The Zulu Philosophers

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Please check back later for the full article. The fortunes of the Zulu language were dramatically changed in the early part of the 20th century through the introduction of a standardized orthography and the creation of vernacular as a school subject. This should have led to a flourishing of Zulu literature and to the emergence of a vibrant literary culture. This, for the most part, is not what occurred. Instead, the literature that emerged was in the form of textbooks, which were used in primary and high schools, and sometimes even at university level, to ostensibly teach first-language Zulu speakers about their own language and culture. This vernacularization of Zulu has had the effect of masking and occluding the 19th century roots of Zulu writing. In that earlier era, there was no governing authority to regulate what and who could write in the language, nor was there a clearly defined market for Zulu texts. In this space, dominance was mainly achieved through the printing press, and many mission stations and missionaries purchased and used these presses for such a purpose. What emerged was a trans-ethnic, regional, and sometimes international network of Zulu speakers who communicated with each other via the pages of bilingual newspapers that were themselves often printed at mission stations. These Zulu writers and their creative works have languished in archives for decades, and are yet to find their interpreters and translators. Thus, although much has been written about Zulu intellectuals from the 1930s onwards—B. W. Vilakazi, H. I. E Dhlomo, his brother R. R. R. Dhlomo, C. L. S. Nyembezi—there is a yawning paucity of scholarly writing on the literary cultures that preceded this formalization of a “Zulu canon.” What complicates the recovery of this pre-vernacularization literature is that its most ardent promoters and contributors were missionary scholars and linguists such as John William Colenso and Henry Callaway, whose enthusiasm for the language was often marred by their association with the colonial project of conversion and subjugation.