LEXINGTON, Va. May 8, 2023 — Wits University of Johannesburg and the University of Cape Town, the two highest-ranking universities on the African continent, recently invited Lt. Col. Jochen S. Arndt, associate professor of history at Virginia Military Institute, to South Africa to discuss his book, “Divided by the Word: Colonial Encounters and the Remaking of Zulu and Xhosa Identities,” at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and the University of Cape Town’s Historical and African Language Studies departments.

Arndt’s book, published both in South Africa and the United States, explains how Zulu and Xhosa emerged as written languages and markers of Zulu and Xhosa identities.

When Protestant missionaries arrived in South Africa in the 1820s, their primary goal was to convert Africans to Christianity, and in order for the Africans to have direct access to the Bible, it had to be translated into their language. The problem was that there was no written language, but multiple regional speech forms: Zulu, Xhosa, Mfengu, Thembu, Bhaca, Mpondo, Mpondomise, Hlubi, Cele, Thuli, and Qwabe. Consequently, the missionaries questioned if all those speech forms were similar enough to represent a single language into which the Bible could be translated, or were they too different and represented multiple languages. According to Arndt, the answer to that question changed over time for a host of reasons, perhaps most importantly due to the influence of African interpreters. “In the book I show that the missionaries struggled with the local speech forms and depended on interpreters who had their own ideas about language. The book argues that the missionaries’ decision to think of the speech forms in the region as two separate languages—Zulu and Xhosa—can to some extent be traced back to those African interpreters and their ideas. The Zulu and Xhosa people like to believe that their languages have always been there and have always played an important role in defining the meaning of Zulu-ness and Xhosa-ness. My book maintains that the emergence of Zulu and Xhosa as distinct languages and language-based identities can be traced back to specific decisions made by European and American missionaries and their African interpreters in the nineteenth century,” he explained.

The book discussions at WiSER and the University of Cape Town were well attended since languages and language-based identities are hotly debated issues in contemporary South Africa. “The country has eleven official languages, two of which are Zulu and Xhosa, which play an important role in South Africa’s identity politics. In fact, at this very moment, there are groups in South Africa that are contesting these official languages by arguing that the missionaries and their interpreters had misclassified their dialects. This context explains why the book is of interest to academics but also to the wider South African public,” Arndt noted.

Lt. Col. Jochen S. Arndt 
Associate Professor, Department of History
VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE