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Mark Sanders. 2016. Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press. 198 pp.
Language can serve as a window into a culture and its people; that is the essence of Sanders' Learning Zulu. The book evokes Toni Morrison's main message in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) of using Blackness to make Whiteness visible, and using Black people as a backdrop in White people's lives. The author, a White South African, writes about his experiences of learning not only the language of the majority of Black South Africans isiZulu but also what he refers to as "their ways of being." In this semi-autobiographical book the author discusses his experiences, with the Zulu people characterizing the background and contours of his life.
The book is divided into five chapters. All chapters are essentially about Sanders learning the culture and language of the Zulu people. The author begins the book by asking for uxolo (forgiveness). He asserts that writing Learning isiZulu is part of his atonement. While he does not explicitly state what he should be forgiven for or why he needs to atone, one can speculate that he wants to be for the sins of the apartheid regime against Black people in South Africa. But why ask for forgiveness when the very act of learning isiZulu and the Zulu culture under apartheid was revolutionary for a White person. Not many White people in South Africa wanted to learn the languages of Black people. Oppression of Black South Africans stripped African languages of their social capital or value. Only English and Afrikaans had social capital, Africans had to learn those languages in order to adjust and adapt to economic and socio-political oppression. So, by learning isiZulu, a language that carried no social value in apartheid South Africa, the author was rather an insurgent of sorts. Normally, it is the oppressed that learn the language of oppressors, not the other way around unless it is for facilitation of oppression. But in this case, he chose to learn the language of the oppressed for the sake of learning the language.
Chapter One discusses the...