Language Learning, Power, Race and Identity: White Men, Black Language

by Liz Johanson Botha

Overview

This book investigates the strategies and identities of colonials who have learned the languages of colonised people, using the context of isiXhosa in South Africa. While power in language learning research has traditionally focused on the powerful native speaker and the relatively disempowered learner, this book studies the inverse, where elites are the language learners. The author analyses the life histories of four white South Africans who acquired isiXhosa during the apartheid years. The book offers insights into relationships between language, power, race, identity and change in their stories and in the broader context of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, with its conflicted history and disparities. This book should appeal to researchers interested in studies of language acquisition, narrative and identity, as well as those more broadly interested in South African history, multilingualism and race studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783093878
Publisher:	Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Publication date:	07/02/2015
Series:	Encounters , #4
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	273
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Liz Johanson Botha has taught languages since 1968 and held a faculty post at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa from 1998 to 2012. More recently, she has worked as a Research Associate to the Faculty of Education at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her interests include language learning, identity and teacher education.

Liz Johanson Botha has taught languages since 1968 and held a faculty post at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa from 1998 to 2012. Liz now works as a Research Associate to the Faculty of Education at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her interests include language learning, identity and teacher education.

Read an Excerpt

Language Learning, Power, Race and Identity

White Men, Black Language

---

By Liz Johanson Botha

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2015 Liz Johanson Botha
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-387-8

---

CHAPTER 1

The Eastern Cape, Then and Now

... although one is still in an area of special and outstanding beauty, it is not long before one is conscious of something more; an impression, seemingly, of a distinct and plangent power deriving from forces occult as well as visible, from an inner component of the malign set within a landscape whose natural attractiveness nevertheless has provoked more jealous antagonism and combat than any other in all Africa. Here on this frontier, between the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century, was to be found the crucible of modern South African society.

Frontiers – Mostert (1992: xxi, xxii, xxix)

The four men whose life histories are the subject of this book are all descended from members of one or other of the earliest groups of white settlers in the Eastern Cape, who were initially all farmers. In this chapter, I look at the history of these groups of settlers, of the groups of indigenous people with whom the settlers interacted and the background to inter-group relations in the area. This means examining the wars and struggles of dispossession and resistance in which the participants' forebears participated, patterns of land occupation and seizure, and labour relations and conditions on farms. Significantly too, in terms of the research, it means exploring language issues and multilingualism in the region, both historically and in the present. I do not go into detail about the more recent apartheid history, which is well known, but focus on the earlier history, linking it to current themes which feature in the men's stories. The chapter culminates in a more detailed account of each of the four men's lives. The oldest was born, as I was, around the time that the National Party took power in 1948, while the other three were born in the 1960s, when the implementation of the apartheid policy was getting into its stride (see Appendix 2).

In setting out the socio-historical context of the men's stories, I draw on seminal works on the history of the Eastern Cape (Mostert, 1992; Peires, 1981, 1989) and South Africa (Giliomee, 2003; Sparks, 1991; Terreblanche, 2002), augmenting these with more specific information and alternative constructions from other sources. I also draw on novels and biographical works (Brodrick, 2009; Gregory, 1995; Johnson, 2006; Poland, 1993; Thomas, 2007), which give further details about the history and an insight into the atmosphere and mood, as well as personal and emotional responses to the times, often by multilingual white people. While most of the seminal works are written by white historians, I have endeavoured to include black perspectives, and to maintain a consciousness of how and by whom the events have been constructed.

Indigenous People and Early Settlers

At the time when the European 'voyages of discovery' were rounding the tip of Africa, a number of clans of the Nguni group of peoples lived on its south-eastern seaboard (Crampton, 2004; Peires, 1981). They grew some crops, but cattle formed the social, spiritual and economic basis of their society. Around 1600, the charismatic Tshawe overthrew his brother, the legitimate heir to one of these chiefdoms (Soga, 1931: 7), and united a number of fairly diverse groups and fragmentary clans to form the powerful amaXhosa (Peires, 1981: 15ff.). Descendants of Tshawe's adherents still live in the Eastern Cape (and in many urban areas, especially around Cape Town), but the term Xhosa is now often used to refer loosely to all the groups coming from the Eastern Cape region who speak a language related to isiXhosa, the Nguni dialect which was written down by missionaries in the 19th century, thus becoming regarded as 'standard' isiXhosa.

