[South Africa has 12 official languages. The two most dominant are
isiZulu and isiXhosa. While the Zulu and Xhosa people share a rich
common history, they have also found themselves engaged in ethnic
conflict and division, notably during urban wars between 1990 and
1994. A new book, Divided by the Word, examines this history – and
how colonisers and African interpreters created the two distinct
languages, entrenched by apartheid education.]
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ZULU VS XHOSA: HOW COLONIALISM USED LANGUAGE TO DIVIDE SOUTH
AFRICA’S TWO BIGGEST ETHNIC GROUPS  
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Jochen S. Arndt
May 11, 2023
The Conversation
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_ South Africa has 12 official languages. The two most dominant are
isiZulu and isiXhosa. While the Zulu and Xhosa people share a rich
common history, they have also found themselves engaged in ethnic
conflict and division, notably during urban wars between 1990 and
1994. A new book, Divided by the Word, examines this history – and
how colonisers and African interpreters created the two distinct
languages, entrenched by apartheid education. _

An illustration of an antique photograph of the British Empire’s
mission work among the Zulu people of then-Natal province. ,
ilbusca/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

 

_Historian Jochen S. Arndt answers some questions about his book._

What is the key premise of the book?

The beautiful thing about history is that it can help us develop a
more complex understanding of the things we consider natural in our
daily lives.

People like to believe that their languages have always been there and
always played an important role in defining their identity.

[A book cover showing an old photo of a young African girl in western
attire holding a book and a pen and reading from the pages.]
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Wits University Press

But history can show us that what appears to be timeless is, in fact,
deeply historical and dependent on the actions of people with
ambitions and agendas. My book argues that, as well-defined,
standardised languages rather than speech forms (vernaculars), isiZulu
and isiXhosa emerged as part of a long historical process that
involved a wide range of actors, notably European and US missionaries
and African interpreters and intellectuals.

How did you arrive at the project?

During the transition from apartheid
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to democracy in South Africa between 1990 and 1994, the urban areas
reserved for black people around Johannesburg were engulfed in
violence [[link removed]]
that killed thousands. Civil wars are always complex, but the
testimonies [[link removed]]
of participants
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reveal [[link removed]] that many of them
understood the conflict
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as a war between Zulus and Xhosas. I was struck by how they defined
Zuluness and Xhosaness. Many said they were Zulu because they spoke
the Zulu language, and Xhosa because they spoke the Xhosa language.
One haunting testimony was of a self-identifying Zulu:

The Xhosa who were trying to kill us were just looking for your
tongue, which language you were.

My book argues that the historical process that produced isiZulu and
isiXhosa as distinct languages began at least two centuries before
apartheid. It was the product of colonial encounters and both foreign
and African ideologies of language.

Was there a time when Zulu and Xhosa identities didn’t exist?

The subtitle of the book is: “Colonial encounters and the remaking
of Zulu and Xhosa identities”. I’m not saying that Zulu and Xhosa
identities didn’t exist before the languages were well defined,
rather that the identities were transformed when these languages came
into existence.

Before the 1800s, South Africa’s indigenous people had two key forms
of collective belonging: the chiefdom and the clan. There were many
chiefdoms and clans, including Zulu and Xhosa ones. The chiefdom was a
political entity: a person belonged to a chiefdom because they had
submitted or sworn an oath of fealty to a chief. The clan was a
genealogical entity: a person belonged because they were born into the
clan.

Membership in a chiefdom or a clan had nothing to do with language.

How did the two distinct languages come into existence?

I argue that in the 1800s foreign missionaries and their African
interpreters together created distinct isiZulu and isiXhosa out of
numerous speech forms.

[A vintage illustration in black and white of an African man in formal
western attire standing next to a table where three other men stand
and sit in a lavish drawing room.]
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JanTzatzoe, left, was a Xhosa chief who converted to Christianity and
served as a translator for the British. Michael Nicholson/Corbis via
Getty Images

Protestant missionaries arrived in South Africa in the 1820s. Their
primary goal was to convert Africans to Christianity. For them the
Bible was the source of revelation. To give Africans direct access to
it, it had to be translated.

The problem was there was no written language, so written languages
and their geographic reach had to be defined. Consequently,
missionaries asked themselves: are the speech forms of the Zulu and
Xhosa and of the chiefdoms and clans in between them – such as
Mfengu, Thembu, Bhaca, Mpondo, Mpondomise, Hlubi, Cele, Thuli, Qwabe
– similar enough to represent a single language into which the Bible
can be translated, or do they represent multiple languages?

I suggest that the answer to this question changed over time for a
host of reasons, perhaps most importantly due to the influence of
African interpreters. Missionaries depended on interpreters, who had
their own ideas about language. The decision to think of isiZulu and
isiXhosa as two separate languages can to some extent be traced back
to these interpreters.

Education played the crucial role in people identifying with these
languages. It involved Africans and non-Africans, as lawmakers,
superintendents of education and teachers, promoting isiZulu and
isiXhosa as part of “mother tongue” education in various school
settings between the middle of the 1800s and the last decade of the
1900s.

How did apartheid entrench this?

Apartheid merely reinforced this trend. Crucial was the Eiselen
Commission [[link removed]] of
1949, which claimed
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that isiZulu and isiXhosa were the “bearer of the traditional
heritage of the various ethnic groups”. This was like saying that
these languages captured the essence of these groups in particularly
powerful ways.

[Close up of hands holding an old, battered document containing an
identity photo and personal information.]
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Dekemani Mzuzwa with his pass book that he is waiting to exchange for
a new passport in 1994. David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

To reinforce these group identities, the commission expanded mother
tongue education in schools. This for a Mpondo child, for instance,
meant studying isiXhosa, and for a Hlubi child meant studying isiZulu.
Children gradually assimilated Zulu or Xhosa as their language-based
identities.

How is this relevant today?

Post-apartheid South Africa continues to promote the Zulu-Xhosa divide
through its own official language policies in schools. In the Eastern
Cape, for instance, African pupils will learn standard isiXhosa
because it is assumed that their “home language” is a dialect of
isiXhosa. In KwaZulu-Natal the same happens with isiZulu. Under this
policy, it is very difficult to revive and strengthen identities such
as Bhaca or Hlubi.

The only way out of this predicament for the Hlubi and Bhaca is to
make language a battleground of their identity politics. I think this
best explains why the Hlubi have created an IsiHlubi Language Board
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and why the Bhaca
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insist that their speech
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is not a dialect of isiXhosa.

My point is that we cannot make sense of their need to make these
arguments without coming to terms with the long history of the
Zulu-Xhosa language divide.[The Conversation]

Jochen S. Arndt
[[link removed]],
Associate Professor of History, _Virginia Military Institute
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This article is republished from The Conversation
[[link removed]] under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article
[[link removed]].

* apartheid
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* South Africa
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* language
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* colonialism
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* ethnicity
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