to come. This understanding of the fundamental significance of language study to the consolidation of enduring colonial power was already clearly in evidence in Ten Weeks in Natal. Colenso wrote, for example, of his meeting with the Lieutenant Governor of the colony regarding a new language commission appointed with the aim of producing a dictionary and grammar of the Zulu language: Had an interview with His Honour, the Lieutenant Governor, B.C.C. Pine, Esq. [  ] He has, I find, appointed a commission to prepare a Kafir [Zulu] grammar and vocabulary; and he desires as soon as possible to enforce the rule, as in India, that all functionaries of the Government, engaged among the natives, shall pass an examination in the Zulu language. (Colenso 1855a, pp. 14–15) While safeguarding effective colonial governance, Colenso reported approvingly, Pine’s commission would also work to impose a linguistic standard throughout Natal. Missionaries, charged with the education of

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Language, Culture, and ‘the Native Mind’ 147

The language, as it will be settled by this Commission, from intercourse with the Natives in all parts of the Colony, and finally adopted as the standard for the whole district, will be the Zulu-Kafir Language. Of course, the vernacular of different tribes may be expected to differ considerably from this [  ]. But the progress of education, when the missionaries are all referred to a common standard, will tend gradually to do away with such distinctions. (Ibid., pp. 16–17) Thus it is clear that, as a colonial Bishop, albeit in many ways a maverick one, Colenso’s views on mission were closely connected to what he perceived as the interests of the colonial regime and the long-term success of British rule in the region.8 But they were also predicated fundamentally upon the model of communication with which he had begun his Natal mission: the way to convert Zulu people was to talk to them, and to listen to them. Thus Colenso’s religious convictions regarding mission found a direct analogue in his approach to language. Colenso’s background had provided useful training for a writer of language manuals: having excelled in Mathematics at St John’s College, Cambridge, he had subsequently won fame as the writer of best-selling mathematical textbooks. Where other writers attempted to cater to the needs of a varied readership, inviting the interest of the philologically minded, Colenso wrote for novice language learners. His Elementary Grammar of the Zulu-Kafir Language, a work originally intended for the use of the mission party accompanying him to his new diocese, was published in 1855. Compared to other missionary grammars of Xhosa and Zulu, it is positively minute: 40 octavo pages of grammatical explanation. It was simplified still further in the beginner’s manual First Steps in Zulu-Kafir (1859). Both grammatical works are characterized by a pared-down simplicity, without justificatory Prefaces or discussions of ‘euphony’, drawing their examples from everyday communicative scenarios rather than religious language. Each of the five chapters of The Elementary Grammar is a brief, point-by-point lesson, based on the key features of Zulu grammatical structure rather than on the demonstration of complexity or on mimicry of classical grammar. While Colenso was a simplifier, he was also an innovator, particularly in his dealings with the Zulu verb, the subject of the last and the longest chapter in The Elementary Grammar. For a British pedagogical grammarian in the mid-nineteenth century, trying to explain the

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Africans on their mission stations in Natal, would be its emissaries and enforcers:

relationship between tense (the relationship between the time of the action referred to and the time of the utterance) and aspect (the duration and type of action expressed) in Zulu, the customary and perhaps the simplest method would be to use and adapt the familiar distinction between the perfect and the imperfect aspect. The former denotes a completed action; the latter denotes a non-completed action. This was the approach that Lewis Grout, for example, was to adopt 4 years later in his far more elaborate grammar The Isizulu. Colenso, however, opted for an innovative classification which did not draw on classically derived categories to describe verb conjugation, instead instituting a new terminology, devised in collaboration with Wilhelm Bleek, in order to define the relationship between tense and aspect. Explaining this, he wrote, Every action, whether in Present, Past, or Future Time, may be regarded as, at the moment spoken of, either just beginning to be, or already in progress, or just finished. Thus we shall need three Tenses for each species of Time, to express the action as commencing, continuing, or completed. (Colenso 1855b, pp. 28–9) As we have seen, the formation of Nguni verbs was a particular challenge for missionary grammarians. Colenso’s was a very simplified version of the Zulu verb – a feature which he highlighted by contrast to Appleyard’s grammar of Xhosa: It is believed, however, that the above paradigm will be quite sufficient for practical purposes, without the necessity of presenting the student with the astounding perplexity of more than two hundred and fifty different forms of tenses, positive, negative, contracted, augmented, &c., of one regular Kafir Verb. (Vide Appleyard’s Kafir Grammar.) (Ibid., p. 36) Thus Colenso invited the reader to reassess the apparently baroque complexity of the Nguni verb as a by-product of missionary folly. This folly consisted both in unnecessary over-elaboration in the verb paradigm – instantiating every possible conjugation, baffling the learner – and in an unwillingness to recognize the internal logic of a language independent of the traditional representational framework of Western grammar.

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References are occasionally made in this Dictionary to my ZuluKafir Grammar. Students, wishing to begin the study of the language, are recommended to use the abridgement, ‘First Steps in Zulu Kafir’, together with the reading book ‘Three Native Accounts’, &c., which has been expressly prepared to accompany the ‘First Steps’, with translation and notes referring to the rules. (Colenso 1861, p. vii) The influence of Colenso’s experiences in preparing mathematics textbooks was evident: the reader was called upon to engage in a careful process of reading, cross-referencing, comprehension, and analysis. This active model of language learning was to be supplemented by tuition from Zulu-speakers, whose presence was posited repeatedly as a necessity in learning the language and using the texts correctly – in order to practice pronunciation, to learn grammatical structure, and to expand one’s lexicon. Perhaps the most striking feature of his language-learning programme, however, was the central role played by the reading book, Three Native Accounts: this contained the written testimony of three Zulu Christian converts who had accompanied Colenso on his visit to the Zulu king Mpande in 1859, with parallel English translation. The three contributors to the text, Magema Magwaza Fuze, Ndiyane, and William Ngidi, were asked by Colenso to keep journals on the trip to Mpande’s court ‘which might be useful in showing how some of our proceedings looked from a native point of view’ (Colenso 1860a, p. 51). These accounts were, Colenso emphasized, ‘written in simple idiomatic Zulu’ and therefore ‘particularly well adapted for any who are beginning to study the language’ (Colenso 1860b, p. i). Colenso did not claim that Three Native Accounts represented some kind of Zulu essence or the ‘native mind’, but rather the opinions and experiences of three individual Zulu-speakers, under particular circumstances, in the present day. In placing the ideas of Zulu-speakers centre-stage in his programme of language-teaching, he thereby suggested that communication between Africans and missionaries in the mission field should be a negotiation between various ‘points of view’, rather than a standoff between homogeneous and polarized positions. In this way he also proposed a model of dialogue between a Western learner and a Zulu-speaker, making his own theological persuasions, and specifically his understanding

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Colenso intended his linguistic texts to be used in conjunction with one another by learners of Zulu. As he wrote in the Preface to his Dictionary, published in 1861:

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Conversation and conversion: The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined When the first volume of Colenso’s book The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined was published in 1862, it caused uproar in Cape society and back in Britain. Controversially questioning the nature of biblical truth, the work became one of the key foci of religious anxiety in the 1860s. However, although scandalized reactions focused primarily on Colenso’s argument – that it was not literal, but metaphorical truth which could be found in the Hebrew Bible – critics also reacted with horror to Colenso’s account of the genesis of his doubt in the mission field. At the beginning of Book One of The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined, Colenso related the story of how his Zulu assistant William Ngidi, a Zulu-speaking Christian convert, had questioned him about the literal truth of the story of Noah: While translating the story of the Flood, I have had a simple-minded, but intelligent, native, – one with the docility of a child, but the reasoning powers of mature age, – look up, and ask, ‘Is all that true? Do you really believe that all this happened thus – that all the beasts, and birds, and creeping things, upon the earth, large and small, from hot countries and cold, came thus by pairs and entered into the ark with Noah? And did Noah gather food for them all, for the beasts and birds of prey, as well as the rest?’ (Colenso 1862–79: I, p. vii) Moreover, Ngidi had questioned not just the literal truth, but also the morality, of the Bible. In translating the Book of Exodus, he had been horrified by the way in which enslaved people were referred to in one passage (Exodus 21: 20–21) as ‘money’. To Ngidi, conducting his own moral diagnosis via the study of language, the ethical implications of a semantic equivalence between slaves and money were shocking and unacceptable. As Colenso reported, I shall never forget the revulsion of feeling, with which a very intelligent Christian native, with whose help I was translating these last

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of the role of mission, into a template for language-learning and communication. However, it was just this kind of dialogue, together with its unforeseen consequences, for which Colenso was to become notorious.

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And, recognizing the moral justification of Ngidi’s position, Colenso reported that ‘my own heart and conscience at the time fully sympathised with his’ (Colenso 1862–79: I, pp. 9–10). In relating these stories, revolving around theological dialogue between Bishop and Zulu assistant, and describing their mutual processes of interpretation and reflection, Colenso kept with the theme which united his work from the beginning: that communication should be the watchword in the task of mission. However, he also described how in this instance, Ngidi’s close questioning had had profound and far-reaching consequences. Having been unable in all conscience to give him confident answers, Colenso had been forced to examine the Hebrew Bible anew – the first fruit of this process being the opening volume of The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined, which ignited the Victorian Christian world. Colenso’s acknowledgement that conversation with his native assistant gave him pause for thought, let alone for doubt about some of the received truths of Christian theology, provided a convenient means to dismiss his efforts that was taken up keenly by his critics. The relationship with Ngidi provoked a rash of scornful responses both in South Africa and back in England, in a prevailing atmosphere of cultural and ‘racial’ superiority. Matthew Arnold’s opening broadside against Colenso in Macmillan’s Magazine, for example, was satirically entitled ‘The Bishop and the Philosopher’. The story seemed to lend itself well to humour; here was the Bishop who went to Africa to convert the heathen and was himself converted. In the words of the popular limerick: A Bishop there was of Natal, Who took a Zulu for a pal, Said the Native ‘Look ‘ere, Ain’t the Pentateuch queer?’ Which converted the Lord of Natal. (Natal Witness 1863, cited in Guy 1997, p. 219) But the words of this limerick point to an important implication underlying Colenso’s experiences, and the way in which he chose to present them: that two-way communication with the native inhabitants of Natal

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words into Zulu, first heard them as words said to be uttered by the same great and gracious Being, whom I was teaching him to trust and adore. His whole soul revolted against the notion.

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I have acquired sufficient knowledge of the language, to be able to have intimate communion with the native mind, while thus engaged with them, so as not only to avail myself freely of their criticisms, but to appreciate fully their objections and difficulties. Thus, however, it has happened that I have been brought again face to face with questions, which caused me some uneasiness in former days, but with respect to which I was then enabled to satisfy my mind sufficiently for practical purposes, and I had fondly hoped to have laid the ghosts of them at last for ever. (Colenso 1862–79: I, p. vi) Colenso’s fundamental argument was that these experiences had not destroyed his faith, but rather transformed it, by deepening his belief in the existence of a universal natural religion common to all peoples and underlying all religious systems, and driving him to a renewed and deeper engagement with Christian theology. Reactions to ‘the Colenso scandal’ in Britain and the Cape, however, dwelled instead on the notion of his ‘conversion’ by Ngidi as both disturbing and absurd: Did you see what Lord Shaftesbury said about the last, not least, danger to the English Church from the ‘Zulu Mission which has just come over from Africa for the conversion of the people of Great Britain’. (Hear, hear, a laugh) (Sarah Frances Colenso 1863, cited in Guy 1997, p. 219) These responses to Colenso’s experiences must also be read as a manifestation of profound anxiety. The story of the Bishop who was ‘converted by the heathen’, the topic of such amused and scandalized dinner party conversation in the 1860s, subverted all the accepted norms of mission and colonialism. As Jeff Guy puts it, The laughter at the story of the Zulu who converted the Bishop was not just derisive – it was also nervous. It was laughter at a disturbing reversal of the idea of coloniser and colonised which switched dominated for dominant, unlearned for learned, heathen for christian, savage for civilized, the self and the other. (Guy 1997, p. 221)

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was an integral part of the task of the missionary, and that these dialogic relations could have potentially transformative effects, with the implicit potential, in the words of the limerick, to transform not only the ‘Zulu’, but also the ‘Bishop’. As Colenso wrote in the ‘Preface’ to Volume I of The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined:

In other responses to Colenso’s reading of the Pentateuch, the disruptive conversations between Ngidi and Colenso were imagined in the context of infection or communicable disease. One particularly vitriolic example appeared in a pamphlet by Thomas Lund, Rector of Morton in Derbyshire, who had been a contemporary of Colenso’s at Cambridge. Lund, like many other critics, sought to take issue with Colenso’s Biblical criticism through a combination of theology, logic, and personal attack. It is in this latter vein that Lund, mockingly speculating on the origins of Colenso’s alleged apostasy, wrote the following: Possibly the stirrings of an accusing conscience had become intolerable – the pent-up swelling against Moses, by Zulu nurture, and in an African climate, grew and came to a head – and there was nothing left for the ease of the unhappy patient, but a copious discharge of the festering matter. (Lund 1863, pp. 3–4) Lund’s disgusting metaphor draws on contemporary assumptions about the effect of climate and living conditions upon disease, particularly in an African setting. Here Colenso’s doubt, cast as a kind of boil on his conscience, is exacerbated both by the ‘African climate’ and by ‘Zulu nurture’ – the condition worsening and ‘coming to a head’ through tooclose proximity to William Ngidi. Intercultural encounter is reimagined, in this context, as contagion and corruption, productive of little but ‘festering matter’. Lund’s farcical rendering of Colenso’s experience in Natal sought to diminish its significance by rendering it in such grossly physical terms. It also betrays graphically, however, the anxieties which were associated not only with Colenso’s arguments about biblical interpretation, but also with his insistence that it was learning Zulu, and the ensuing dialogues with William Ngidi and other Zulu-speakers, which had prompted them. Colenso was familiar with, and influenced by, proponents of German higher criticism who insisted that the Bible must be treated as a historical text and could be subjected to historical, logical, and ethical criticism. However, he portrayed these kinds of methods not in the context of European debates over Scriptural interpretation, but as a natural result of colonial missionary work, and particularly of the discursive aspects of translating Scripture into new cultural contexts. Trying to translate the Bible into Zulu had forced Colenso to reassess his own religious identity, and his own ideas about religious truth, as much as it had taught him about Zulu-speakers and ‘the Zulu mind’.