In the 18th century, a difference of opinion over the appropriate behaviour for a Xhosa king caused the powerful Rharhabe to leave his brother Gcaleka, the heir to the throne, on the north-east side of the Kei River, and settle, with a large following, south-west of the Kei. This divided the amaXhosa in two: the amaGcaleka and the amaRharhabe (Mangcu, 2012: 52) (see Map 2, p. 5). Some independent chiefdoms, also recognising Rharhabe's authority, moved across the Fish River into what became known as the Zuurveld (sour grassland) and beyond (Peires, 1981: 56). After Rharhabe's death, the territory of his followers, under Ngqika and his regent Ndlambe, was to become a cauldron of war, as settlers of European origin moved into the area, seeking land and colonial dominion over the indigenous inhabitants.

Forebears of the four participants in this study are found in all of the main groups of early settlers to the Eastern Cape: Portuguese sailors, shipwrecked on the coast from as early as 1550 (Crampton, 2004), Dutch trekboers (travelling farmers) and British and German settlers.

The trekboers were descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers at the Cape, who gradually moved further and further away from the constraints of the Dutch colonial government, seeking more grazing for their cattle. Map 2 (p. 5) shows that the paths taken by the trekboers eventually led some of them to areas west of the Great Fish River, some also moving into the Zuurveld, between the Bushmans and the Great Fish Rivers (Lubke et al., 1988: 395). Mostert (1992: 165ff.) graphically describes the restless lifestyle of the physically powerful trekboers, removed from the cultivated lifestyle of the Cape, beholden only to themselves and God, living and dying by their guns, and dependent on the Cape only for ammunition. In the period between the late 1820s and 1845, trekboers, motivated by a complex of reasons, most of which were related to their dislike of British domination and policies making them feel like aliens in what they regarded as their own land, moved out of the Eastern Cape in great numbers, seeking self-determination beyond the Orange River. Particular grievances were the change from the loan farm system to freehold title, the emancipation of slaves and the granting of equality before the law to Khoi and amaXhosa (Giliomee, 2003: 144ff., 161; Terreblanche, 2002: 220). Some trekboers remained in the Eastern Cape, and their descendants still live in the region.

In 1820, the British, who ruled the Cape from 1806 onwards, recruited 5000 Britons, representative of all social strata of British life, to settle on farms in the Zuurveld area, renamed Albany (Sparks, 1991: 59) (see Map 3). The purpose of this settlement, not revealed to the settlers themselves at the time, was that they form a buffer against what the colonial authorities saw as the 'inroads of the amaXhosa' from across the Fish River, the then designated boundary of the colony. British settlers continued to immigrate to the Eastern Cape, a number in the early days coming as missionaries, attempting to win converts to Christianity from among the Khoi and the amaXhosa and using 'education and literature to spread the gospel' (Ndletyana, 2008: 2).

Sparks (1991: 58) calls the 1820 immigration scheme, which gave each settler 100 acres, 'an agricultural absurdity in the South African environment', where a completely different approach was needed from that implemented in Europe. Following farming disasters during their first three years, including drought, blight, rust, locusts and floods, many settlers abandoned their allotments and moved to Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth, to form the backbone of commercial development in South Africa. Those who remained on the land enlarged their plots by taking over those that had been abandoned and turning to cattle ranching and later sheep farming. This put them in direct competition with the amaXhosa for cattle, and constituted the beginnings of commercial agriculture in South Africa. While many 1820 descendants moved far from the Eastern Cape, some still live on farms in areas where they were originally settled.

