Introduction -- "What Does Stick to People-More Than Their Language-Is Their Isibongo": Language and Belonging in South Africa's Deeper Past -- "Surrounded on All Sides by People That Differ from Them in Every Point, in Color . . . and in Language": The Birth of the "Caffre" Language Paradigm -- "All Speak the Caffre Language": Missionaries, Migrants, and Defining the Target Language for Bible Translation -- "Their Language Had an Affinity with That of Both of These Nations": African Interpreters, MeĢtissage, and the Dynamics of Linguistic Knowledge Production -- "The Natives. In What Respects, If Any, Do They Differ from the Southern Caffres?": American Missionaries and the Zulu Question -- "To Speak Properly and Correctly, viz. Uku-Kuluma-Nje": Americans, Africans, and Zulu as a Superior Language -- "Many People . . . Explain This Identity Primarily in Terms of the Language They Speak": The Language-Based Zulu-Xhosa Divide in South African Consciousness -- Epilogue.
Summary:
Divided by the Word refutes the assumption that the entrenched ethnic divide between South Africa's Zululs ad Xhosas, a divide that turned deadly in the late 1980s, is elemental to both societies. Jochen Arndt reveals how the current distinction between the two groups emerged from a long and complex interplay of indigenous and foreign-born actors, with often diverging ambitions and relationships to the world they shared and the languages they spoke. The earliest roots of the divide lie in the eras of exploration and colonization, when European officials and naturalists classified South Africa's indigenous population on the basis of skin color and language. Later, missionaries collaborated with African intermediaries to translate the Bible into the region's vernaculars, artificially creating distinctions between Zulu and Xhosa speakers. By the twentieth century, these foreign players, along with African intellectuals, designed language-education programs that embedded the Zulu-Xhosa divide in South African consciousness. Using archival sources from three continents written in multiple languages, Divided by the Word offers a refreshing new appreciation for the deep historicity of language and ethnic identity in South Africa while reconstructing the ways in which colonial forces generate and impose ethnic divides with long-lasting and lethal consequences for indigenous populations. -- dust jacket. "This book argues that foreign missionaries and their African interlocutors deliberately forged separate Zulu and Xhosa languages in the nineteenth century, tracing the consequences of this imposed linguistic division through the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.