Listening versus Lingwashing: Promise, Peril, and Structural Oblivion When White South Africans Learn Indigenous African Languages

Abstract

This article focuses on the liberal South African whites in Cape Town who mediate their crisis of national belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages. After contextualizing white aspirations to linguistic belonging, some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, and various white metapragmatic judgments, I discuss promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, then argue that language learning invites a reckoning in which whites grapple with questions of interracial dynamics in the new South Africa and their own “structural oblivion”—that is, their failure, as elites, to understand precisely the reasons for which they are resented. Some critics charge that white self-congratulation can amount to what I call “lingwashing”: using language learning as a moral cover for enduring inequities. I suggest a potential remedy is to conceptualize language learning as a process not of self-comforting but of self-discomfiting, requiring both listening and humility.

In December 2013, an Afrikaner man named Alex de Kock posted a short video to YouTube that, as of August 2017, had garnered more than 1.6 million hits. The video is titled, in capital letters, “AMAZING TODDLER CAN SPEAK AFRICAN LANGUAGE.”¹ It opens with high drama: an epic soundtrack by deep-voiced singers in the amaZulu mbube style, as glowing purple font against a black background introduces “JP,” de Kock’s toddler. “Born an Afrikaans boy; two and a half years old,” the screen reads, “He lives in Cape Town, South Africa with his white parents. He is fluent in Afrikaans, which is his mother tongue and … he is also fluent in Xhosa.” (“Xhosa” is an Anglicization of the language’s indigenous name, “isiXhosa.”) As the video proceeds, we hear JP’s nanny, Portia, and a female friend off camera cheerfully ask the boy to identify parts of the body, animals, and the location of objects in the room, seemingly tickled that he’s absorbing the language. The introductory text explains that Portia made it “her business to teach him Xhosa.” The next screen announces plainly: “Xhosa is also the mother tongue of Nelson Mandela.” What makes this statement relevant, rather than a non sequitur, is that Mandela has been remembered by some as a model peacemaker between races for a post-apartheid South Africa (while his legacy is now quite contested, a romanticized image of his policies is still widespread, especially among whites). Already we are seeing what we are meant to make of the child’s learning isiXhosa.

A similar video of a three-year-old isiXhosa-speaking white boy happened to appear on YouTube around the same time. Posted by one Catherine Smit, it explains that the boy’s mother is being treated for breast cancer and that the video is dedicated to her, presumably to cheer her up. The male questioner off camera, who sounds like a native speaker, asks about the boy’s buddy who works on the farm. They chat about how to start a tractor and whether the boy knows how to swim. In the comments section, viewers praise him for knowing words such as igxamesi (a laborer’s residence on a farm). The latter video was relinked on the Sowetan Live news website, under the subheading “Some people think that learning other South African languages is too hard. This little boy is the exception to their rule.”² In this decorous phrasing, complex colonial and racial politics are both indexed and euphemistically sidestepped, a theme to which I will return.

More striking to me than the content of the videos are the prolific comments sections that follow, in which lively debates ensue about the promise and perils faced by white South Africans learning indigenous languages. YouTube’s virtual setting and comments sections invite audience participation and interpretation (Deumert 2014a), while furnishing a venue for a unique social accomplishment: exchanges between interlocutors from vastly different social contexts and subject positions who would ordinarily be unlikely to converse. The virtual forum thus pulls social frictions to the surface. As Daniel Miller and Don Slater (2000) note in their research on internet use in Trinidad, furthermore, the internet is a generative site for the performance of and debates about national identity. When it comes to language and identity (national and otherwise), too, online forums provide a venue for intense language-ideological or metapragmatic statements—that is, discourse about what particular uses of language achieve or at least symbolize. In this vein, Alex de Kock frames JP’s linguistic ability as an aspirational metaphor for racial integration and white virtue in South Africa’s post-apartheid “rainbow nation.” The copy directly under the video reads:

JP is two and a half years old and can speak Xhosa fluently. He travels to Khayelitsha [a township of Cape Town] with his parent’s house keeper, on a regular basis. Khayelitsha is a very dangerous area where few white people would dare to enter. Enjoy the video!!!