Almost 40 years after the arrival of the '1820 settlers', when eight Wars of Resistance had been fought between the colonial powers and the amaXhosa, and the boundary of the colony had been shifted to the Kei River, the new British governor, Sir George Grey, settled military veterans from the British German Legion in the area stretching inland from East London (Tankard, 2009), and from 1858 onwards, he recruited German peasants to augment this group and provide wives for the soldiers (see Map 4, p. 13). These settlers (about 3400 in total), mostly poor peasant folk with no resources of their own, were given very small farms (20 acres at £1 an acre) and little government support (Brodrick, 2009; Schuch & Vernon, 1996). In spite of severe hardships, most of the German peasants persevered on the land, though some settled in town, taking up trades such as blacksmithing and wagon making. Many became productive agriculturalists, able to make a living for themselves, and a significant number of the descendants of the original German settlers are still farming in the area, or occupy other professional and commercial positions in the 'Border' area.

These groups of settlers and indigenous peoples now faced the challenge of relating to one another, on land which they all needed for their stock. The trekboers' progress into the hinterland from the Cape was characterised by fierce ongoing battles against the San(hunter-gatherers) and Khoi (wandering pastoralists) over cattle. Mangcu (2012: 49) maintains that 'war between pastoralists and hunter-gatherers is inevitable because the latter want to eat what the former want to preserve'. While he notes that there were efforts on both sides to 'stand together against the trekboere', he also describes how the general commando combined all boer commandos and pressed Khoi into service to conduct a 'genocidal campaign' (Mangcu, 2012: 47) against the San. This resulted in the trekboers becoming dominant in the interior of the Cape colony (Penn, 2005; Terreblanche, 2002: 166).

Khoi people were often attached, voluntarily or by force, to boer families as servants, inboekelinge (serfs) (Terreblanche, 2002: 11), 'clients' or even farming partners. In the early 18th century, the trekboers learned much from the Khoi ways of farming sheep and cattle in harsh, dry conditions (Terreblanche, 2002: 166), the Khoi in turn learning from the trekboers the skills of shooting and horse riding, as well as the their language (a form of Dutch). Khoi servants were thus often able to act as interpreters when the Dutch encountered new groups of people. Trekboers became notorious for their harsh treatment of Khoi servants, often similar to the way that slaves were treated in the Cape colony, except that the Khoi 'violently resisted their enslavement' (Terreblanche, 2002: 168). Attempts by British authorities and philanthropists to bring trekboers to justice for their harsh treatment were an important cause of the Great Trek of 1836.

Terreblanche (2002: 165) describes the relationship between trekboers and Khoisan as 'changeable, dynamic and complex'. Mostert (1992) comments that conventional views of the trekboers' racial attitudes obscure the

bizarre, fundamental ambivalence that operated within trekboer society. The trekboer not only turned to Khoikhoi women for cohabiting partners, but he often raised large families by them. He was, besides, wholly adaptable to Khoikhoi society, and could shift easily between his own and theirs if circumstances required. (Mostert, 1992: 175, 176)

Reports also indicate that in the areas west of the Fish River where the trekboers settled, they soon began to live 'almost mixed together with the Kafirs' (Mostert, 1992: 226). Most of the Boers became fluent in isiXhosa, the language of the people among whom they found themselves.

The British settlers, by contrast, had very little contact with the amaXhosa initially; they were not allowed to employ the indigenous people as labourers (Mostert, 1992: 541), and a series of forts had been set up along the Fish River in an attempt to prevent the amaXhosa from coming into the colony. The settlers had little idea of the prior interactions between the British administration and the amaXhosa people, which had given rise among the Xhosa to fierce anger and resentment, so for many British settlers the Fifth War of Resistance, one of their earliest close encounters with the amaXhosa, was a shocking and unexpected experience. Mostert's (1992) description of the attack on Christmas Eve 1834 reflects the colonists' construction of the event:

[They] saw the surrounding hillsides livid with menace, ablaze with the massed red bodies that suddenly gathered there, and then liquid with scarlet movement as the whistling war-cry descended: a terrible sound, chilling in its undeviating and unmistakable purpose. (Mostert, 1992: 666)

The amaXhosa overwhelmed all white settlements, killing the men, burning and destroying houses and other property, and driving off thousands of cattle. 'Their raging desire was to drive the British back into the sea', claims Mostert (1992: 676). This war, which 'swept away the toil of fourteen years in a matter of hours', according to Butler and Benyon (1974: 259), had a brutalising effect on the British settlers. According to Sparks (1991: 62), it '... poisoned the racial attitudes of those settlers, deepening the ambivalences they had brought with them from "home"'. He elaborates on this ambivalence: while Britons believed strongly in democracy, they also believed that they were racially superior. Although British evangelical humanitarians pursued a liberal agenda, the English settlers facing the challenge of survival on a war-torn frontier had no time for humanitarianism. The war set up a burning hatred between the settlers and the philanthropists of the London Missionary Society, who promoted the cause of the indigenous peoples to the British government, resulting in equal rights legislation.

