Overview

Divided by the Word refutes the assumption that the entrenched ethnic divide between South Africa’s Zulus and Xhosas, a divide that turned deadly in the late 1980s, is elemental to both societies. Jochen Arndt reveals how the current distinction between the two groups emerged from a long and complex interplay of indigenous and foreign-born actors, with often diverging ambitions and relationships to the world they shared and the languages they spoke. The earliest roots of the divide lie in the eras of exploration and colonization, when European officials and naturalists classified South Africa’s indigenous population on the basis of skin color and language. Later, missionaries collaborated with African intermediaries to translate the Bible into the region’s vernaculars, artificially creating distinctions between Zulu and Xhosa speakers. By the twentieth century, these foreign players, along with African intellectuals, designed language-education programs that embedded the Zulu-Xhosa divide in South African consciousness. Using archival sources from three continents written in multiple languages, Divided by the Word offers a refreshingly new appreciation for the deep historicity of language and ethnic identity in South Africa, while reconstructing the ways in which colonial forces generate and impose ethnic divides with long-lasting and lethal consequences for indigenous populations.

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9780813947358

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Reviews

"[An] intriguing and enriching study... Arndt makes a major contribution to readers' understanding of how identities were fluid in the pre-conquest era, how they gradually regressed to the mean, and how they can be a force for ethnic uplift today... This imaginative and important contribution to the history ofAfrica will deepen researchers' and reflective South Africans' understanding of why nations, rather than states, are so hard to construct in Africa today. -- ""Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries"" A fresh and compelling analysis of the constitutive nature of linguistic as well as cultural identities. Divided by the Word is more than a key text for South African and missionary historians; it's an important book for people wanting to better understand how identities are made and unmade in a variety of complicated historical spaces. -- ""International Journal of African Historical Studies"" An ambitious work that makes a bold argument, Divided by the Word is sweeping in both geographic and chronological scope, relevant to today, and approaches this history in an almost entirely unique way. While Arndt's conclusions will be controversial with some, his mastery of the evidence will be difficult for those most invested in maintaining the border between Zulu and Xhosa to counter. --Robert J. Houle, Fairleigh Dickinson University, author of Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faith in Colonial South Africa Arndt's study ably combines not only different types of historical evidence but also brings insights from other disciplines to shed new light on topics with which historians and scholars of South Africa have grappled in various ways for two centuries... Arndt's critical examination of the documentary record of nineteenth-century South Africa, in particular, highlights a deep knowledge of the available archives about South Africa in this period, as well as a keen ability to bring a critical, interdisciplinary eye to these sources. -- ""Journal of Interdisciplinary History"" Jochen Arndt's path-breaking study, Divided by the Word, examines how the South African languages, isiXhosa and isiZulu, have come into being. Meticulously researched and drawing on a rich array of rarely used primary sources, Arndt shows how the boundaries of these languages and ethnic identities were constantly shaped and reshaped over the centuries by a host of actors: European missionaries and mission rivalries, African interpreters and translators, black and white intellectuals, educators, and apartheid ideologues. Clearly written, this book is a must-read for historians and analysts of contemporary South African developments. --Robert Edgar, Howard University, author of The Finger of God: Enoch Mgijima, the Israelites, and the Bulhoek Massacre in South Africa This fascinating book challenges the too often accepted binary vision inherited from colonial and apartheid eras of the ethnographic representations of African peoples... The Zulu-Xhosa divide is, as convincingly demonstrated by the author in his conclusion, a fundamental element for the understanding of the 'new South Africa' (213) and should be more seriously considered by anyone who wishes to analyse the evolution of South African society since the end of apartheid and its endeavours to come to terms with colonialism and apartheid. This book is a major contribution to the understanding of the links between language and identity and their impact on the social development of a society which acknowledges eleven official languages and is still struggling to find a consensual way to define itself. -- ""Journal of Modern African Studies"""

[An] intriguing and enriching study... Arndt makes a major contribution to readers' understanding of how identities were fluid in the pre-conquest era, how they gradually regressed to the mean, and how they can be a force for ethnic uplift today... This imaginative and important contribution to the history ofAfrica will deepen researchers' and reflective South Africans' understanding of why nations, rather than states, are so hard to construct in Africa today. -- ""Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries"" A fresh and compelling analysis of the constitutive nature of linguistic as well as cultural identities. Divided by the Word is more than a key text for South African and missionary historians; it's an important book for people wanting to better understand how identities are made and unmade in a variety of complicated historical spaces. -- ""International Journal of African Historical Studies"" An ambitious work that makes a bold argument, Divided by the Word is sweeping in both geographic and chronological scope, relevant to today, and approaches this history in an almost entirely unique way. While Arndt's conclusions will be controversial with some, his mastery of the evidence will be difficult for those most invested in maintaining the border between Zulu and Xhosa to counter. --Robert J. Houle, Fairleigh Dickinson University, author of Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faith in Colonial South Africa Arndt's study ably combines not only different types of historical evidence but also brings insights from other disciplines to shed new light on topics with which historians and scholars of South Africa have grappled in various ways for two centuries... Arndt's critical examination of the documentary record of nineteenth-century South Africa, in particular, highlights a deep knowledge of the available archives about South Africa in this period, as well as a keen ability to bring a critical, interdisciplinary eye to these sources. -- ""Journal of Interdisciplinary History"" Jochen Arndt's path-breaking study, Divided by the Word, examines how the South African languages, isiXhosa and isiZulu, have come into being. Meticulously researched and drawing on a rich array of rarely used primary sources, Arndt shows how the boundaries of these languages and ethnic identities were constantly shaped and reshaped over the centuries by a host of actors: European missionaries and mission rivalries, African interpreters and translators, black and white intellectuals, educators, and apartheid ideologues. Clearly written, this book is a must-read for historians and analysts of contemporary South African developments. --Robert Edgar, Howard University, author of The Finger of God: Enoch Mgijima, the Israelites, and the Bulhoek Massacre in South Africa This fascinating book challenges the too often accepted binary vision inherited from colonial and apartheid eras of the ethnographic representations of African peoples... The Zulu-Xhosa divide is, as convincingly demonstrated by the author in his conclusion, a fundamental element for the understanding of the 'new South Africa' (213) and should be more seriously considered by anyone who wishes to analyse the evolution of South African society since the end of apartheid and its endeavours to come to terms with colonialism and apartheid. This book is a major contribution to the understanding of the links between language and identity and their impact on the social development of a society which acknowledges eleven official languages and is still struggling to find a consensual way to define itself. -- ""Journal of Modern African Studies""

Author Information

Jochen S. Arndt is Assistant Professor of History at the Virginia Military Institute.

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