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The Reverend Jacob Ludwig Döhne, who published his Zulu-Kafir Dictionary in 1857 – 4 years before Colenso’s dictionary – saw in the study of the Zulu language the imperative not to reconsider biblical truth, but to verify it. An amateur enthusiast for German comparative philology, Döhne tried to align his local project of language-study in colonial Natal with a European comparativist project which saw the science of language – facilitated by the findings of colonial missionary linguists such as himself – as leading ‘inexorably toward the discovery of the one pristine uncorrupted language common to all humanity’, the one Edenic tongue (Newmeyer 1986, p. 21). At the same time, possessed of a German romantic conviction in the inextricable bond between language and national identity, Döhne used his study of Zulu to elaborate and propound a theory of language development which could function as a moral diagnosis of ‘the Zulu mind’. Like his fellow American Board missionary Lewis Grout, Döhne saw an inextricable bond between Zulu language, culture, and identity. However, where Grout’s work was largely characterized by an American Congregationalist confidence in his own religious and cultural superiority, Döhne’s approach to the Zulu language evinced a clearer and more overtly worried conviction in the sinful nature of the unsaved. Döhne, a German Lutheran, had been a saddler by trade before his entry into the ministry in 1835. As soon as he was ordained, he set sail for the Cape under the authority of the Berlin Missionary Society. He worked among the Rharhabe Xhosa in the eastern Cape for 12 years, until – demoralised by their lack of enthusiasm for Christianity, as well as by their ‘carnal lust’ – he moved to Natal in 1847, where he later entered the service of the American Board (Döhne 1843, see for example pp. 26, 33–4). Döhne was a prolific writer and translator, first in Xhosa and then in Zulu, while also engaged in his Dictionary project – all in all, as he confessed, it had been 20 years in the making. The long task of its production had been funded in part by the government of Natal; when the government abandoned the project, the Governor of Cape Town, Sir George Grey, a keen enthusiast for language study as a tool of colonial rule, took responsibility for its publication. The reason his dictionary had taken so long to prepare, Döhne rather defensively claimed, was that it was a proper one – ‘a proper one, I say, because no other can expect to meet the wants of those who desire to use this language for some good purpose’ (Döhne 1857, p. iii). Other white people in Natal, who considered themselves able to pronounce on the

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Reverend Jacob Ludwig Döhne’s Zulu-Kafir Dictionary

language, did so from a position of profound and worrying ignorance. Here Döhne probably had in mind not only the misuse of the Zulu language by colonists – a fairly common refrain in missionary writings of this period – but also, undoubtedly, the Zulu dictionaries recently published by the Anglican missionary James Perrin, and endorsed by Bishop Colenso (Perrin 1855a,b). Colenso, whose grammar of Zulu had been published only a year after his arrival in Natal and whose dictionary project was already underway by the time Döhne’s own dictionary was published, may also have been in the firing line. Missionary linguists were not always above lashing out at one another where their own reputations were concerned. In defining what constituted a ‘proper’ dictionary of Zulu, and what a ‘good purpose’ might be, Döhne asserted that In the study of languages in general, and of barbarian languages in particular, two objects are to be aimed at, – a philosophical and a practical. The philosophical object is the attainment of an insight into the character of a people, by means of an accurate acquaintance with the form into which its thoughts are moulded, – and which is invariably the true expression of the national spirit. [  ] The immediate practical object, as far as barbarous tribes are concerned, is that a literature should be created for the propagation of Christian truth and the extension of civilization. Christian Missionary enterprise has both of these objects in view, – but the practical end demands its direct attention more prominently than the scientific investigation: its chief aim is a written language for the purpose of truth. (Döhne 1857, p. vii) Thus Döhne interwove the traditional ‘practical’ purposes of missionary linguistics with a German romantic conviction in the ‘philosophical’ project of revealing ‘national spirit’ through the study of linguistic development and structure. In terms which echoed the ideas of Fichte, Herder, and Humboldt, he wrote that The spirit of the nation is exhibited to our minds in the living words which have conveyed its ideas for ages, as clearly as its physical appearance is presented to our eyes. Thus the national language is the only safe exponent of the national character. (Ibid., p. vii) Although in missionary linguistics, this philosophical strand was necessarily subordinate to its crucial practical purpose, namely the production

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For my part, I believe that in the divine plan of the redemption of a fallen world, one link of the chain of instrumentalities which tends to the great end, is the spread of scientific investigation of every kind; and that while the Christian Missionary always devotes the first place in his zeal and labours to the Gospel, he should, in as far as in him lies, likewise endeavour to enlarge the sphere of human knowledge by such additions as it may be peculiarly in his power to give. The interest at present taken in philological studies is very great; the enquiry which embraces all the languages of the earth is perhaps the most important of scientific investigations; and it is right that the Missionary, with his opportunities, should furnish all aid in his power in order to render this investigation as complete as possible. (Ibid., p. vii) Modern science, Döhne continued, was the instrument of revelation, having done so much to prove the veracity of the Biblical account of history; and soon it was to be hoped that comparative philology and ethnology would finally and conclusively demonstrate human monogenesis: Is it too much to indulge in the thought that the time may soon arrive, when the development of the sciences of ethnology and comparative philology shall dispel vague fancies entertained on slight foundations respecting the origin of particular nations and languages, – and that the greater knowledge may make clear what the less knowledge has covered with doubt? (Ibid., p. vii) Thus Döhne suggested that his Dictionary, as well as providing a means to interpret Zulu words, would also contribute to illuminating the divinely ordained order of the world and human history, and offer proof of linguistic monogenesis, thereby vindicating the Biblical account of human monogenesis. Towards this latter goal, he included a table of lexical correspondences between Zulu and Hebrew, Saxon, Dutch, German, English, Greek, Arabic, Swahili, Latin, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Gothic (ibid., pp. xl–xlii). He also highlighted words with meanings which he approximated to Christian concepts such as

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of ‘a written language for the purpose of truth’, Döhne was also committed to the philosophical aspect of language study, and justified it on religious grounds. Western scientific investigation, he argued – in which the study of language took a central place – was part of God’s plan, revealing slowly to a fallen humanity His design for the world:

resurrection and the transmigration of souls, which ‘have [  ] a particular historical value, bringing these nations in a nearer connexion with those of the old world’ (ibid., p. x). This concern with historical origins informed Döhne’s approach to lexicography: his was not just a dictionary, but an etymological dictionary, of Zulu. His etymology had two strata to it. First, he discussed the formation of compound forms, charting the language’s development from monosyllables to polysyllables, as well as tracing connections between the multiple meanings often accruing to single lexical items, speculating on the process by which an original meaning had been extended metaphorically.9 Second, Döhne purported to be able to identify the indivisible root forms of the Zulu language, ‘those parts of it which are primitive’, as Franz Bopp had done with Indo-European (Döhne 1857, pp. xvi–xviii; see for example Bopp 1820, pp. 19–22): The roots of this language are in the simplest sense of the word one articulation, which, according to the idiom, is made by an opening and closing (or terminating) vowel or sound, as iba, uba, izi, &c., of which the incipient is either dropped or contracted, when compounded with other articulations or roots. It follows of itself that such an articulation must be the object of a thought, having one meaning which it cannot surrender without being itself destroyed. (Döhne 1857, p. xviii) The roots, asserted Döhne, were irreducible and represented an original, fundamental one-to-one relationship between sound and meaning, ‘suggested to man by the nature of things’, through the God-given faculty of rational speech (ibid., pp. xvi–xvii, xxxii). Thus Döhne’s etymology purported to demonstrate the originary connection between God, humanity, and the world. He took his task to be not only the identification of these original, minimal units of meaning, but also the identification of the ‘thought’ of which each was expressive. In Döhne’s etymological method, it was not just morphological structure, but more importantly the semantic content or ‘core meaning’ of the roots – which, unlike the language itself, had not changed over time – which was his central concern to uncover.

‘Coarse, clumsy, and unrefined’: The problem with Zulu Döhne assumed that the tracing of original root forms would reveal the pure, Edenic origins of the language, serving to cast away the doubts of

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a sinful world. At the same time, motivated by his belief in language as revelatory of ethnos, he also argued that consideration of the ways in which these root forms had been modified would reveal the Zulu ‘national spirit’ as it had developed over time. And so, reading Zulu language and Zulu culture against one another – through the prism of German Calvinist doctrine – Döhne argued for example that On nearer examination the language bears plainly the stamp of the people who now use it. Outwardly it presents a massiveness and bulkiness of form as well as of idea, – it is coarse, clumsy, and unrefined as the barbarians themselves. (Ibid., p. viii) And so, Zulu was a language of two aspects: elevated past and degraded present. The depravity and corruption of Zulu-speakers in the present day was Döhne’s repeated refrain, and key to his theories about the language. For example, he ascribed the implosive consonants or ‘clicks’ in the language to the impatience and lack of self-control of its speakers. He dwelled on its agglutinative structure, accounting for the language’s ‘bulkiness and massiveness of form’, as being obstructive to thought. In considering its semantic capabilities, Döhne concluded that In the expression of the better feelings, it is rude and clumsy; for the savage custom of going naked has denuded the mind, and destroyed all decorum in the language. (Ibid., p. ix) Impatience and uncontrollability, massiveness and clumsiness, nakedness and lack of decorum were, according to Döhne, equally apt to describe the Zulu language and its speakers. He praised the linguistic policies of Shaka, which had worked to stem the process of degradation in the Zulu language, but in such a polyglot environment even such attempts could not win out against the prevailing processes of deterioration: It is evident that the Zulu dialect, by Chaka’s law regarding the Ukukuluma, has retained its originality with a precision and gravity of expression far beyond the other dialects, and this result has followed from that measure alone. But it is equally evident that it was an impossibility to keep it perfectly pure. The conflict of differences was too great, and divergences or amalgamation were a necessary consequence. (Ibid., p. xv)

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The centripetal linguistic policies of the Zulu elite were counterbalanced by the centrifugal forces of linguistic disunity and degradation in the region. Döhne continued by explaining that the Zulu distinguished between ‘high’ languages, or ‘Ukukuluma’, which included the language of the Zulu proper, Xhosa, and Thembu, and ‘low’ languages, or ‘Amalala’, encompassing all other Natal tribes, frontier Mfengu, Sotho, and so forth (ibid., p. xv).10 Once again political hierarchies were mapped onto language. The linguistic degradation he perceived was influenced by the pollution of the ‘high’ languages by the ‘low’. The concept of degradation was key to Döhne’s interpretation of language change. His etymological method, purporting to reveal the processes by which Zulu became imbued with the culture and morality of its current speakers, certainly did not appear to uncover the kind of pre-Christian religious understanding which Colenso claimed to exist. Döhne’s research revealed, for example, the fallacy of supposing unKulunkulu to be a name for God. On the contrary, while the word referred to ‘some great or original man of a whole nation, like Adam’, it was now most commonly used as a means by which ‘greedy mothers’ play tricks on their children ‘when they have prepared a dainty meal and wish to enjoy it alone’, sending the children away saying Go and call out to unkulunkulu, that he must give you all nice things. The hungry children do what their mothers say and are laughed at for their obedience; (but foreigners who did not sufficiently understand the people and their language, have mistaken this, and believed that these women were in the habit of teaching their children to pray to the Unkulunkulu, and concluded that there must be a good deal of religious knowledge among them.) Thus, Döhne claimed, ‘the native or savage idea expressed in the above tradition is, in strict conformity with their spirit and life, materialistic’ (ibid., p. 178). Instead of religious thought, Döhne’s etymology revealed evidence of depravity, illuminating the myriad ways in which the language was ‘coarse, clumsy, and unrefined’. Döhne highlighted the etymology of honorific titles and tribal groupings to illustrate this: The words expressive of their rank and classes in society are derived from the comparative qualities of animals (see Inkunzi – Induna); the names of their progenitors, which afterwards became national

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Regarding language as a direct reflection of its speakers’ understanding of reality, Döhne implied that he was revealing something profound, and disturbing, about Zulu conceptions of human identity and social relations through his work of etymological research. Social hierarchy and group identities, he noted with dismay, were founded upon the blurring of semantic boundaries between the animal and the human, and upon associations with warfare and violence. Inkunzi, as Döhne explained in the Dictionary, meant ‘A bull, the male of cattle’, and its signification had been extended thus: The bull of cattle is an object of great reverence among these savages. He is the representative of strength, power and value, the chief article of all property, and being scarce in former times, was only in the possession of a king or chief of a tribe, who was on that account identified with the bull, and so called. Afterwards the noblemen were also allowed to possess bulls and entitled to the name. (Ibid., p. 181) Induna, meanwhile, is glossed in the Dictionary as: 1. A male; a procreator; a sire; a ruler of a large family; a lord or master; 2. The male generation of beasts descended from the parent, the Sire’. Furthermore, Döhne claimed, the primitive root form from which induna was formed, and revelatory of its underlying signification, meant ‘a designation of the genitals of males’ (ibid., p. 67). In giving the examples of inkunzi and induna as indicative of the coarseness, clumsiness, and lack of refinement in the Zulu language, Döhne suggested that the terminology by which Zulu social space was organized was founded upon semantic associations with male sexuality, upon the associations of ethnic identity with violent conflict, and upon the blurring of the categories of animal and human. And he further implied that this was, surely, a reflection of profound degradation. How otherwise could a term for ‘lord or master’ be derived from a root form denoting male genitalia? This was, of course, a particularly significant example, since it highlighted a part of the lexicon which had importance not only for colonists – ‘lords or masters’ of their employees – but also and more

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and tribal, are frequently taken from wild animals or from massive objects, like large herds of cattle: – from violent actions, such as striking, strife, battle, &c. (Ibid., p. viii)

significantly for Christian discourse which revolved around the service of the ‘Lord’ Jesus Christ. But it also reveals the sorts of preoccupations and anxieties governing Döhne’s approach to Zulu; particularly given that he could, presumably without irony, employ the similarly multivalent English word ‘sire’ in this context, without suggesting that the word’s etymology and range of usages implied a worrying depravity on the part of English speakers.11 The central themes which emerge in the above example – Zulu violence and warfare, the blurring of boundaries between the animal and the human, an association with an apparently disturbing and unbounded sexuality – surfaced time and again in Döhne’s representation of Zulu, as he read his impressions of Zulu national identity into his interpretation of the language. This occurs strikingly, for example, as he discusses the question of ‘progress’: In speaking of the progress of the Zulu-Kafir it must always be borne in mind, that the causes by which the progress or the development of a language are influenced depend entirely on the geographical, physical, intellectual, moral, &c., position of the nation. A savage or barbarian nation, like the Kafir, which has a natural aversion against all kinds of improvement in science, arts, and civilization in general, which has little or no desire to apply its mind to the study of the material or spiritual world; which knows nothing about discoveries which interest other nations, and which hardly shows a desire for novelty, innovation, and fashion of speech; but has only spent its life in external warfare, and the greatest superstition, and in a social state which is more like that of a brute than the condition of thinking man; indulging in all kinds of the grossest sensualities, and loading its mind with the greatest vices: a nation like this has not the capability of producing peculiar effects of progress in its language. (Ibid., pp. xxxii–xxxiii) Döhne highlighted and celebrated the relationship between Zuluspeakers and their language, while manifesting through it the nature of his anxieties. His descriptions of the Zulu language cast it as a looming and threatening physical presence – ‘bulky’, ‘coarse’, ‘clumsy’, ‘massive’, possessed of an apparent nakedness and lack of decorum, and resonating with licentiousness and sexuality, the conflation of the human with the animal, and with the threat of violence. For Döhne, in all of these ways, the Zulu language stood metonymically for its speakers and the physical and moral danger which they appeared to pose. The Zulu

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language appeared as a direct emanation – even as a physical manifestation – of the true ‘national spirit’ of its speakers. Döhne’s work makes speaking the Zulu language, much less attempting Scriptural translation in it, look like a dangerous business. Döhne thus implied a serious problem in learning Zulu, but he also proposed something of a solution in his language theory. He laid out the two tasks of missionary linguistic study as, first, the creation of ‘a written language for the purpose of truth’ in order to found ‘a literature [  ] for the propagation of Christian truth and the extension of civilization’ and, second, the philosophical pursuit of ‘an insight into the character of a people, by means of an accurate acquaintance with the form into which its thoughts are moulded, – and which is invariably the true expression of the national spirit’ (ibid., p. vii). He presented the latter, in effect, as crucial to the execution of the former. The ‘philosophical’ study of Zulu both diagnosed a problem – the fact that the language was riddled with the corruption and sin of its speakers – and proposed a solution – that missionary linguists, armed with an understanding of the development of Zulu and its ‘true’ etymology, would be able to free their own use of the language from the taint of sin. This kind of application, then, was what Döhne called the ‘proper’ study of language: The troubles and pains it has cost me to analyze the thoughts to that degree to which they are defined in this work will be manifest. Many, perhaps, will look upon this as an unnecessary labour, because they are content with understanding words in one or another of their senses. But, how far shall we advance, or what kind of literature shall we produce with such a partial, and insufficient knowledge, will readily be understood. No intelligent or conscientious student can rest satisfied with such narrow views! (Ibid., p. xxx) Döhne’s methods, moreover, by applying to Zulu the methods of comparative philology, also inserted the language into a monogenetic, Biblical global history in which Zulu-speakers, for all their apparent ‘coarseness’, ‘sensualities’, and ‘vices’, could be demonstrated to be part of God’s ‘divine plan of the redemption of a fallen world’.