The German settlers, on the other hand, arrived on the frontier in the wake of eight Wars of Resistance and the episode known as the cattle killing (described and discussed under 'Struggles for power and territory'), all of which had left the amaXhosa hugely depleted in terms of numbers and morale. The stated aim of the policies of the then governor George Grey, unlike that of his predecessors, was to encourage the 'civilised coexistence' of black and white in the Cape colony (Tankard, 2009). German settlers lived in close proximity to the amaXhosa and the amaMfengu people and they wrestled side by side with hardship and poverty. As Schuch and Vernon (1996: 44) state, 'The early settlers learned many ways of coping with their often hostile environment from their Xhosa neighbours. The days of employing black people on the farms and in the homes only came later'. They also comment that 'many of the German children brought up in the Eastern Cape in the early days were trilingual and spoke Xhosa fluently' (Schuch & Vernon, 1996: 46).

Struggles for Power and Territory

The trekboers and amaXhosa had very similar lifestyles and priorities and were soon in conflict over grazing land, the trekboers sometimes joining forces with one clan against another. The First War of Resistance (1779), triggered by the shooting of a Xhosa man by a trekboer called Prinsloo, cost the boers 21,000 head of cattle (Giliomee, 2003: 70). The Second War of Resistance (1792) began with a boer alliance with Ndlambe, which aimed to expel a smaller group from the Zuurveld. For the trekboers, it led to the loss of some 50,000 head of cattle and their homes in the Zuurveld, almost all of which were burned down. This caused most to leave the Zuurveld altogether, and engage in counterraids to recover their stock (Giliomee, 2003: 71).

Once the British were established in a dominant position in the Cape, they engaged in a massive military operation driving approximately 20,000 amaXhosa out of the Zuurveld and across the Fish River. In this, the Fourth War of Resistance (1811), the British were ruthless, not only killing without mercy, but also seizing thousands of cattle and burning and trampling fields of ripe corn and vegetables (Peires, 1981: 65–66). This was the beginning of a series of increasingly violent wars over territory between the British and the amaXhosa: the Fifth War of Resistance (that of Nxele, 1819), the Sixth War of Resistance (that of Hintsa, 1834–1835), the Seventh War of Resistance (that of the Axe, 1845–1847) (Peires, 1981) and the Eighth War of Resistance (that of Mlanjeni, 1850–1853) (Peires, 1989).

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Language Learning, Power, Race and Identity by Liz Johanson Botha. Copyright © 2015 Liz Johanson Botha. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Eastern Cape, Then and Now
Chapter 2: Life History, Identity and Language Acquisition
Chapter 3: Childhood: Intimacy and Separation
Chapter 4: Rites of Passage: Paths Diverge
Chapter 5: Adult Life and Work: Language and Power
Chapter 6: Identity across Spaces: White Discourse and Hybrid Space
Chapter 7: Conclusion
Appendices

What People are Saying About This

Gary Barkhuizen

The stories in this book — stories of multilingualism, race, identity and power — are vividly retold, sensitively interpreted, and are framed by relevant theory. The outcome is an immensely readable and informative work, unique in that it tells readers about the experiences of elites learning an indigenous language in a rigidly divided socio-political context. These stories certainly hit home.

Editorial Reviews

The stories in this book – stories of multilingualism, race, identity and power – are vividly retold, sensitively interpreted, and are framed by relevant theory. The outcome is an immensely readable and informative work, unique in that it tells readers about the experiences of elites learning an indigenous language in a rigidly divided socio-political context. These stories certainly hit home.

Gary Barkhuizen