‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’: Missionary Language-Learning in Mid-Nineteenth Century Natal

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Although the relationship of missionary linguistics to colonial power in Africa has been well-documented, far less attention has been paid to the role of language-learning in forging missionary identities. This article examines a diverse range of responses to the Zulu language among missionaries in Natal in the 1850s and 1860s – the period in which missionary work became consolidated in the colony – addressing their relationship not only to the work of colonisation, but also to missionaries' own evangelical self-conception. It argues that for many missionaries, from a range of denominations and backgrounds, the experience of second-language learning came to be definitive of their evangelical identity. In a positive sense, learning to speak Zulu was considered as the indispensable key to the central tasks of mission, whether primary attention was given to preaching, translation, or interpreting ‘the minds and modes of thought’ of Zulu-speakers. However, attitudes to the Zulu language were driven as much by anxiety as by a sense of confidence, or cultural and religious superiority. The insecurities commonly felt by novice language-learners were sometimes exacerbated as missionaries were exposed to censure or ridicule by the Zulu-speakers they sought to convert, and concerns about the sinful nature of the ‘unsaved’ Zulu were mapped on to attitudes to language. This article thus demonstrates some of the ways in which missionaries established, reinforced, or reconsidered their own evangelical identities by means of their relationship to the Zulu language, and explores some of the worries and fears that underpinned their conceptions of language-learning. The themes of laughter and contamination symbolise in different ways the dangers which language-learning could pose to missionaries' sense of self, power, or propriety.