The missionary-scholar: Henry Callaway’s researches into comparative mythology and Zulu religion The trend for missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century to incorporate the study of Zulu language, culture, and belief reached its apotheosis

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with the Anglican Henry Callaway, whose efforts to learn the Zulu language became an ambitious project of comparative research into Zulu mythology and religion. Callaway published two major collections of transliterated Zulu oral narratives, with parallel English translations and copious notes: Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus (1866–68), and The Religious System of the Amazulu (1868–70). Although both works, published back in England, contributed to Western study of the Zulu language, they subordinated linguistic pedagogy in favour of focus upon the study of Zulu culture and ‘the Zulu mind’. Callaway’s work came to be regarded not just as ‘the definitive statement on Zulu religious beliefs and practices’, but moreover as an important contribution to the burgeoning European disciplines of comparative religion, folklore, and mythology, which aimed at developing universal theories about the development of human cultural practices and belief systems. Key European theorists such as Max Müller, John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, E. B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, and James Frazer relied heavily upon Callaway’s works, and he came to be widely acknowledged as the nineteenth century’s foremost authority on the Zulu (Chidester 1996a, p. 152). Like his contemporary Lewis Grout, Callaway described the origins of his researches in his attempts, soon after arriving in Natal, to learn the Zulu language by listening to, transliterating, and trying to emulate the utterances of native speakers (Callaway 1868, p. iv). As Grout had done, Callaway insisted that this was by far the best way to acquire the language. However, this relatively modest task – the individual missionary learning to speak Zulu for the purposes of communication and evangelism – rapidly took on, in Callaway’s mind, the status of a more generalized project of ethnographic research: What was commenced as a mere exercise-lesson was soon pursued with the further object of discovering what was the character of the mind of the people with whom we are brought into contact. (Ibid., p. ii) Transforming himself from learner to theorist, Callaway set about developing this ethnographic archive by soliciting and transcribing songs, stories, and historical narratives from which could be revealed the ‘character of the mind’ of Zulu-speakers. Religion was his central concern, and his researches focused upon his opposition to Colenso’s position on the Zulu God-name; Callaway insisted that uNkulunkulu could not be adapted to a Christian conception of the Divinity. Most of the primary

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data for Callaway’s research into Zulu religion was either provided or collected by his Zulu assistant and catechist, Mpengula Mbande. Callaway presented Mbande as the authentic mouthpiece of Zulu religion, and himself as the theorist able to process, analyse, and interpret his data. However, as David Chidester has persuasively argued, Mbande’s work actually constituted a set of theological and philosophical negotiations, which had as much to do with ‘working out his own ambivalent relationship with both the Christian mission and his African religious heritage’, as it did with a general and ‘authentic’ account of Zulu thought and belief. ‘Arguably [  ] Mbande actually produced, not an ethnographic account, but a theological critique of traditional Zulu religion’ (1996a, pp. 159–60). Chidester’s arguments suggest that while Callaway sought – and assumed he had found – a straightforward and unmediated version of Zulu religion, what he got instead was Mbande’s meditations upon his own complex and ambivalent theological position. Callaway assumed, however, that he had uncovered certain key truths about Zulu culture and religion, and the ‘native mind’. Although Callaway’s work was not directed towards linguistic pedagogy, he nevertheless insisted that the kind of understanding he sought was crucial to the work of Christian mission, which he saw as a matter of mediation between entirely different linguistic and cultural matrices. The missionary needed to Teach them the Gospel of which he is the professed minister in intelligible and proper language, free from Anglicisms or an English mode of thought in Zulu garb. And in the matter of prayer especially, let him study the Zulu language and the Zulu mind. (Callaway cited in Benham 1896, p. 152) Thus the study of language, culture, and ‘mind’ were indivisible from one another in the work of mission. It was only through profound cultural understanding that the missionary could reconfigure existing Zulu beliefs and practices, best achieved via a comparative process which would reveal to Zulu-speakers the points of convergence or continuity between Zulu religion and Christian theology: There is so broad a gulf between the heathen Kaffir and the Christian mode of thought that it requires the utmost patience and tact to gain his ear at all. The Bible to him is a fearful kind of thing. [  ] But speak to him from ‘prophets of his own’ – show him that underneath their tradition there is a wonderful substratum of truth – show that their

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own ancients knew more than they, and that it is clear that traditions orally received have lost much in transmission and had much added to them; you are then meeting them on their own ground; they hear words and thoughts to which they are accustomed made standing points from which to proceed to make known to them higher and holier truth. (Ibid., pp. 102–3) Callaway’s vision of mission bore, in many important respects, a close similarity to that of John Colenso, in emphasizing Christianity’s continuity with certain aspects of Zulu culture and belief, and the importance of dialogue as the cornerstone of evangelism. His emphasis, however, lay upon the expertise of the missionary in matters of Zulu culture – implying, in fact, that the task of mission was to reveal to Zulu people their own culture and history in new, previously unexperienced ways, as a foundation for Christian revelation. Thus his own conception of his role as missionary, as well as his reputation as a scholar in Europe, was predicated on his status as an expert in matters of ‘the native mind’. Although his knowledge had stemmed originally from native Zulu-speakers, from what he called ‘the close communication of mind with mind’ (Callaway 1868, p. ii) and specifically from the work of Mpengula Mbande, he nevertheless considered that his expertise far surpassed any of which Zulu people themselves were capable: he had ‘entered far deeper’ into Zulu language and culture ‘than the natives themselves could penetrate’ (Callaway cited in Chidester 1996a, p. 156). In the movement away from linguistic pedagogy, Callaway had also moved further towards an apparently all-encompassing mode of scholarship, by which Zulu-speakers, their culture and beliefs might be transformed ever more effectively into objects of Western scrutiny. And it was his deployment of the methods and language of comparative scholarship, alongside his position of intimate observation in day-to-day contact with Zulu-speakers, which sealed his reputation in Europe as an unrivalled expert on the Zulu.

Conclusions The missionaries working on the Zulu language in the mid-nineteenth century placed an emphasis upon culture which was entirely absent in the Methodists’ approach to Xhosa. As we have seen, the prestige associated with the ‘pure’ form of the language, that of the Zulu court, together with the very different political relationship between Zulu-speakers

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and colonial authority, encouraged missionaries to take Zulu culture seriously. For these reasons linguistic texts tended to incorporate Zuluspeakers and their culture as a presence within their own language, in contrast to the virtual absence of speakers or cultural forms in representations of Xhosa by the Wesleyans. Because missionary linguists in Natal were working within the relatively stable environs of a British colony, they were confident enough to regard Zulu language and culture as suitable objects for knowledge, regulation, and control, within the environs of the linguistic text. In their different ways the missionaries under discussion in this chapter were engaged in the production of colonial knowledge, and under the political and social circumstances of control and containment prevailing within Natal, this appeared on the surface to be a fairly straightforward undertaking. However as we have seen, the importance of Zulu-speakers to the study of the Zulu language could be troubling and disruptive. In these very different linguistic texts and writings on language there are hints that missionaries recognized their efforts were not being visited upon a passive and acquiescent colonized population. All too often, the attempt to communicate or to evangelize could be subverted by African interlocutors, or even by the language itself. This is borne out in different ways by Döhne’s anxious warnings about the polluting degradation of the Zulu language, by Grout’s interdictions regarding conversation between his daughter and her Zulu playmates, and even by Colenso’s troubling conversations with William Ngidi. Responses to the potentially difficult relationship between language and culture varied enormously, and were conditioned in large part by differences in religious doctrine. For Calvinist or Lutheran missionaries like Grout and Döhne, the language was a diagnostic gauge of the state of its speakers’ unsaved souls. Grout, enthused by his optimistic faith in the transforming power of Congregationalist Christianity and American civilization, encouraged his readers to engage with ‘native literature’, as a manifestation of Zulu identity, and thus to understand both the language and its speakers. He made radical arguments to legitimate the language, and praised its cultural products, taking an approach founded upon the belief that understanding would give the missionary the power to remould Zulu culture, beliefs, and language according to a Christian, ‘civilized’ model. However, despite the strength of his arguments regarding the value and legitimacy of Zulu, there are hints of anxiety at the possibility that dialogue might result, not in the transformation of the colonial subject according to Christian values, but in the pollution of the colonizer with the sinfulness

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of the ‘unsaved’ Zulu. Döhne, meanwhile, warned his readers of the presence of Zulu culture and identity permeating the language. The sin and degradation of its speakers were, he asserted, an integral feature of the Zulu language, but he implied that by careful etymological study, the missionary could obviate the risk of contamination of his or her utterances and writings. The Anglican Bishop Colenso, by contrast, took an approach whereby readers were encouraged to enter into dialogue with Zulu-speakers, and to pay attention and respond to their utterances, their beliefs, and their cultural practices. In essence his was a reactive and dialogic vision of mission, which would alter its shape in order to be effective in bringing Christianity to the Zulu. It appears that variations in attitudes to the role of Zulu culture and identity in the Zulu language re-inscribed Christian doctrinal differences in Natal. Missionary linguists wrote primarily for a missionary readership. However, in the case of both Xhosa and Zulu we have seen that writers, particularly under circumstances of confident colonial control, increasingly moved towards more scholarly models of representation which would also have been more likely to appeal to a metropolitan readership. Missionaries themselves paid attention to developments in comparative scholarship – reading what works they could gain access to, and corresponding with learned societies and individuals in Europe and North America. And, as colonial control over Nguni peoples was extended and consolidated, more academic structures of knowledge, etymological or comparative in focus, began to be built on top of the modes of study with which missionary linguists are more usually associated: pedagogic grammar-writing, or the production of dictionaries. Meanwhile a scholarly readership had, from the earliest stages, taken an interest in missionaries’ linguistic writings which, in the metropolitan centres, provided a source of raw data for scholars in various fields keen to extend the import of their studies beyond the bounds of Europe. The burgeoning comparative classificatory disciplines of philology and ethnology were fed by missionary work. The British ethnologists J. C. Prichard and R. G. Latham, for example, drew much of their data from missionary writings, not least from South Africa. Although manifesting far less concern with the non-Indo-European world, comparative philology also benefited; and, although some scholars denounced missionaries’ competence as accurate observers of language, their criticisms themselves are suggestive of the reliance of metropolitan scholarship upon missionary research (see for example Ellis 1873–74, p. 33). Then, mid-way through the period we have been discussing, in the mid-1850s, the new, confident, institutionalized classificatory

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disciplines being developed in Europe and America, comparative philology and ethnology, made their way to South Africa, in the guise of Wilhelm Bleek, a professional linguist often regarded as the ‘father of Bantu philology’ (Doke 1959a). In many ways ahead of his time, Bleek personified Alexander Ellis’s dictum that, in order for philology to become a professionalized science, research had to be conducted in situ on living languages: The bookman has to be converted into a natureman; the chair and library have to be forsaken for the horse and hut; literature has to become a science. (Ellis 1873–74, p. 23) Bleek was a close friend of Colenso, he corresponded with many of his missionary linguist contemporaries, notably John Whittle Appleyard, and missionaries read and cited his work as legitimating the importance and the credibility of their own researches. He formed the focal point of a community of European linguistic researchers in South Africa, from the 1850s to the 1870s. However, as we shall see in the following chapter, his approach – professional, comparative, evolutionary, secular – marked a radical departure from the methods and central preoccupations of missionary language study.

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From Languages to Language: The Comparative Philologist in South Africa

Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek is still widely acknowledged as the foremost nineteenth-century scholar of South African languages and peoples. For the two decades from his arrival in Natal in 1855 until his early death in 1875 he published extensively and for a wide variety of readerships on ‘Hottentot’ (Khoi), ‘Bushman’ (San), and ‘Kaffir’ or ‘Bantu’ languages – this latter classificatory term having apparently been coined by Bleek himself (see for example Bleek 1855–56, p. 31). His writings included papers for a number of German publications and for learned societies in Britain, more populist articles for the Cape Monthly Magazine, aimed at the growing community of relatively well-educated English-speakers in the Cape Colony and Natal, reports for the Cape and British governments, collections of mythology and oral literature, and his unfinished but nevertheless enormously influential magnum opus, A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages. Bleek’s background was very different to those of most of the missionaries working in South Africa. The eldest son of Friedrich Bleek, a leading proponent of higher criticism and Professor of Theology at the University of Berlin and subsequently of Bonn, Wilhelm had grown up in an atmosphere coloured by the influence of the leading German intellectuals of the age. Robert Thornton (1983a) emphasizes the impact of this intellectual heritage upon his thought, and in particular the combination of ascendant nationalism of the kind propounded by Johann Gottlieb Fichte which elided language, ‘race’ and nation, with the religious issues and critical and hermeneutical methodology arising from the practices of higher criticism. Bleek himself began his university career in Bonn as a theologian, but his interests shifted gradually towards classical philology and he moved to Berlin in 1848 to study Hebrew. Here he came under the tutelage of Karl Richard Lepsius, an 169

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influential philologist and an enthusiast for the significance of African language study. Lepsius had Bleek transcribe a number of missionary manuscripts he had received from southern Africa, a task which served to encourage and develop Bleek’s interest in the languages of the region. This interest gave rise to the topic of his doctorate, in which he applied the practices of comparativism to this new milieu: his dissertation offered a linguistic analysis of the gender systems of Xhosa, Herero, Tswana, and Nama and concluded with a universal typological classification based upon grammatical gender. His assertions included the claim that Nama, a Khoi language, was related to languages of North Africa – Berber, Galla, Coptic, and Ancient Egyptian (Thornton 1983a). It is thus clear that Bleek, unlike the other workers in the field of language study in South Africa in this period, possessed a thorough training in the methods of comparative philology as they had been developed in Indo-European studies. His was a scholarly rather than an evangelical interest in the region. Following his doctorate, he did more work editing African philological material, under the instruction of the zoologist K. H. Peters, but soon set out to apply and extend his knowledge through southern African fieldwork (Bleek 1965, p. 2). He joined the British government’s Niger Tshadda expedition in 1854 as the official linguist or ‘scientific commissioner’, but was quickly forced to return to Britain due to ill health. Back in London, however, he soon found alternative opportunities through two men who were to prove lifelong friends to him: Bishop Colenso, who had returned from his initial colonial fact-finding mission to raise funds, was introduced to him by their mutual friend the liberal theologian F. D. Maurice; and at this time Bleek also met the newly appointed Governor and High Commissioner of the Cape Colony, Sir George Grey. Colenso asked Bleek to travel with him to the Cape as his official linguist, with the particular intention of compiling a Zulu grammar. Thus Bleek arrived in Natal in May 1855, among the party of the new Bishop. The following year was spent travelling to Zulu settlements and in helping Colenso to write his Grammar. This was to be Bleek’s only involvement in linguistic pedagogy: his interests were philological and classificatory, his language study fitting a scientific rather than a religious paradigm. In late 1856 he left Natal for Cape Town, where he was appointed as translator to Sir George Grey and commissioned to catalogue Grey’s extensive philological and ethnological library. Grey’s patronage gave him the security, and the library provided him with the resources, to conduct research in earnest and to publish a range of

