Learning Zulu

"Ostensibly about one man's quest to acquire a language, Learning Zulu is a clever, surprising, and enlightening journey into 150 years of South African history. Nobody has written quite this subtly about race and language in South Africa in a long while." --Jonny Steinberg, University of Oxford"Learning Zulu is a brilliant book. Unprecedented in the South African arena and very likely beyond, Sanders's 'secret history' is nothing less than a sustained tour de force and an extraordinary mix of linguistics, literary criticism, cultural studies, legal studies, psychoanalytic theory, and autobiography/memoir. This is very much a book about the psychic and psychopolitical investments involved in acquiring and teaching language in colonial and postcolonial settings."--Stephen Clingman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst"Mark Sanders has written a remarkable book that combines analysis and memoir, and mines documentary material and the individual experience of learning Zulu, to unearth the complex and sometimes controversial meanings of Zulu language, culture, and imagery for South Africans and others around the world. Learning Zulu will capture the attention of all readers interested in translation, self-formation, and cultural history in multilingual societies across the globe."--Loren Kruger, University of Chicago"This book offers a historical account of the Zulu language in South Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. Exploring the psychological significance and symbolic meaning of the language in the South African social imaginary, the work does a real service to the Zulu language and identity by pointing to the richness and complexity of its more recent history. Learning Zulu makes available a wealth of fascinating material."--Gareth Cornwell, Rhodes University