Proposal for the ASAUK meeting in Birmingham – 11-13 September 2018.
S.E.K.Mqhayi, William G. Bennie and Diedrich Westermann and the Challenges of African Language Policy for the Xhosa in the 1930s
Peter Kallaway
Emeritus Professor, University of the Western Cape
Honorary Research Associate, University of Cape Town
ABSTRACT
This is an attempt to demonstrate the curious ambiguities of colonial language policy in Africa in the 1930s. In that context It links the careers of three unlikely individuals. Samuel Mqhayi, William Bennie and Diedrich Westermann. Mqhayi (1875-1945) was a Xhosa imiBongi, poet, linguist, journalist and historian, who lived in a rural village in the Eastern Cape where he was known first at Imbongi yaka Gompo (The Poet of East London) and later as Imbongi yesizwe jikelele (The Poet of the Nation). He was a prominent cultural activist and defender of Xhosa culture, tradition and language. William Bennie (dates) was the son of one of the founders of Lovedale missionary institution and Lovedale Press, and followed in his father’s footsteps as a Xhosa linguist and orthographer. After being a teacher at Lovedale he became the first Inspector of Native Education in the Cape during the 1920s. In the 1930s, with the, largely unacknowledged collaboration of Mqhayi, he was a major influence in the introduction of a new official orthography for the Xhosa language. With his missionary links to Lovedale Press and his influence in the Department of Public Education, he edited an extremely successful series of school textbooks, in particular Imibengo (a poetry anthology) and the Stewart Xhosa Readers : Primers to Senior Grade (1934 et seq) which dominated the school textbook market for twenty years. The third person mentioned is Deidrich Westermann (1875-1956). He was a pioneer of German linguistics and orthography. From his position as Professor of African languages at the University of Berlin, he was influential in the institutionalization of African Studies in Germany. (Afrikanistik) In the broader British colonial context he held the position of co-director of the International Institute of African Languages and Culture (IIALC) from 1926 to 1939. Through his editorship of the influential journals Koloniale Rundschau (Berlin) and the IIALC journal Africa (1928-1939), he was able to play an influential role in the crafting of a colonial research culture in Germany and in Britain. He was an advisor to Hailey on The African Survey (1938). During the ‘thirties he was drawn into the culture and dynamics of National Socialism in Germany and played a complex role in navigating the politics of the times. Through the IIALC he was influential in shaping British colonial office policy relating to African languages and education in West and East Africa and visited South Africa in 1934 at the invitation of his former student Werner Eiselen (a key member of the government’s Central Orthography Board and the later architect of Bantu Education in the 1950s) and W.G. Bennie. He assisted in the framing of a new official indigenous languages policy and drafting a new approach to Xhosa orthography. He seems to have also visited Lovedale and met Samuel Mqhayi, since he published Mqhayi’s autobiography in his path-breaking volume Afrikaner erzahlen ihr Leben (Essen,1938). Through the careers of these three men, this paper attempts to link the local to the global through the medium of literature and science in the late colonial period in Africa and understand these complex figures caught in the drift of powerful historical forces – religious, cultural, academic, scientific and ideological.