Learning Zulu: a secret history of language in South Africa

Wylie, Dan

Title: Learning Zulu: a secret history of language in South Africa
Creator: Wylie, Dan
Date Issued: 2017
Date: 2017
Type: book review
Type: text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61255
Identifier: vital:27997
Identifier: https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/160848
Description: Taking a leaf from the book under review, I’ll start by injecting an autobiographical element. Much of what Sanders examines here echoes my own experience, after Zimbabwe’s independence, of heading to a remote mission school to teach for two years. Part of my purpose was to learn better Shona, the majority language from which I had been systematically discouraged by my colonial education. It was, in a way, a gesture of reparation, or addressing a nagging “white guilt”, or at least of assuaging a sense of fruitless loss and exclusion. I was nowhere near as successful in attaining fluency as Sanders seems have been in learning Zulu; and now that I live in the Eastern Cape, my efforts to learn Xhosa have been similarly patchy and faltering. One thing is evident throughout Sanders’s dense discussions: long-term, assiduous application and pe¬riods of total immersion are vital—and as he points out, few whites in South Africa have carved out the time and energy to do so, while willy-nilly expecting the black majority to learn their language. (An endnote does aver that, according to census figures, a surprising 16,000-plus whites, and a similar number of Indians, in KwaZulu-Natal, list Zulu as their first language.)
Format: 5 pages
Format: pdf
Language: English
Relation: Tydskrif vir letterkunde
Relation: Wylie, D., 2017. Learning Zulu: A secret history of language in South Africa
Relation: Tydskrif vir letterkunde 54 vol. 2 no. 182 186 2017
Rights: Tydskrif vir letterkunde
Rights: Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Tydskrif vir letterkunde Copyright Statement

Hits: 684
Visitors: 785
Downloads: 115

Collections

RU Department of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies

Wylie, Dan (Emeritus Prof)

		Thumbnail	File	Description	Size	Format
View Details Download			SOURCE1	Adobe Acrobat PDF	190 KB	Adobe Acrobat PDF	View Details Download