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works on South African philology. When Grey left the Colony to take up his post as Governor of New Zealand in 1862, he made provision to ensure that Bleek’s work would continue. He presented his huge collection to the South African Public Library, and made it a condition of the gift that Bleek should be kept as its permanent curator (Eberhard 1996, p. 51). As a consequence, Bleek was left with a small income in perpetuity as Librarian to the Grey Collection, and a prestigious position as Cape Town’s philologist-in-residence. Martin Hall points to the eulogistic obituaries which appeared in the Cape press on Bleek’s death, and comments that The key to Bleek’s contemporary reputation was his standing as a philologist. [  ] Philology was unchallenged intellectually throughout the nineteenth century, and was the particular domain of German scholarship. For Cape Town to have Bleek ensconced at its heart, surrounded by learned volumes in a monumental public library with classical façade, was to own an invaluable emblem of cosmopolitan status. (Hall 1996, p. 145) Bleek’s eminence in Cape society is indicated by his role as an advisor to the Cape government: in the 1870s he received governmental funding to conduct research on San languages and culture, and presented his findings to both houses of parliament (Bleek 1873a, 1875). His significance can also be gauged by his connections, and indeed he was, as Robert Thornton has made clear, at the very heart of an intellectual elite, a linking figure uniting the growing intelligentsia at the Cape with the academic communities of Europe, corresponding with such figures as Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Max Müller, Thomas Huxley, and Ernst Haeckel, among others (Thornton 1983a, p. 1). Many of these were also associates of Bleek’s close friend Bishop Colenso; however, while such connections existed for Colenso independently of his knowledge of African languages and cultures, Bleek’s, by contrast, rested precisely upon this expertise. His career and his reputation were built upon his standing as a professional Africanist. In 1869 he was granted a pension on the civil list in recognition of his pioneering philological studies, and upon his death, a petition signed by the leading European scientific figures of the day called for a successor to be appointed to carry on his work, to which the Cape assembly duly agreed. Thus it is abundantly clear that Bleek was, above all, the institutionally sanctioned voice of African philology. During his lifetime, and for long afterwards, he was

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‘The discovery of the process of human development’: Linguistic and cultural evolution in Bleek’s ‘universal philology’ In a paper presented to the Philological Society near the end of his life, Bleek recounted the circumstances under which he had discovered his calling to African philology. Happening upon the Reverend Moffat’s translation of the New Testament into Tswana, he recalled, The very curious structure of this language soon attracted me so greatly, that for several months the book became my constant companion; and perceiving, before long, that an insight into the structure of the Setshuana [Tswana] and its kindred languages would throw a bright light upon some of the most important problems of Comparative Grammar, I thenceforward devoted myself wholly to South African philological researches. (Bleek 1873–74, p. 200) Bleek’s attraction to African philology lay in the contribution it would make to what he regarded as the central ‘problems of Comparative Grammar’ – in other words, to questions of linguistic origins, and of language structure and typology. It was this conviction that led him to dedicate his life to its study. While other philologists believed that Indo-European researches could afford all necessary knowledge, Bleek rapidly became convinced that South Africa presented a more fertile field of study. The specific form which Bleek considered this contribution might take was indicated in another early treatise, On the Origin of Language, published in English translation to widespread acclaim in Europe and North America in 1869, but originally written before Bleek’s initial departure for Africa, to compete for the 1853 Volney prize (Bleek 1869b, p. ix). In this speculative piece, containing little linguistic data, Bleek presented a manifesto-like exposition of his system of ‘universal philology’, a rationale for the study of language that was at the same time a specific justification of his African researches. The proper object of language study, Bleek contended, was the illumination of human

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regarded as the leading authority on Bantu and Khoi-San languages and cultures, possessed of a deep and scholarly understanding of the ‘native mind’. He was, and remains, the most influential African philologist of the nineteenth century.

From Languages to Language 173

Philology must [  ] become more and more conscious of its great aim – the discovery of the process of human development, of the position which we hold in it, and the manner in which our efforts can be made to contribute to its advancement. (Bleek 1869b, p. 38) Bleek’s project of study accepted implicitly the notion of development as in some sense purposive: ‘the direction of the world’s development seems to have for its aim the production of a being more and more capable of volition, because continually advancing in power and self-consciousness’. However, the methods of language study must, he asserted, be inductive and positivist: It appears impossible for us, from the nature of our understanding, to grasp anything beyond the laws according to which the elements involuntarily act upon each other, we can speak no longer of the purpose, but only the result of the process of the world’s evolution; we must seek to recognize in it, not a plan, but a course of development. (Ibid., pp. 33–4) The teleological vision of human history and human development proposed by Bleek was one in which the hand of the divine could be traced, but which revealed his intellectual heritage in seeking and offering answers without reference to an explicitly Biblical paradigm. Much German religious thought had by the mid-nineteenth century been highly coloured by the developments of critical Old Testament scholarship, of which Bleek’s father Friedrich was a leading exponent (see Rogerson 1984, pp. 130–1). German scholars had conducted detailed analyses of Scripture and Scriptural authorship, in the process proposing a radical reconstruction of biblical authority in which the Old Testament version of history was thrown open to question. For the higher critics, the Hebrew Bible was as much to do with grappling with the relationship between the divine and the human, as it was to do with historical veracity. Thus the Old Testament could no longer be regarded as the infallible ur-text of human history. The sciences – geology, biology, philology, ethnology – would have to provide an alternative narrative of human development.

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development – to trace, in other words, the workings of a process which had taken place over time through examination of available evidence in the present:

The fit between Bleek’s explication of language study and the work of some of the key scientific thinkers of the period is illustrated by the warm reception with which On the Origin of Language was greeted by, for example, Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley (Thornton 1983a, p. 4; Bank 2000, p. 167). In his ‘Preface’, written in 1867 for the work’s publication in English, Bleek tied his arguments firmly to developments in evolutionary theory – although the piece had been written before On the Origin of Species, and was pre- or non-Darwinian in its conception of evolution, Bleek was clearly cognizant of the relevance of his arguments to the Western scientific community of the 1860s: The rise of humanity is so recent an act in the history of the development of mundane life, and the preparatory stages which preceded the appearance of the human race are so well known to us, that it can hardly be regarded as anything extraordinary if we endeavour to form to ourselves some representation of the process which brought us to that which distinguishes us from the animal world and threw us into a higher path. Particularly at present, when the tendency of all the more recent investigations goes so much to strengthen the idea of progressive development in the production of the animal world, this attempt seems merely a legitimate offspring of the time. (Bleek 1869b, p. ix) Bleek proceeded to align himself with that camp of materialist evolutionists, vehemently opposed by figures like Max Müller, who regarded human language as a development in degree but not necessarily in kind from animal communication: As there is only a step from printing with blocks to printing with types, so in those means of expression which the animals use to communicate their feelings we find the elements out of which, under favourable circumstances (which rendered the division of speech into articulate elements possible), it was possible for human language to arise. This view, that the insight which is possible for humanity had its origin in the unintelligence of the lower animals, is to me not at all a degrading one, but seems in the highest degree elevating and hopeinspiring. For the advance which we have already made, and the comparison of what we have attained with what we have left behind, cannot but inspire us with the deepest hopefulness in regard to the attainments which our race may yet possibly make. (Ibid., pp. xi–xii)

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Bleek’s ‘universal philology’, therefore, took as its ultimate goal that of the burgeoning human sciences, ‘the discovery of the process of human development’ via inductive processes of study. He went on to elaborate further: ‘human development’ was to be understood as evolutionary, following a linear progressive path onto which different existing language groups might be mapped, illustrative of various developmental phases: Only when every peculiarly developed member of humanity is considered worthy of attention, and investigation turns with as much zeal to the conditions of those peoples which have stopt [sic] short at the lowest phases of development, as to those of the most cultured nations – which it can properly understand and comprehend only by a comparison with those less developed ones – only then may we speak of a universal philology in the true sense of the term, and place it on an equal footing alongside natural research. (Ibid., p. 39) Bleek presented a model of language, therefore – which was endlessly reiterated as a frame for his subsequent researches – in which a hierarchical arrangement of contemporaneous human groups was mapped directly onto a sequential process of evolutionary development. Thus he argued for a model of philology which would take all forms of language as legitimate objects of study, as against the overwhelming dominance of Indo-European within contemporary Continental scholarship, towards the construction of what he termed a ‘universal philology’. His project marked a conscious break with the emphases of orthodox comparative philology, moving away from the general preoccupation with classical, written languages, towards a more overarching and universalist philology of the kind advocated by Humboldt. However, this was not to say that all languages had an equal or comparable role to play. On the contrary, there were the languages of ‘the most cultured nations’ on the one hand, and the languages of those who had ‘stopt short at the lowest phases of development’ on the other. The latter were significant because they were taken to be representative of earlier stages of linguistic evolution and, as such, crucial to the understanding of this developmental process, the culmination of which was to be found in ‘the most cultured nations’. Bleek presented a hierarchical evolutionary model which implied a direct correspondence between linguistic features and perceived cultural development, combining these into one ascending order. The basis for this was by implication monogenetic: all languages were taken to exhibit

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Universal philology does not confine its efforts simply to pursuing the development and growth of each particular race, and to connecting together such results as may be obtained touching the progress of the method of human development universally. No, its task is one which goes much deeper. It must endeavor earnestly to obtain a picture of the whole course of human development; must examine how the conditions of the individual nations, investigation of which is the task of the special branches of philological study, arose out of a former undistinguished existence, of which no monuments or written records remain to us, and attained their present distinct and variform character. A solution of this problem is of course possible only when the conditions of different nations have been shown to have arisen out of one and the same original condition. (Ibid., pp. 39–40) On the Origin of Language provided an overarching framework and exposition of Bleek’s attitudes to language development and the purposes of philological study. It was a work in which he had abiding interest and pride: well over a decade after writing it, he and his cousin Ernst Haeckel went to considerable lengths to ensure it was published in English translation, and both men took the opportunity to write prefaces situating the essay in a contemporary scientific context. Although Bleek’s ostensible subject in the essay was a defence of ‘universal philology’, it is clear that by the time he wrote On the Origin of Language, he had already become convinced that the solution to the central questions which fascinated him were to be found in South Africa. Bleek was sure that the people of the region and their languages represented some of the very earliest stages of human development – the already-existing linguistic research produced by missionaries told him that this was so, and gave him a basis from which to work. And at the same time, as British control extended itself over South Africa, it seemed increasingly likely that he would be able to find the resources and the stability there to conduct his researches. Thus because of his evolutionary theories, and also because of the networks of European power and knowledge already established there, this region of the world better than anywhere else could serve him as a philological laboratory and as a window into prehistory. Bleek arrived in South Africa determined to build on the work conducted by missionary linguists, but his evolutionist agenda differed

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different stages of one and the same set of processes. Thus the overall aim of ‘universal philology’ was to trace the manner by which variety – and inequality – had emerged out of identity:

radically from their evangelical assumptions. His thesis was that the southernmost portion of Africa contained three distinct groups of languages – ‘Hottentot’, ‘Bushman’, and ‘Bantu’ – each of which represented a ‘primitive form’, one of the earliest stages in linguistic development (see for example Bleek 1862, p. viii). His philology rested upon the belief that the languages and cultural forms of the region existed in their current state not due to a process of decay from a purer and more elevated original, as the missionaries supposed, but through atrophy at an early stage on a developmental continuum.1 The time frame in which Bleek conducted his theorizing was divorced from that of Biblical history: he owed no debt to the notion of pure Adamic speech. Instead, he could even go so far as to countenance the notion that human communication had developed from the cries of apes (Bleek 1869b, p. 52). Thus Bleek’s work, revolving around the mapping of an evolutionary model of linguistic and cultural change and development onto South Africa, diverged radically from the approaches and assumptions of his missionary contemporaries, and his aims in studying language were also very different. His emphasis was classificatory and academic, bound up with the scientific discourses of philology and ethnology rather than the evangelical demands around which missionary studies to a greater or lesser extent revolved. He did not aim, as missionary grammarians did, to produce didactic texts for language-learning. Moreover, the validity of languages as objects of study was in no way founded upon their capacity to provide Christian converts. This meant that privileged status need no longer be accorded to the widely spoken Bantu languages. As we have seen, missionary linguists often considered the examination of languages likely to become extinct, for the satisfaction of mere philological curiosity, as a waste of time and resources. Bleek the comparative scholar, by contrast, considered this to be precisely the most powerful possible argument for their study. Calling for resources to be devoted to San languages, for example, he exclaimed, What we do know of [the ‘Bushman’ language] is sufficient to render the study of this language highly interesting. Would that, before the few remnants of this widespread race become quite extinct, some one were found to study their language thoroughly, and through it their mental and social condition! (Bleek 1869a, p. 284) In the final 5 years of his life, Bleek became the exact ‘some one’ with the opportunity to conduct this study of San language and culture. From 1870 a shifting group of San people, mostly convicts from the Break-

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water prison in Cape Town, were sent to live at the Bleek family home in Mowbray on the authority of the Cape government for the purposes of philological and ethnological research. In this instance language study was, for Bleek, an act of scientific preservation. His San researches, compiled with his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd – a huge and unparalleled archive of San language, mythology, folklore, literature, and art – represented a concerted attempt to capture the ‘mental and social condition’ of the San in the face of the impending extinction of their language and culture. In Bleek’s view this was an incredibly important scientific project: South Africa held a unique position as the home of three distinct ‘primitive’ nations, and it was imperative that these human resources should not be allowed to disappear before adequate research had been conducted. As he wrote to Charles Brownlee, the Secretary for Native Affairs, near the end of his life, There is, perhaps, no other country which like this Colony, with its three native races (Kaffirs and their kindred, – Hottentots, – and Bushmen), still contains at the present day such divergent, and at the same time, such primitive types of Aboriginal nations, languages, and forms of mind. On this account it is, scientifically speaking, of exceeding importance not to allow the mental life of the Aborigines in its uninfluenced primitiveness to become quite effaced, without making an effort to preserve an image of it, fixed in the truest manner in their own words. (Bleek 1875, p. 2) Bleek was concerned to record the ideas of African people ‘in their own words’, but it was the supposed primitivity of the speech forms of the region which constituted their appeal: he wanted to use them to reconstruct the very earliest phases in the evolution of human language and thought. Language study was to be conducted, not with a view to cultural change, nor even primarily to communication, but for reasons of scientific interest. Languages, and the ‘mental and social condition’ of their speakers (to be revealed through language) were the proper objects of philological study. Bleek’s purpose was to try to gather information before processes of change took place, brought about by the development of colonialism, and destroyed the ‘uninfluenced primitiveness’ of South Africa’s languages and their speakers. For example, in setting about recording the stories and religious ideas of Zulu-speakers, Bleek’s interest lay, not in finding out how far missionaries had effected change on the Zulu, but in tracing the practices of the ‘Zulu and Kafir’ as distinct from – and as far as possible uninfluenced by – the new beliefs brought by missionaries (Bleek 1855–56, p. 30).

