Introduction

This book examines how the idea of learning Zulu became intertwined with issues of property, proprietorship, and appropriation. Drawing on the author's experience in trying to learn Zulu, the book explains how, in South Africa, the signifier “Zulu” had come to have a unique and privileged status. In this introduction, the author reflects on the play Ngicela uxolo , by Nkosinathi I. Ngwane, and how he began to understand the secret history of language, and language learning more specifically. He shares how some black African migrants were forced, under threat of violence, to pronounce shibboleths in Zulu. He also narrates the colonial- and apartheid-era elevation of “Zulu” involving intensive white appropriation and translation and shows that when missionaries in mid-nineteenth-century Natal standardized the Zulu language by writing grammars and compiling dictionaries, they also made Zulu—in its “pure” or correct form—a yardstick for being good, both morally and politically.