Introduction 1 Language in the Land of the 'Hottentots' and 'Caffres'
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Notes 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 rela- tionship 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 Raven- Hart 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). 197 198 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 Hovd- haugen 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 inter- preters 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 Hovd- haugen 2004; Zwartjes and Altman 2005. 10. For the impact of missionaries’ educational background on their grammat- ical work, see also Nowak 1996b, pp. 157–8. Notes 199 3 Studying language in the ‘moral wilderness’: Methodist linguistics in the eastern Cape 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 Meth- odist 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 unpub- lished, 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 thir- teenth 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 rela- tionship 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 200 Notes 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) Traill’s arguments indicate the entrenched nature of the attitudes mani- fest 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 preju- dices as a contributory factor in the ongoing process of Khoi-San linguistic decline. 12. Boyce to Secretaries of Wesleyan Missionary Committee, Bunting Station, 21 April 1831, WMMS incoming correspondence, Box 3: Albany. 13. 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. 14. For discussion of contemporary theories which cast Khoi-San people as the descendants of Ham, see Chidester 1996a, pp. 38, 41. 15. Peter Mühlhäusler, for example, notes the prevalence of analogous attitudes among missionaries in the Pacific in the nineteenth century (1996, p. 141). 16. See for example Appleyard 1850, p. 6, where he cites Prichard. 17. 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. 18. 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.