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From Languages to Language 179

In his Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, Bleek opened with the claim that there were two sets of questions which South African philology could answer. The first pertained specifically to ‘the history of South Africa’ itself, which, As far as it can be learnt from written records, does not extend beyond a few centuries back, and refers only to some small portions of the coast line of this continent. But there is another kind of historical research accessible to us, which embraces thousands of years of the bygone times of our race. From the facts brought to light by Comparative Philology and Ethnology, a knowledge can be gained – superior in its certainty to that of the historical record – of the descent and mixture of the different nations inhabiting South Africa, their consanguinity with and influence upon each other, their gradual breaking up into several tribes, or the confluence of different tribes into one powerful nation. [  ] Small in comparison with this grand history of South Africa, accessible to us by means of Comparative Philology and Ethnology, are the facts revealed by the traditions of the different tribes and nations. (Bleek 1862, p. vii) In the absence of written records, and in light of the insufficiency of oral histories, comparative philology together with ethnology could provide for the reconstruction of a historical narrative. An understanding of the past movements, divisions, and combinations of populations – so essential for ‘making sense’ of the ostensible polyglot confusion of southern Africa – could thus be traced through modern, Western scientific means. This was all the more important without the Biblical paradigm to fall back on: language and ethnology alone would have to provide the key to history and genealogy. But South African philology held a universal significance extending far beyond local historical reconstruction, however important a project this might be. Bleek went on to make the grand assertion that his field of research was likely to afford solutions to the central questions of philological inquiry, rivalling or even surpassing the insights afforded by Indo-European studies at the beginning of the century: The importance of the South African languages (and particularly of the Kafir and Hottentot) for Comparative Philology, or the so-called ‘Science of Language’, cannot well be overvalued. Nay, it is perhaps

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Typological classification, historical reconstruction, and the study of ‘primitive forms’

not too much to say that similar results may at present be expected from a deeper study of such primitive forms of language as the Kafir and Hottentot exhibit, as followed at the beginning of this century the discovery of Sanscrit and the comparative researches of Oriental scholars. The origin of the grammatical forms of gender and number, the etymology of pronouns, and many other questions of the highest interest to the philologist find their true solution in South Africa. (Ibid., pp. viii–ix) This passage represents a distillation of some of Bleek’s most central arguments. He was convinced that close examination of the languages of South Africa could resolve many of the most important questions relating to the early development of human language, particularly ‘the origin of the grammatical forms of gender and number’, and ‘the etymology of pronouns’, key issues which threaded through all his researches. Bleek’s philology pivoted upon a typological system of classification based on grammatical gender, within which he proposed two distinct classes of languages, deemed to have divided from one another at the stage of pronoun formation – a process imbued by Bleek with quasimystical significance. In ‘prefix-pronominal’ languages, ‘the pronouns are originally borrowed from the derivative prefixes of the nouns’. In ‘sexdenoting’ or ‘suffix-pronominal’ languages, ‘the pronouns are originally borrowed from the derivative suffixes to the noun’ (ibid., p. 2). Sex-denoting languages classified nouns with reference to gender; prefix-pronominal languages did not. And as Bleek claimed, in the above quote and elsewhere, the most original or ‘primitive’ forms of these two language groups were Khoi on the one hand, and Xhosa and Zulu on the other. The Cape’s eastern frontier zone, which as we have seen had been the location of comparative linguistic description since Sparrman’s first rudimentary wordlists, now represented the bifurcation not only between ‘Hottentot’ and ‘Kafir’ but between two huge, typologically distinct language families: This knowledge that the great mass of African languages is reducible to two families is mainly due to comparative researches which had taken as their basis the Hottentot and Kafir languages, as exhibiting in general the most primitive state of the two races, in speech, customs, &c. (Ibid., p. viii) In fact, these ‘families’ encompassed not only ‘the great mass of African languages’, but made their way as far as Europe. Khoi belonged to the

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vast ’sex-denoting’ class of languages which encode grammatical gender; in Bleek’s formulation, typological and genealogical classification were conflated, so that this ‘class’ was synonymous with ‘family’ and included Indo-European languages: ‘all those Sexdenoting languages [  ] known to us in Africa, Asia, and Europe, are members of one large family, of which the primitive type has, in most respects, been best preserved to us in the Hottentot language’ (Bleek 1864, p. xviii). Since Khoi was the most ‘primitive’ form of this vast ‘sex-denoting’ group, its analysis offered a window into the early stages of European languages and modes of thought. Bantu languages, and specifically Xhosa and Zulu, by contrast, were characterized as the most ‘primitive’ members of the categorically distinct ‘prefix-pronominal’ class. Of these two classes, the former, encompassing as it did all the languages of Europe, was considered by Bleek to be absolutely superior to the latter – neatly reversing the assumptions of the missionaries working in South Africa at the same time. In this conviction that languages with grammatical gender were categorically superior to those without, Bleek showed the clear influence of Humboldt, who had expressed similar ideas, and also of his mentor C. R. Lepsius. Lepsius, moreover, provided support for Bleek’s views by drawing particular attention to the position of ‘even the widely distant languages of the miserably reduced Hottentots and Bushmen’ within the ‘Gender-languages’ (Lepsius 1855, pp. 89–90). For Bleek, this formulation of the significance of gender was absolutely pivotal. Much of his theorizing revolved around the supposed implications of the difference between ‘sex-denoting’ and ‘prefix-pronominal’ languages, but the essential argument he rehearsed endlessly was this: there was a causal link between sex-denoting’ structure and a tendency to ‘personification’, a characteristic which, according to Bleek, had profound implications for the development of thought and language. Here he agreed with Max Müller’s contention that mythology was a ‘disease of language’ generated by confusion over grammatical gender (Müller 1861–64, p. 12):2 When, however, the sex-denoting idea had once attached itself in some way to the classes (or genders) of nouns, its shadow would also fall upon those other nouns in which no distinction of sex is naturally discoverable, but which were contained in the same classes together with the nouns in which the class (or gender) indicated the sex. In analogy with the latter, it was natural that the mind should begin to imagine that inanimate nature also was possessed of those instincts

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which exert so powerful an influence over the life of the more highly organised beings, and which especially shape the relations of human beings to each other. Thus the sex-denoting character of the classes of the nouns became the most powerful agent for the personification of all impersonal objects; and to the nations speaking such sex-denoting languages, the whole world would be gradually filled with beings which assumed to their minds some mysterious human-like relations towards each other. (Bleek 1871–72a, p. lxxviii) The impact of this process of ‘personification’ on the imaginative capabilities of the speakers of these ‘sex-denoting’ languages had been profound, and they had left their more prosaic ‘prefix-pronominal’ cousins far behind: The nations speaking Sex-denoting languages are distinguished by a higher poetical conception, by which human agency is transferred to other beings, and even to inanimate things, in consequence of which their personification takes place, forming the origin of almost all mythological legends. This faculty is not developed in the Kafir mind, because not suggested by the forms of their language, in which the nouns of persons are not (as in the Sex-denoting languages) thrown together with those of inanimate beings into the same classes or genders, but are in separate classes, without any grammatical distinction of sex. (Bleek 1862, pp. ix–x) This process lay at the root of the intellectual and cultural superiority which Bleek claimed for those nations, notably those of Europe, which spoke ‘sex-denoting’ languages: Thus poetry, theology, philosophy, and all branches of science have been, if not called into existence, at least very strongly stimulated by this structural peculiarity of the language. [  ] All nations who have made themselves in any way conspicuous in the exercise of these higher faculties of humanity either speak, or used to speak, SEX-DENOTING languages. (Bleek 1871–72a, p. lxxviii) So much for the ‘sex-denoting’ language speakers whose scientific, poetic, and philosophical accomplishments had so enriched the world. But since thought was so utterly dependent upon language, and since their language forms did not provide for the imaginative leaps

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Is it, then, a mere accident that nearly all the nations which have made any progress in scientific acquirement speak sexual languages? [  ] On the other hand, among the mass of nations speaking prefixpronominal languages, [  ] there is not one that has added any noteworthy contribution to scientific knowledge: and not a single individual who could be called great as thinker, inventor, or poet has risen among them. This fact is, doubtless, the result of an organic defect, the ground of which lies in the lack of any power of seizing poetically the constitution of things. The grammatical form of their languages does not allow their imagination that higher flight which the form of the sexual languages irresistibly imparts to the movement of the thought of those that speak them. This enables us to see why the mode of speech, and hence also the mode of thought, prevalent among peoples who speak prefixpronominal languages is strikingly practical and prosaic. Of poetry, as well as of science, mythology, and philosophy, there is hardly even a trace among them. (Bleek 1869b, pp. xxii–xxiii) It was a linguistic phenomenon, the development of grammatical gender, which had given speakers of ‘sex-denoting’ languages the creative and imaginative power to formulate poetry, science, mythology, and philosophy. The ‘organic defect’ of ‘prefix-pronominal’ languages, meanwhile, condemned their speakers to a limited and prosaic range of ideas and to cultural non-productivity. Thus for Bleek, language and thought were inextricably and indivisibly linked: We know the condition of a thing by its manifestations. The manifestations of thought are various; but no one of them is of more importance of language. For it is through language and with language that man as a thinking being has developed himself. (Ibid., p. 43) Language provided the framework in which it was possible for human beings to think; therefore the study of language was at the same time an examination of the very thought, belief, and identity of human speakers:

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experienced by the ‘sex-denoting’ group, it was to be expected that the fate of the speakers of ‘prefix-pronominal’ languages such as Bantu would be a quite different matter:

The forms of a language may be said to constitute in some degree the skeleton frame of the human mind whose thoughts they express. [  ] The organic features of the languages, as they will be laid down in the following parts of this book, are in one respect especially attractive, since they afford the clue to the original mental tendencies of the two races, of which the Kafir and the Hottentot are the most primitive representatives. For any one who has studied the subject, the dependence to a great extent of a nation’s mode of thought on the forms of their language is a well-known fact. (Bleek 1862, p. ix) A number of ‘mental tendencies’ could, according to Bleek, be read off and accounted for by the different structures of the ‘sex-denoting’ and ‘prefix-pronominal’ languages. The ‘poetic’ thought of ‘sex-denoting’ language speakers was accompanied, for example, by a tendency towards monogamy, and towards sidereal and ultimately monotheistic worship. The eminently ‘prosaic’, ‘prefix-pronominal’ speakers by contrast were polygamous, and ‘addicted to ancestor worship’ (see for example Bleek 1871, pp. 434–5): The primary cause of the ancestor worship of the one race (Kafirs, Negroes, and Polynesians) and of the sidereal worship (or of those forms of religion which have sprung from the veneration of heavenly bodies) of the other (Hottentots, North African, Semitic and Aryan nations) is supplied by the very forms of their language. (Bleek 1862, p. ix) Thus Bleek regarded the distinction between Khoi and Xhosa and its Bantu cognates as absolute and categorial, just as did contemporary missionary commentators. For him, however, it was Khoi, not Xhosa or Zulu, which represented the superior form. Although Bleek’s linguistic typology was based upon a conception of evolutionary development, it is important to recognize that it was nevertheless essentially static in conception. Bantu-speakers, who had diverged from their ‘sex-denoting’ relatives at the stage of pronoun formation, could not hope to achieve the imaginative flights which grammatical gender might have afforded them. They were locked in the past. Meanwhile, although Khoi languages displayed some of the characteristics of their more developed ‘relatives’ in Europe, this in no way implied that they might one day reach their stage of evolutionary development. Khoi-speakers represented

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Europe’s past, but Europe did not represent Khoi’s future: ‘the progress of a language like that of the Hottentots to the stage of development reached by its no [sic] very distant Indo-Germanic relatives is now impossible’ (Bleek 1869b, p. 46). Thus Bleek’s evolutionary paradigm founded itself upon a permanent and static hierarchy. The speech forms of South Africa had atrophied at an early stage in their development – making them, of course, ideal objects of philological study.

Language, and ‘race’, in South Africa Of central importance to all Bleek’s philological studies was the drive to find answers to what he perceived to be the central questions of language formation and development, and we have seen that this drive was predicated upon a hierarchical evolutionary paradigm within which the languages and peoples of South Africa were to be taken as the extreme limits of human ‘primitivity’. His solutions to these questions, within the South African context, also provided the foundation for an exhaustive categorization of the languages and peoples of the region, based upon his system of typological linguistic classification. Attempts to classify the indigenous peoples of South Africa had already been conducted by missionary linguists keen to trace genealogical and historical relations between language groups, but Bleek brought to the region the attitudes and concerns of a dedicated classificatory theorist. His interest in such questions lay not so much in the ways in which their solution might contribute to the study of one particular language or group of languages, but in the possibility of thereby constructing overarching philological theories about language, and an exhaustive taxonomic classification of the peoples of the region. In this latter task Bleek demonstrated an interest in the techniques of other disciplines, particularly those associated with race science, being drawn towards methods by which linguistic categorizations might be aligned with or verified by other forms of taxonomy. For example, as Andrew Bank has noted, he took an interest in the new methods of visual recording being developed in anthropology. In 1871 Bleek sent a report to the British government, together with a series of anthropometric photographs produced in response to Thomas Huxley’s call for ‘a systematic series of photographs of the various races of men within the British Empire’, to be ‘measurable and comparable with one another and that give precise information respecting the proportions and conformation of the body’ (Huxley cited in Bank 2000, p. 175). Bleek accompanied the photographs with an

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186 Grammars of Colonialism

In this set of photographs there are [  ] represented the three distinct races of men (and families of language) extant in South Africa; viz, the Bântu (in the Kafir and the Damara), the Hottentot, and the Bushman. It is to be regretted that no Betshuâna (Basuto, Barolong, Mahaua, &c.) were within our reach, as, in that case, the three nations of the Bântu race which live nearest to the Cape Colony would have been represented. (Bleek 1871, p. 434) Bleek proceeded with the following précis of the ‘three native races of South Africa’: The Bântu (Kafirs, Betshuâna, Damara, and all other Negroes dwelling to the South of the Equator) are agricultural and pastoral polygamists, mostly living under hereditary chiefs, addicted to ancestor worship, speaking euphonious polysyllabic Prefix-pronominal languages, eminently prosaic in their ideas and literature, and possessing a decimal system of counting which is however very clumsy in its application. The Hottentots or Khoi khoi (Namaqua, Koranna, as well as many other tribes now extinct) are a pastoral nation, occasionally polygamous, ruled by hereditary chiefs, worshipping in former days the moon, speaking a clicking monosyllabic Sex-denoting language, poetical in their ideas, with a traditional literature full of myths and fables, and with a decimal system of counting which is of easier application than the Bântu one. The Bushmen are a hunting race, strictly monogamous, without chiefs, worshipping moon, sun, and stars, speaking a most harsh clicking and guttural monosyllabic language (which is not now but may possibly once have been Sex-denoting), poetical in their ideas, with an extensive mythological traditionary literature, and with a binal system of counting, which has however no names for numbers beyond the third. (Ibid., pp. 434–5)3 Bleek’s ongoing interest in biological ‘racial’ classification, demonstrated starkly in this anthropometric photography project, led him to characterize Bantu-speakers as the ‘Negroes’ of South Africa. Reviewing the first major study of physical anthropology in the region, by the German scientific traveller Gustav Fritsch, for the Cape Monthly Magazine, Bleek wrote,

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explanation of the origins of the men pictured, in which linguistic and ‘racial’ classification were conflated:

