The American “Zulu” Mission and the Emergence of “Zulu” as a Distinct Language Community in South Africa, 1835–54

When in 1854 European missionaries in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa proposed to their American counterparts in KwaZulu-Natal the idea of jointly producing a single Bible translation that would lay the basis for a unifying written “Caffre” language, the latter rejected this proposal on linguistic grounds. Since this rejection resulted in the bifurcation of “Caffre” into separate “Xhosa” and “Zulu” languages over the course of the subsequent century, the year 1854 represents a crucial moment in the historical development of two of South Africa’s major language communities. Drawing on archival research in South Africa, Europe and the U.S., this essay explores the genealogy of this bifurcation from the perspective of the American missionaries. In line with existing constructivist interpretations of language development in Africa, it shows that the American missionaries’ rejection of the 1854 proposal was not the result of linguistic differences but their attitudes toward such differences. However, this essay also provides a corrective to such interpretations by showing that these attitudes depended first and foremost on the American missionaries’ self-conception as a ‘Zulu’ mission which, by 1854, was sustained by a discourse about “Zuluness” that was entangled in complex ways with pre-existing African ideas about the relationship between language and identity. By drawing attention to this entanglement, the essay suggests that an Afrocentric approach is crucial for developing a more nuanced and accurate understanding of missionary linguistics in general and American missionary linguistics in particular and their respective impacts on the development of African language communities.