We especially assent to the author’s opinion that there is no essential difference between those natives [Bantu speakers in southern Africa] and the general Negro (or, as he prefers to call it, Nigritian) type. Many modern anthropologists have here been led into the error of distinguishing the Bantu nations from the so-called Negroes. They arrive thereby at the to us (who dwell at the uttermost ends of Africa) absurd notion of excluding the Negro entirely from South Africa. (Bleek cited in Bank 2000, pp. 173–4) Although far removed from the metropolitan centres of Europe and America, Bleek was informed of the developments of ‘race science’ through his many correspondents, notably figures like Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, and his cousin Ernst Haeckel, an enthusiast for the concept of biological ‘race’ and a notorious polygenist. Certainly he would have been aware of the ideological significance of classifying Bantu-speakers as ‘Negroes’. Although so much of his work was based upon the specificity of different linguistic and cultural groups within South Africa, nevertheless he took recourse to one of the most overarching, and stigmatized, classifications available within ‘racial’ discourse in this period. Douglas Lorimer’s classic study of attitudes to ‘the Negro’ in Victorian Britain bears this out: the mid-century saw a hardening of views towards biological ‘race’ and particularly towards ‘Negroes’. ‘The Victorians looked upon the Negro as the photographic negative of the Anglo-Saxon, and they seemed to get a clearer perception of their own supposed racial uniqueness from the inverted image of the black man’ (Lorimer 1978, p. 11). At the extreme end of the spectrum, for example, polygenetic theories regarding the origins, biology, and inferior mental capacity of ‘the Negro’ formed the centrepiece of the work presented to the Anthropological Society of London, founded in 1863 by the notorious ‘negrophobe’ James Hunt. Hunt himself argued that the Negro should be classified as a separate species of man (Hunt 1863c, 1863–64). Bleek’s work was a clear corrective to such extreme racialist views; but even more moderate thinkers on ‘race’, however, like Bleek’s friend and correspondent Huxley, held firm views on the categorical inferiority of ‘the Negro’ to the white man (Lorimer 1978, pp. 140–1). Thus Bleek loaded a significant ideological freight onto the term ‘Bantu’ by making it synonymous with ‘Negro’. A moniker originally coined to denote a group of languages, came to encapsulate a ‘racial’ as well as a linguistic classification: these ‘prefix-pronominal’ languagespeakers were also ‘the black nations of South Africa’ (see for example

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Bleek 1857, p. 293; 1862, p. xi). In a paper from the early 1870s on the languages of Australia and Africa for the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Bleek made an attempt to systematically account for this connection, mapping climatological theories of biological ‘race’ onto the ‘sex-denoting’/‘prefix-pronominal’ binarism: We may [  ] well assume it as a fact, that the tropical regions [  ] are mainly occupied by languages of the PREFIX-PRONOMINAL class, whilst the SUFFIX-PRONOMINAL [i.e. ‘sex-denoting’] languages are found rather on the outskirts of the tropics, and in the more temperate and cold latitudes. (Bleek 1871–72b, p. 100) Tropical, ‘prefix-pronominal’ speakers were generally ‘black’ or ‘Negro’, while the non-tropical, ‘suffix-pronominal’ groups were characterized as ‘yellow races’. Bleek conceded that his rule was not absolute, but he treated other permutations as deviations, referring for example to ‘a class of languages which is generally restricted to nations of true Negro descent’ (ibid., p. 101). Writing with authority on language, on cultural development, on the intellectual faculties, and on biological ‘race’, Bleek created a typology which was all-encompassing. What had begun as a project to study the languages of South Africa had resulted in a systematic and inflexible schema classifying the ‘native races’ of the region. The implications of Bleek’s philological approach and his linguistic, ethnological, and ‘racial’ classifications for colonial relations and the maintenance of confident British power in South Africa, although never stated explicitly, were nevertheless profound. By the 1850s and afterwards, when Bleek conducted his researches, Bantu-speakers were by far the most numerous of Britain’s African subjects in southern Africa. Meanwhile the Khoikhoi were largely assimilated into the colonial order; and the San, as Bleek repeatedly observed, were in sharp decline. Bleek’s philology, giving a privileged place to ‘dying’ languages and cultures, focused on Khoi and San in a way which had never before been done. At the same time, however, he grouped Bantu-speakers together as culturally unproductive and stagnant, set in their prosaic mode of thought by their ‘prefix-pronominal’ language structure, fixed within a static racial classificatory framework. His schema provided a comprehensive and immobile colonial typology. It also privileged the languages and cultures of those colonial subjects who, perceived as either safely contained and assimilated or on the verge of extinction, posed little apparent threat

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to the colonial order, over those which still existed in vibrant diversity despite the ravages of colonialism. Bleek’s approach to language study, in its philological and classificatory focus, was seemingly removed from the demands of communication. His work was not pedagogic in the sense in which missionaries’ texts were: the reader was invited to learn about language rather than to learn a particular language. Still further distance was put between the reader and the object of study by the evolutionary framework around which Bleek’s approach was built. The African interlocutors represented within his texts were not only contained within a classificatory and scientific framework, but also removed in time both from Bleek himself and from the readers of his work. However, these interlocutors were nevertheless deeply involved in his project, albeit mediated through layers of temporal distance, and it is this presence which has been registered in recent laudatory approaches to Bleek’s career.

Communication versus classification: Recent readings of Bleek As we have seen, Bleek’s work as a whole established a philological and ethnological paradigm in which ‘Hottentots’, ‘Bushmen’, and ‘Bantus’ could be explained and classified. Some recent scholars however, enthusiastically reviving elements of his work, have cast him not as a classificatory scientist, but as an early ally of southern Africa’s indigenous people in the face of European domination. Such approaches tend to focus on Bleek’s San researches, conducted in collaboration with his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, arguing – rightly – that this was the first notable attempt to understand and record San languages, cultures, and beliefs.4 Pippa Skotnes, for example, writes of Bleek’s San researches that The rarer moments of mutual respect and a common humanity [are] witnessed in the life work of, for example, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, which resulted in the photographs of /Xam and !Kung [San] individuals, and an archive which is the closest thing we have to a ‘Bushman voice’ from the nineteenth century. (Skotnes 1996b, p. 18) Skotnes’s is a romanticized view of Bleek’s career, insofar as it seeks to recast his San researches outside the overarching evolutionary classificatory theories he spent 20 years constructing. What her approach and those of others like her demonstrate, however, is that even Bleek’s apparently systematic knowledge production was riven enough with

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contradictions for elements of his work to be made over and reappropriated as valuable cultural and linguistic resources. Bleek’s deep and prolonged contact with the indigenous peoples of South Africa was predicated upon an assumption of unbridgeable temporal distance between Africans and Europeans, an assumption which permitted him to transform the Africans he met into ‘types’, classifications, material for scientific analysis. Bleek believed himself to be gathering evidence of human prehistory. But this was to ignore the fact that his researches involved communication and conversation in the present, and the careful recording and analysis of the utterances, beliefs, and opinions of individual African speakers. For this reason, Bleek’s African career, dedicated as it was to the excavation of primitivity, was always inherently contradictory – as it had to be, since it was premised on conversation in the present with people who were regarded as representatives of the past. In an essay in the collection Miscast, Janette Deacon discusses the circumstances of Bleek’s San researches, in which the Cape government permitted a group of San people, largely inmates of the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town, to be moved to Bleek’s family home in Mowbray for the purposes of linguistic and ethnological inquiry. Deacon describes the relationship between Bleek’s family and the San informants as ‘remarkable’. These were Two families who, in the ordinary way, would never have met each other, much less come to know intimate details about each others’ lives. [  ] The project that drew them together was the recording of the /Xam San folklore and language spoken by descendants of the indigenous San of the northern Cape. In the 1870s Bleek and Lloyd were the only two, out of tens of thousands of Europeans in southern Africa, who took the trouble to learn a San language and then to write down what the San had to say. (Deacon 1996c, p. 93) The relationship was one of close daily proximity and communication, described in Deacon’s title as ‘A Tale of Two Families’. Yet this is the same Bleek who wrote to his friend Governor Grey to tell him that ‘we have now two Bushmen with us, an old one and a young one, and they are constantly chattering in their monkey-like speech’ (Bleek cited in Bank 2000, p. 170). There is an inherent tension between the communication and interaction, the careful listening and recording which Bleek undertook daily, and the assumption that this communication was being conducted across an unbridgeable temporal divide between present and

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This compendium was understood by Bleek to be more than merely an account of contemporary Zulu myths and ritual practices. Rather, Bleek understood his collection as an archaeological excavation of human prehistory. (Chidester 1996a, p. 144) Thus Bleek gathered linguistic and cultural resources which he regarded as clearly defined and containable images of the human past. But they were also, simultaneously, products of conversations and interactions in the present, stories and narratives which did not articulate human prehistory, but instead the reactions of colonized people to their current circumstances. For example, Bleek recorded a story of how uNkulunkulu, the ‘Great-great one’, had created all human beings. Bleek’s Zulu informant told him that uNkulunkulu had divided male from female, and at the same time he also separated black from white. He commanded that ‘the white men may live in the midst of the water, in the sea. He gave them clothing.’ Meanwhile ‘the black people shall live within this land [  ] the white men shall carry guns [  ] the [black] men shall carry spears’ (Bleek 1855–56, pp. 3–4): This myth manipulated certain oppositions that might have been perceived as natural, such as life and death, up and down, or male and female. However, in the version recorded by Bleek, the myth also manipulated contemporary, historical oppositions that defined the modern world of Zulu religion in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was structured in terms of the oppositions represented by white and black, sea and land, and the violent confrontation of spears against guns. (Chidester 1996a, p. 146) This instability between past and present, classification and communication, lies at the heart of Bleek’s work. It is this conflict which means that scholars like Deacon and Skotnes can see him as a sympathetic and sensitive recorder of Africans’ lives, while Andrew Bank on the other hand recognizes him as ‘the first serious thinker about and systematic theorist of “race” in colonial South Africa’ (Bank 2000, p. 163).

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past. This conflict underpinned all his cultural and linguistic researches. For example, as David Chidester makes clear, when Bleek undertook his collection of Zulu Legends in the 1850s, this project too was to form part of his larger evolutionist agenda:

By the mid-1850s, when Wilhelm Bleek arrived in Natal to begin his South African researches, British control throughout the region was becoming confidently consolidated. Natal had been annexed and its African inhabitants incorporated as colonial subjects. Soon the eastern Frontier, too, was rendered relatively secure, after the Cattle Killing and events surrounding it had weakened Xhosa resistance, and consequently the Xhosa also came to be appropriated more fully into the colonial order. As we have already seen, the extension of this control had been accompanied by the gathering of knowledge: since the beginning of the century, missionaries and others had been describing and demarcating the people of the region and their languages in ever more assured ways. In other words, a nexus of power and knowledge had been established before Bleek reached South Africa. The Nguni-speakers who had been so new to Western travellers at the beginning of the century when they were incorporated into the tentative typologies of Barrow and Lichtenstein were now largely colonized people, apparently suitable and containable objects of knowledge within Western discourses. Bleek’s researches into Bantu languages built on a body of knowledge already established by other linguists, predominantly missionaries. However, as we have seen, missionaries in South Africa had devoted themselves primarily to the study of languages – examining individual linguistic systems, for pedagogic purposes. Bleek’s central concern, by contrast, was not languages but language, conceived of as a universal human phenomenon rooted in a regular and uniform developmental process. Thus his work inserted South African languages into a global comparative schema, and thereby also reflected back upon questions of metropolitan, that is to say Indo-European, language and identity. His schema identified Bantu languages as systems which were different in their construction from Indo-European because of their divergence at the stage of pronoun formation. In reflecting upon this difference one could ascertain more clearly the source of Western intellectual and cultural superiority. Khoi people, on the other hand, were treated as distant ancestors whose ways of speaking, behaving, and looking at the world provided a window into the very earliest development of the ‘civilized’ world. Bleek’s scientific philology posited development 192

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Conclusions

193

as something to be studied in the past, not as something to be enacted in the present. His work was predicated upon the preservation of existing languages and cultures, rather than the moulding of new ones. Thus Bleek’s work fitted, not an evangelical paradigm, but an anthropological one, and one distinct from the natural scientists of the early nineteenth century in its explicitly evolutionary suppositions. Whereas their classificatory approaches treated languages and peoples as objects of a synchronic categorization, Bleek’s work was predicated upon a particular kind of diachrony. As Johannes Fabian has argued, anthropology was already perceived well before the mid-nineteenth century as ‘a science of disappearing societies’ (Fabian 1991, p. 193). By founding his philology entirely upon African languages for the stated reason that they were both radically primitive and threatened with impending absorption or extinction, Bleek made his work anthropological. The understanding of the relationship between European ‘self’ and African ‘other’ encapsulated within Bleek’s philology fits Fabian’s model of anthropological discourse in casting it as a relationship between present and past, developed and primitive: Generally speaking, anthropology appears to have been a field of knowledge whose discourse requires that its object – other societies, some of them belonging to the past, but most of them existing contemporaneously in the present – be removed from its subject not only in space but also in time. Put more concretely, to belong to the past, to be not yet what We are, is what makes Them the object of our ‘explanations’ and ‘generalizations’. (Ibid., p. 198) Fabian calls this mechanism of temporal distancing the ‘denial of coevalness’. Anthropological time, in other words, is past time, casting its subject as ‘now’ but its object as ‘then’. The missionary linguists working on Xhosa and Zulu also worked within a particular paradigm of time, of the relationship between subject and object of linguistic discourse, and of the role and purpose of language study. Theirs was a model of Christian, evangelical time. The present state of language and of humanity was taken to be the result of deterioration from a once-elevated position. Consequently, those features of African languages which appeared to them to be inferior to those of Europe – gaps in the lexicon where concepts of sin and salvation should be; phonological elements which seemed bestial and strange; syntactic or morphological characteristics which appeared unsystematic or obstructive to thought – were outcomes of this process of degradation,

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Conclusions

linguistic evidence of their speakers’ distance from God and salvation. The task of the missionary linguists was to intervene in this process and to reverse it by Christianizing and hence elevating the languages and their speakers. In contrasting a religious with an anthropological approach, Fabian distinguishes between the categories of ‘pagan’ and ‘savage’. Unlike the pagan, who is ‘always already marked for salvation, the savage is not yet ready for civilisation’. The role of missionary linguists in the gathering of institutional knowledge was conditioned by their interventionist, evangelical remit. They did not fix their objects of study into place because their desire was always to transform them: ‘the Others, pagans and infidels (rather than savages and primitives), were viewed as candidates for salvation’ (Fabian 1983, p. 26). Thus it was hoped that they would eventually be brought, through the efforts of evangelism, into the same Christian time as the missionaries who laboured among them. Bleek’s hierarchical evolutionary paradigm, by contrast, was founded upon the idea of difference, both typological and temporal, as a constant: There would be no raison d’être for the comparative method if it was not the classification of entities or traits which first have to be separate and distinct before their similarities can be used to establish taxonomies and developmental sequences. To put this more concretely: What makes the savage significant to the evolutionist’s Time is that he lives in another Time. (Ibid., pp. 26–7) Because Bleek’s evolutionary schema purported to explain and classify while locating his African objects of study in an immobile past time, he created a colonial typology which appeared stable and unchanging. For example, as he wrote of Khoi languages: ‘the progress of a language like that of the Hottentots to the stage of development reached by its no [sic] very distant Indo-Germanic relatives is now impossible’ (Bleek 1869b, p. 46). Groups were classified according to a set of characteristics, linguistic, cultural, ‘racial’, and temporal, which defined them and also located them in relation to one another. Thus, as they were situated as regulated objects of knowledge within Western scientific discourses, by being fixed in a past time, so they were simultaneously situated within the present colonial order. Bleek’s work represented a comprehensive, hierarchical, colonial typology: ‘Bantu’, ‘Hottentot’, and ‘Bushman’ were all accorded their places within it. So too were white people – implicitly included at the apex of Bleek’s hierarchy, although they were never discussed in his brief but apparently

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comprehensive linguistic, anthropological, and ‘racial’ classifications, nor photographed in the demeaning poses of anthropometric photography. The ethnolinguistic classification of South Africa’s African populations – aligning linguistic with cultural and ‘racial’ characteristics, and distinguishing Bantu, Khoi, and San from each other – having been developed since the later eighteenth century, was given definitive, evolutionist scientific expression by Bleek. The relationship between Bleek’s theories, and the developments of twentieth-century ‘scientific racism’ in South Africa via the work of such figures as George McCall Theal and Carl Meinhof, has been indicated by Dubow (1995) and underlined by Bank (2000). However, as we have also seen, colonial representations of languages were sites of instability and insecurity. For example, the ‘denial of coevalness’ upon which Wilhelm Bleek’s work was predicated, the distancing mechanism whereby the anthropologist subject is separated in time from his or her object of study, was a difficult position to maintain. This temporal distancing presented a potential means to resolve the perceptible tension between an overarching, scientific, classificatory framework, and the relations of close communicative proximity required to record the languages, beliefs, and cultures of indigenous Africans in the way that Bleek did. But the contradictions inherent in the position were unavoidable, and they run through Bleek’s oeuvre, making it a site of ongoing debate. It has been a contention of this book that this sense of contradiction is certainly not unique to Bleek. Indeed, the controversy over Bleek’s legacy is mirrored in approaches to missionary linguists’ work. Some scholars, following the prevalent assumption that Christian mission was an arm of the colonial enterprise and that missionaries shared the ideological presuppositions and ambitions of other colonial agents, have seen missionary language study as an exercise in control and containment, refiguring African vernaculars to fit particular Western models and to serve the needs of colonial power (for example Fabian 1985, 1986; Harries 1988; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). On the other hand, the missiologist Lamin Sanneh (1989, 1993) has fêted missionaries’ linguistic efforts as legitimating and empowering for colonized African people. He argues that by fostering vernacular literacy, by engaging in projects of cultural preservation, and by providing the canonical texts of cultural legitimacy according to a Western model – Bible, grammar, dictionary, ‘native literature’ – missionary linguists undermined the mainstream colonial project and, albeit perhaps unwittingly, sowed the seeds of nationalism and autonomy. Jeff Guy (1994) has also pointed out the immense significance of the written word in the colonial

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Conclusions

South African context, and the early recognition by African elites of the political advantage to be gained by its mastery, via the assistance of missionaries. These polarized perceptions of colonial linguists are suggestive of the tension, revealed in this study, between the uses of language as a means to assert order and control, and the intimate relations of communication and interplay of authority – between colonial linguist and native speakers – that were necessarily bound up with them. We have seen, in examining colonial representations of Xhosa and Zulu, both the impact of speakers upon those representations, whether as informants, advisors, or contributors, and the various means by which this impact was dealt with, emphasized, or obscured. Representations of languages articulated wider networks of power and knowledge with intimate, interpersonal communication. For this reason, it is in such places that we can learn much about the negotiations and contradictions of colonial encounters, as well as about language as a tool of power and control, and begin to address the complex relationship between them.

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Introduction 1. One of the earliest and certainly the most influential of the contributions to this field is Said 1991. See also for example Cohn 1985; Fabian 1986; Harries 1988; Niranjana 1992; Rafael 1993; Mühlhäusler 1996. 2. These disciplines have been subject to reanalysis and self-scrutiny along these lines by their own practitioners. See for example Fabian 1983, 1991; Clifford 1988; Godlewska and Smith 1994; Bell et al. 1995. 3. In particular Le Cordeur 1981; Peires 1981b, 1989a,b; Giliomee 1989; Crais 1992; Ross 1993; Lambert 1995; Keegan 1996; Lester 1997, 2001. 4. See for example Sara Mills’ (1997) useful and accessible summary of the relationship and distinctions between the different uses of the term. 5. See for example Patrick Harries’ (1993) account of the roots of Zulu cultural nationalism in nineteenth-century missionary linguistics. 6. Richard Elphick, among others, argues against the use of the term San since it is derived from a Khoi word, which is pejorative, and because it subsumes a wide array of cultural and linguistic difference (1989, p. 4). However, in common with many other contemporary scholars, I have elected to retain the term since it indicates an appropriate degree of linguistic and cultural relatedness, and because I find the connotations of its alternative, ‘Bushman’, just as problematic.

1 Language in the land of the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Caffres’: European travellers to the eastern Cape, 1652–1806 1. For example Augustin de Beaulieu 1620–22, cited in Raven-Hart 1967, p. 101; Jón Ólafsson 1623, cited in Raven-Hart 1967, p. 112; Abraham Bogaert 1711, cited in Raven-Hart 1971: II, p. 483; Wouter Schouten 1676, cited in RavenHart 1971: I, p. 52. For nineteenth-century British discussion of the etymology of the term ‘Hottentot’, see papers in the Transactions of the Philological Society, 1866, pp. 6–25. 2. Peter Kolb’s The Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope, for example, published in German in 1719 and translated into English in 1731, offers a detailed ethnographic account of ‘Hottentot’ life and culture, alongside a brief and second-hand comparative description of the ‘Caffres’ of Port-Natal based on the testimony of a ship’s captain, Gerbrantz van der Schelling, who landed at Natal on the homeward leg of his trading missions (Kolb 1731: I, pp. 31–2, 81). 197

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Notes

3. On contemporary European analogies between race and gender, see for example Stepan 1990, p. 43. 4. Recent scholars, notably Sara Mills, have condemned many aspects of Batten’s work as rather reductive and outdated. However, the fundamental features of his classifications of travel writing are, in this instance, still useful for my purposes. 5. See for example Lichtenstein 1812–15: I, pp. 413, 415, 419, 430–1. 6. For references to one or more unnamed interpreters – one, a ‘Gonaaqua from Bethelsdorp’ – see Lichtenstein 1812–15: I, for example pp. 383–4, 396.

2 Of translation and transformation: The beginning of missionary linguistics in South Africa 1. Transactions of the Missionary Society, 2nd edn, 1 (1804), p. 323. This volume is hereafter cited as Transactions. 2. As many historians have remarked, Ngqika was mistaken by the new Cape Government as the paramount chief of all the Xhosa, and treated accordingly. 3. On the inadequacy of Van der Kemp’s understanding of Xhosa for the purposes of effective evangelism, see Hodgson 1984, p. 33. 4. For further discussion of the Latin grammatical model see for example Hovdhaugen 1996b, p. 18; Steadman-Jones 2000, p. 197. 5. Rules of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Cited in Canton 1904: I, p. 17. Emphasis in original. 6. See for example Moffat 1842, pp. 291–2; Merriman 1854, p. 62; Moodie 1835, cited in Mesthrie 1998, p. 18. William Samarin’s discussion of the role of interpreters in central Africa is useful in this context. He writes, An African intermediary could be anyone, but anyone 1) who shared a language with the white, 2) who enjoyed a certain amount of trust, and 3) who could be presented to others as representing the white. (Samarin 1989, p. 233) 7. Jean and John Comaroff make an analogous point in relation to interpreters between Nonconformist missionaries and the Tswana (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, p. 216). 8. D. Williams, ‘The Missionaries of the Eastern Frontier of the Cape Colony, 1799–1853’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1960, cited in Mesthrie 1998, p. 9. Bennie produced the earliest Scriptural translations into Xhosa, and his manuscript grammar of Xhosa was a (unacknowledged) source for Boyce’s grammar, published in 1834. See for example Godfrey 1934, pp. 123–34. 9. Recent collections in the field of history of linguistics have attempted to redress this balance. See for example Hovdhaugen 1996a; Zwartjes and Hovdhaugen 2004; Zwartjes and Altman 2005. 10. For the impact of missionaries’ educational background on their grammatical work, see also Nowak 1996b, pp. 157–8.

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198 Notes

Notes

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1. Quote from Colonel Richard Collins, appointed as commissioner to assess the situation in the eastern Cape in 1809, and who was the first to propose settling the region around the Fish River in order to secure the colonial border. Moodie 1838–42: V, pp. 17–19. See also Peires 1989b, pp. 474–5. 2. For instances of the close questioning of missionaries by Xhosa on matters of Christian theology, see for example Shrewsbury 1867, p. 233; Moffat 1842, pp. 307, 311. 3. Reverend William Shaw, 15 October 1838. Regulations approved by District Meeting, May 1837. Methodist Missionary Archive, Box 3, Sheet 109. 4. Norman Etherington (1978, p. 29), for example, notes that none of the Methodist missionaries working in Natal before 1880 were university-educated, and fewer than half had pursued formal studies in theology. 5. Boyce to Secretaries of Wesleyan Missionary Committee, Dangwana River, 29 November 1830, WMMS incoming correspondence, Box 3: Albany. 6. Boyce to Secretaries of Wesleyan Missionary Committee, Bunting Station, 31 March 1832, WMMS incoming correspondence, Box 3: Albany. 7. Boyce to Secretaries of Wesleyan Missionary Committee, Missionary Notices, 213 (1833), p. 336. 8. Boyce’s dedication is disingenuous in obscuring earlier printed, but unpublished, works on Xhosa by Reverend John Bennie of the Glasgow Missionary Society. As Wilhelm Bleek pointed out some decades later, Bennie’s studies of Xhosa from the 1820s were influential on Boyce, as well as on other Methodist grammarians. Bleek 1858, p. 45. See also Godfrey 1934, pp. 123–34. 9. Peter Burke’s examination of the etymology of the term ‘jargon’ finds a number of meanings developing from its first use in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to connote ‘unintelligible speech, a sort of gargling in the throat’; but all carry a pejorative meaning, of unintelligible, impenetrable ‘not-language’ (Burke and Porter 1995, pp. 2–4, 10–13). 10. Very early in the grammar, for example, he uses comparison with the Latin ‘hic’ as a means to discuss the operation of definiteness in Xhosa (Boyce 1844, p. 6). 11. Such arguments can also be found articulated by missionaries who studied and published linguistic works on Khoi-San languages (see for example Tindall 1856, p. 11; Tindall 1857, pp. 3–4). Anthony Traill’s sociolinguistic account of the linguistic death of Khoi-San languages suggests a causal relationship between linguistic stigmatisation and language death, arguing that negative European attitudes regarding Khoi-San speech prevailing from an early date were significant factors in the languages’ erosion: To add to the social, economic and physical onslaught on the Khoekhoe, their language itself faced two intimidating problems. The first was extreme linguistic prejudice: from the first contacts between Europeans and Khoekhoe there had been a persistent attitude on the part of the Europeans that the language was utterly bizarre, unpleasant, inarticulate and not human. [  ] These prejudices fed the second problem, namely

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3 Studying language in the ‘moral wilderness’: Methodist linguistics in the eastern Cape

200 Notes

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

Traill’s arguments indicate the entrenched nature of the attitudes manifest in nineteenth-century language debates on Khoi-San. In indicating the material impact of linguistic stigmatization, they also serve to suggest the significance of missionary linguists’ absorption of extant colonial prejudices as a contributory factor in the ongoing process of Khoi-San linguistic decline. Boyce to Secretaries of Wesleyan Missionary Committee, Bunting Station, 21 April 1831, WMMS incoming correspondence, Box 3: Albany. Note that Appleyard favours the term ‘Indo-Germanic’, which prevailed among German far more than British philologists in this period. See Morpurgo Davies 1992, p. 147. For discussion of contemporary theories which cast Khoi-San people as the descendants of Ham, see Chidester 1996a, pp. 38, 41. Peter Mühlhäusler, for example, notes the prevalence of analogous attitudes among missionaries in the Pacific in the nineteenth century (1996, p. 141). See for example Appleyard 1850, p. 6, where he cites Prichard. Ntsikana’s hymn, which is still sung in churches in South Africa, was often cited in missionary literature from the 1820s onward. It first appeared in Thompson 1827: I, pp. 455–7. See also for example Peires 1981b, pp. 72–4; Hodgson 1980. The best history of the Cattle-Killing movement, told from the perspective of the Xhosa, is Peires 1989b.

4 Language, culture, and ‘the native mind’: Missionary language study in Natal 1. Fynn 1969, p. 60; Aldin Grout to Anderson, Bethelsdorp, 12 February 1836, printed in Missionary Herald, 1836, pp. 339–42. 2. Wilson and Thompson also point to the significance of language in consolidating Zulu power (1969–71: I, p. 345). For contemporary evidence see for example the testimony of Madikane ka Mlomowetole, in Webb and Wright 1976: II, pp. 54–5. 3. For a discussion of these controversies as they were manifest in North America in this period, see Thuesen 1999, pp. 46–7. 4. For a useful discussion of the concept of ‘genius’ in language, see Schlaps 2004. 5. Lindley’s family angrily denied that these conversations had ever taken place, but this appears to me to be implausible. Given that Shepstone was also supposedly present, and more importantly that Colenso, having just been made Bishop, was particularly unlikely to want to court a reputation as a slanderer and a liar, it seems likely that, at most, he exaggerated the Americans’ attitudes. E. D. Smith, The Life and Times of Daniel Lindley (1801–80) (London: Epworth Press, 1949), pp. 290–1, cited in Dinnerstein 1983, p. 88.

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the view that the language was unlearnable, and from as early as 1663 this led to official government policy that the Khoekhoe should learn the colonial language. (Traill 1995, pp. 5–6)

201

6. Diana Jeater (2001, pp. 460–1) gives an excellent account of the anxieties engendered by such bilingualism among poor whites in early-twentiethcentury Rhodesia. These speakers were considered by the colonial administration to be inappropriate as interpreters, partly because they ‘possibly understood Africans a little too well’. Ann Laura Stoler (2002, pp. 121–30) also discusses anxieties around bilingualism among European children in the Dutch Indies, and the supposedly concomitant threat to European cultures and identities. 7. For further discussion of the missionary controversy over the Zulu name for God, and Colenso’s place within it, see also Worger 2001, pp. 428–45. 8. For further discussion of Colenso’s relationship to colonial rule see Guy 1983, p. 81. 9. Döhne’s approach to language development, and his treatment of Zulu as an agglutinating language, draws on the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt. See for example Humboldt 1836, pp. 264–71. 10. Hamilton and Wright (1990) discuss power relations in the Zulu state and the ideological implications of the Zulu/Amalala distinction. 11. Thanks are due to Javed Majeed for pointing out this fascinating contradiction in Döhne’s argument.

5 From languages to language: The comparative philologist in South Africa 1. See Chidester 1996a, pp. 142–4, for a discussion of this question as it relates to Bleek’s work on Zulu religion. 2. See also Chidester 1996a, pp. 149–50. Bleek (1862, p. ix) points to the significance of Müller’s work on comparative mythology for his own ideas. 3. For further discussion of Bleek’s involvement in Huxley’s photographic project, see Godby 1996, pp. 115–27. Godby clearly indicates the problematic nature of Bleek’s involvement in this dehumanising project of anthropometric photography, but still concludes by returning to Bleek’s ‘extraordinary humanity’ (p. 126). His views in this regard are criticized by Andrew Bank (2000, pp. 174–7). 4. The first to treat Bleek in this way was J. David Lewis-Williams (1981); several contributors to the 1996 collection Miscast, edited by Pippa Skotnes, took a similar approach. Andrew Bank (2000) has problematized these views of Bleek.

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Notes

Archives Methodist Archive, John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester Missionary Archive, SOAS, London Yale Divinity College

Serials and periodicals The Anthropological Review The Cape Monthly Magazine Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Journal of the Ethnological Society of London Memoirs Read Before the Anthropological Society of London The Missionary Herald Missionary Notices Proceedings and Transactions of the Philological Society Reports of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society The South African Christian Watchman Transactions of the Missionary Society

Official reports and publications A Compendium of Kafir Laws and Customs, including genealogical tables of Kafir Chiefs and various tribal census returns, compiled by direction of Colonel Maclean (Printed for the Government of British Kaffraria Mount Coke: Wesleyan Mission Press, 1858) Report and Proceedings, with Appendices, of the Government Commission on Native Laws and Customs. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by His Excellency the Governor. January, 1883 (Cape Town: Richards, 1883) Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), reprinted with comments by Aborigines Protection Society (London: Aborigines Protection Society, 1837)

Books, articles and pamphlets Aarsleff, Hans (1967) The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Adendorf, R. (1995) ‘Fanagalo in South Africa’. In Rajend Mesthrie, ed., Language and Social History: Studies in South African Sociolinguistics. Cape Town and Johannesburg: Philip, pp. 176–92. 202

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Afrikaans, origins of, 11 see also Cape Dutch agglutination, 106–7, 158 see also grammar; Xhosa language; Zulu language alliteration, see ‘euphonic concord’; euphony American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 118–22, 129–30, 138–43, 154 ancestor worship, as product of language structure, 184 anthropology, 15–16, 185–9, 193–4 Appleyard, John Whittle, 61, 94–112, 116–17, 148, 168 Arabic, 85 Archbell, James, 77 Arnold, Matthew, 151 Ayliff, John, 71 Babel, 139 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3–4 Bank, Andrew, 12, 191, 201 Bantu, 9–10, 169, 186–8 see also Nguni; Xhosa language; Xhosa people; Zulu language; Zulu people Barrell, John, 89–90 Barrow, John, 30–43 Bennie, John, 60, 198, 199 Berlin Missionary Society, 154 bilingualism among Khoikhoi and Xhosa, 10 among whites, 22, 37, 142–3, 201 Bleek, Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel, 148, 167–96 Boers, 17–18, 22, 26, 29, 33, 34, 44, 47, 52, 53, 67, 68, 127 Bopp, Franz, 157

border, colonial, see frontier zone, eastern Cape Boyce, William Binnington, 73–94, 95, 98, 99, 105, 108, 111–13, 116–17 British and Foreign Bible Society, 58 Bryant, James, 124, 130 Burton, James, 74–5 ‘Bushman’, 13, 17 for further references, see San languages and peoples Callaway, Henry, 162–5 Calvinism, 158 Cape Dutch, 11, 18, 58, 74 cartography, 33–4 Cattle Killing, Xhosa, 115 Chidester, David, 101, 123, 164, 191 chronology, Biblical, 101–4, 156–7, 173, 177 classification, of languages and peoples, 1–2, 12, 16–17, 80, 87–90, 179–89, 192–5 comparative classification of Bantu and Khoi-San, 26–8, 35–40, 87–90, 99–104, 170, 180–5 clicks, see implosive consonants (clicks) Coetzee, J. M., 15–16 Colenso, John William, 125–6, 142–53, 155, 170, 171 colonialism British, 29, 33–4, 67–9, 96–7, 115–16, 126–8 Dutch, 14, 17–18 Comaroffs, Jean and John, 195 communication, 2–4, 22–6, 40–3, 48, 49–50, 53, 54, 57–8, 71, 93–4, 111, 142–5, 149–53, 164–5, 190–1, 195, 196 dialogue as central to Christian mission, 149–53, 164–5 226

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Index

comparative philology, 95–6, 100, 105, 113, 154, 156, 167, 169–91 comparativism, 129, 163, 167–8, 194 see also classification, of languages and peoples comparison, as strategy in linguistic representation, 26–8, 35–40, 113–14 see also classification, of languages and peoples; comparativism contact languages, 11, 17 copiousness, as characteristic of language, 83, 99 Cust, Robert Needham, 59–61 Darwin, Charles, 171, 174, 187 Davis, William Jafferd, 77, 93–4, 112–16 Davys, John, 16 Deacon, Janette, 190 dictionaries, 62, 111–13, 149, 154–62 Dingane, 118, 119–20 Dinnerstein, Myra, 129–30, 138 discourse, definitions of, 6–7 colonial, 5–6 disease, as metaphor for communication, 153 Döhne, Jacob Ludwig, 121–2, 154–62 Dubow, Saul, 12, 195 Dugmore, H. H., 71 Dutch East India Company, see VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) economics, as metaphor for language, 140–1 Ellis, Alexander, 168 Elphick, Richard, 197 n.6 ethnography, 19–20, 26, 34–5, 53, 163 see also anthropology etymology, 157, 159–61 ‘euphonic concord’, 74–6, 84, 99, 130–1 euphony, 75, 83, 84, 131, 147 evolution, as model for language development, 174–8, 184–5, 189, 190–1

227

Fabian, Johannes, 3–4, 141, 193–4, 195 Fanakalo, 11 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 155, 169 Frazer, James, 163 Fritsch, Gustav, 186–7 frontier zone, eastern Cape, 17–20, 22–9, 32–43, 44–50, 52–7, 67–73, 76–7, 78–9, 80–2, 89–90, 93–4, 95–100 language and communication in, 18, 20, 22–9, 35–43, 47–50, 53–7, 71–3, 78–9, 80–2, 89–90, 93–4, 95, 98–100 gender, grammatical, see grammar, gender in Genette, Gérard, 63 Giliomee, Hermann, 18, 67 glossaries, see vocabularies God difficulty in discussing concept of, 42–3 terms for, 41, 55, 91, 144–5, 159, 163 Godby, Michael, 201 n.3 grammar categories of, 56, 62–3, 85, 105, 133–4, 147–8 comparison as strategy in representation, 85–6, 105–6, 134–5 gender in, 170, 179–85 see also dictionaries; vocabularies Greek, 134–5 Grey, George, 154, 170–1, 190 Grimm, Jacob, 100 Grout, Aldin, 120 Grout, Lewis, 124–5, 129–43, 148 Guy, Jeff, 195–6 Haeckel, Ernst, 171, 176, 187 Harries, Patrick, 12, 121, 195 Hebrew, 85–6, 87 Herbert, Thomas, 16 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 155 higher criticism, 153, 169, 173 Horne Tooke, John, 107

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228 Index

implosive consonants (clicks), 10 in Khoi-San languages, 36–7, 40, 102 in Xhosa, 74 in Zulu, 145, 158 Indo-European languages, 99–100, 105–6, 170, 172, 179–80, 184–5, 192, 193, 194 interpreters, 22–4, 42–3, 53, 58–60, 71–2, 74–5, 78, 119–20, 133, 150–3, 164, 165, 198 n.6 Jane Eyre, 62 jargon, 83, 89, 102–3, 199 n.9 ‘Kaffir’, 13, 16–17 for further references, see Bantu; Nguni; Xhosa; Zulu Kew gardens, 31–2 Khoi languages, 10, 13, 36–7 as absence, 15 as animalistic, 16 as lacking in scientific and abstract terms, 41–2 difficulty in learning, 16, 22 onomatopoeic origins of, 39–40 Khoikhoi people, 10, 13 early European contact with, 14 men, as effeminate, 38–9 Khoi-San languages, 10, 11 decline of, 88–9 early European contact with, 15–16 Hamitic origins of, 103 incompatibility with Christianity, 87–90, 99–100 as product of deterioration, 102–3 stigma as contributory factor in decline of, 199–200 n.11 compared with Xhosa/Bantu, 26–8, 35–40, 87–90, 99–104, 170, 180–5

see also jargon; Khoi languages; San languages and peoples Kitchen Kaffir, see Fanakalo Kolb, Peter, 16, 197 n.2

Lang, Andrew, 163 language families of, 100, 132, 180–1, 184–5 and historical reconstruction, 99–104, 179 and nation, 38–9, 155, 158, 159–62 origin and development of, 39–40, 49, 100, 131–2, 157, 172–6, 177 relationship to culture, 42–5, 48–50, 92–3, 101–2, 107–10, 134–8, 142–3, 175–6, 183–4 relationship to mind, 106–7, 154, 159–61, 163–5, 181–4 see also linguistic relatedness language-learning, 4, 49–50, 55, 60, 62, 75–6, 77, 95, 104–7, 132–4, 142–3, 163 and colonial power, 78–80, 81–2, 96–9, 171 among colonists, 22, 37, 97, 155 among white children, 22, 37, 76, 142–3 and contamination, 142–3 languages, Indo-European, 38, 85–6, 100 see also Greek; Latin Latham, Robert Gordon, 167 Latin, 85, 87, 199 n.10 Lepsius, Karl Richard, 139, 169–70, 180 Le Vaillant, Francois, 19 Lichtenstein, Heinrich, 1–2, 43–50, 51, 56 Lindley, Daniel, 200 n.5 lingua francas, see contact languages linguistic hierarchy, 37–40, 120–1, 159, 175–6, 182–5 see also classification, of languages and peoples; language, relationship to culture linguistic relatedness, 80 see also language, families of

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‘Hottentot’, 13, 16–17, 197 for further references, see Khoi languages Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 107, 155, 175, 181 Hunt, James, 187 Huxley, Thomas, 171, 174, 185, 187

linguistic representation, as representation of social reality, 27–8, 54–5, 93–4, 137 linguistics colonial, 2–4, 11–13, 78–80, 81–2, 96–9, 126, 128, 141, 146–7 missionary, 56–7, 61–4, 80, 97, 126, 128, 130, 155–6, 162, 167, 193–4, 195–6 Linnaeus, Carl, 19–20, 21, 32 see also natural science Lloyd, Lucy, 178, 189 London Missionary Society, 51, 52 Lorimer, Douglas, 187 Lubbock, John, 163 Lund, Thomas, 153 Lyell, Charles, 171 Maurice, F. D., 144, 170 Mbande, Mpengula, 164, 165 Meinhof, Carl, 195 Methodists, 69–73 attitudes to Xhosa, 69–70, 71, 73 educational background, 72 language study, 72–3, 112–13 relationship to British settlers in eastern Cape, 69–71 mfecane, 118–19, 120, 123 migration, and theories of language development, 131–2 millenarianism, 130, 139–41 Milward, John, 15 missionaries, 51, 127–8 educational background, 63, 73–4, 94, 130, 149, 154, 199 n.4 and language study, 57–64 see also entries for individuals, denominations Moffat, Robert, 59 monogenesis, 103, 156–7, 175–6 monotheism, as product of language structure, 184 Mpande, 149 Mpondo, 13, 74–5, 91, 92, 127 Mühlhäusler, Peter, 62 Müller, Friedrich Max, 117, 163, 171, 174, 181

229

multilingualism and development of European colonialism in South Africa, 10–11 and problems of communication, 18, 22, 35–6, 53 as productive of linguistic deterioration, 158 native speakers, 3–4, 60–1, 64, 110–12, 133–4, 135–8, 149–53, 166, 191, 196 natural science, 18–50 as model for linguistic description, 19–20, 26–7, 28–9, 35–6, 47–9 as model for travel writing, 21–2, 31–2, 45–6 ‘Negro’, see ‘race’ Ngidi, William, 149, 150–3 Ngqika, 42–3, 52, 53, 55, 67, 198 Nguni, 9–10, 12–13 see also Bantu; Xhosa language; Xhosa people; Zulu language; Zulu people Unkulunkulu, as term for God, 145, 159, 163, 191 Nongqawuse, 115 Ntsikana, 108–10 onomatopoeic, 39–40 orthography, 138–41 Pentecost, 139 Perrin, James, 155 philology, comparative, see comparative philology philosophy, as characteristic of language, 83, 99 phonology, 27, 36–7 see also implosive consonants (clicks) pidgins, see contact languages polygenism, 187 see also monogenesis potentiality, as characteristic of language, 63–4, 82–90, 99–104, 107–8, 112, 126 Pratt, Mary Louise, 18, 39

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230 Index

‘race’, 185–9 climatological theories of, 188 ‘Negro’ as racial category, 186–8 Reformation, 83–4 regularity, as characteristic of language, 83 representation, 3, 4–5 romanticism, 154–5 roots, 157, 160 Said, Edward, 4 Samarin, William, 198 San languages and peoples, 10, 37, 177–8, 186, 188, 189–90 San as problematic term, 197 see also Khoi-San languages Sanneh, Lamin, 195 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 107 Semitic, 85–6, 100–4 settlers, British, 68–9 attitudes to Xhosa people, 70–1, 81–2, 97 ‘sex-denoting’ languages, see grammar, gender in Shaka, 119, 158–9 see also Zulu language, and policies of the Zulu state Shaw, William, 69–70, 72, 74, 76, 77, 101, 112–13 Shepstone, Theophilus, 74–5, 127–8, 144, 146 Shrewsbury, William, 71 Skeper, Jan, 23–4 Skotnes, Pippa, 189 Smith, Thornley, 95 Soga, Tiyo, 60 Sparrman, Anders, 20–9 spatiality, in colonial linguistic discourse, 140–1 Spencer, Herbert, 163 standardization, of language, 12–13, 79, 138–41

Standish, Ralph, 15–16 Steadman-Jones, Richard, 6, 62–3, 86 Theal, George McCall, 195 Thonga/Tsonga, 12 Thornton, Robert, 169, 171 time anthropological time versus evangelical time, 193–4 Khoikhoi concepts of, 41–2 temporal distancing, 190, 193–4 see also chronology, Biblical; language, and historical reconstruction uTixo, as term for God, 55, 91, 145 Traill, Anthony, 199–200 n.11 translation, 58, 60–1, 108–10, 111, 122, 134–6, 150–3, 162 see also interpreters; missionaries, and language study Tshatshu, Dyani, 72 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 163 Van der Kemp, Johannes, 51–7 verbs, 85–6, 105–6, 134–5, 147–8 VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie), 14 vocabularies, 19–20, 26–8, 35–6, 47–50, 53–6 see also dictionaries; grammar Wesleyans, see Methodists word lists, see vocabularies writing, see orthography Xhosa language, 1, 9–10, 12–13 contrasted with Khoi-San, 26–8, 35–40, 87–90, 99–104, 170, 180–5 elevated origins of, 40 manliness as characteristic of, 27, 38–9 as marker of potentiality, 82–90, 99–104, 107–8, 112 as product of deterioration, 100 as Semitic, 85–6, 101–4 see also Bantu; ‘euphonic concord’; Nguni; Zulu language

10.1057/9780230286856 - Grammars of Colonialism, Rachael Gilmour

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‘prefix-pronominal’ languages, see grammar, gender in Prichard, James Cowles, 103, 167 printing press, 58 progress, 161

Xhosa people, 9–10 absence of culture, 90–3, 107–8 as Arabs, 101–4 colonial policy of assimilation, 115–16 culture, as object of study, 116 early European encounters with, 22–5 religious thought, 55, 91 resistance to British colonialism, 65, 68, 93–4, 96–7, 111–12 responses to missionaries, 52, 54, 71, 108–10 as warlike, 79, 81–2, 97 see also Bantu; Nguni; settlers, British, attitudes to Xhosa people; Zulu people Zulu language, 9–10, 92, 178, 191 as corrupting, 142–3 as degraded, 159–62

231

as elevated linguistic form, 121–2, 123–6, 127, 131–2, 158–9 and policies of the Zulu state, 120–2, 124–6, 158–9 as repository of culture, 134–8 as standard language in Natal, 124–6, 127 and Zulu ‘mind’, 128, 154, 159–61, 163–5, 191 and Zulu national identity, 155, 158, 159–62 see also Bantu; ‘euphonic concord’; Nguni; Xhosa language Zulu people, 9–10 as degraded, 138, 142, 158–63 as high-status group, 122–3 inhabitants of Natal as, 124, 126 relationship to colonial power in Natal, 127–8 religious thought, 144–5, 164–5 responses to missionaries, 128 see also Bantu; Nguni; Xhosa people

10.1057/9780230286856 - Grammars of Colonialism, Rachael Gilmour

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05

Index