The text spooling across the video invokes a similar theme, noting that “JP has been [to Khayelitsha] on many occasions. He has not come to any harm. The JP story is an example of how bright the future is for South Africa.” JP’s venture into isiXhosa is thus framed in parallel to his ventures into this lower-income, higher-crime area, and the two journeys semiotically transfer onto each other; daring in an African language is social bravery, and vice versa, and both herald a future nation in which the privileged and the marginalized, those of all races, freely and happily interact without peril or ill will. Presumably all of this factors into why viewers are meant to receive the toddler as “amazing.”³

But when Alex de Kock holds his child up as “amazing,” he meets with some responses he didn’t anticipate. Plenty of comments on his video (and the Sowetan Live link to the other boy) are approving and positive, expressing awe and amazement, yet other comments challenge the framing of these children as remarkable, newsworthy, or even praiseworthy. Fractious and critical voices pull complex language ideologies to the surface, ideologies bound up with the politics of racial hierarchy and language learning in the new South Africa. My conversations in Cape Town, too, with amaXhosa (isiXhosa-speaking people; singular, umXhosa) and white citizens, including the directors of two isiXhosa instructional institutes with largely white clientele, furnish still more evidence of the contested semiotic, social, and moral burdens that white language learning carries. In the post-apartheid era, growing numbers of urban white South Africans are reaching toward the idea (even if not the reality) of learning indigenous languages, not as technologies of command and control as whites would have used them in the past, but rather as technologies of moral belonging. There is great possibility in this new enthusiasm, but also vulnerability and peril—including the peril of what I have elsewhere called “structural oblivion” (McIntosh 2016)—namely, the failure of an elite group to understand precisely the reasons for which it is resented. The implicit charge among some critics is that the exuberant praise for these children, as well as the efforts of other well-meaning white language learners, can amount to what I call “lingwashing”: using language learning as moral cover for enduring inequities.

I offer here brief historical context for white aspirations to linguistic belonging and discuss some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, attitudes that are thinly coded surrogates for broader social changes. I discuss positive and promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, focusing on whites’ accounts and their metapragmatic statements about isiXhosa language learning, and then I argue that language learning invites a kind of reckoning in which whites must grapple with intimate questions of interracial dynamics in the new South Africa. I discuss some of the more cynical receptions that have greeted contemporary white isiXhosa speakers, which do not emerge solely from the bitter evocations of so-called farm Xhosa used to order staff and servants around but also, today, from the politics of white self-congratulation. Drawing on these critical voices, I suggest that a potential remedy—for both analysts and social actors themselves—is to conceptualize language learning as a process not of self-comforting but of self-discomfiting, requiring a kind of radical humility.

A note about the limits of my data and analysis is in order. I have drawn some (though not all) of this material from online sources, whether YouTube comments or published blogs and articles by journalists, pundits, and others. As South Africans grapple with questions of morality and identity in the post-apartheid nation, their metacommentary about language is rich with impressionistic claims about what people do with language and what their doings mean from a moral perspective, particularly with regard to racial dynamics. The internet furnishes an invitation to a kind of soapbox, it seems, where people grow invested in public enunciations of where they stand—perhaps an especially appealing or strategic prospect in an era when elites transnationally and South African whites specifically are called on to reckon with their privilege. Yet sweeping public claims about the morality of nationwide linguistic dynamics inevitably simplify the vagaries of language-in-use, failing to do justice to the plurality of contexts in South Africa and how rapidly things are changing on the ground. The pragmatic realities of white South Africans using indigenous language vary considerably depending on the immediate situation: a white boss addressing nonwhite employees, for example; a child speaking with their nanny; a teacher addressing a university student as they cross paths; a hip-hop artist or comedian engaging in elaborate code-switching on stage that remixes, reclaims, and revalorizes languages and speakers in unexpected ways. Summary metapragmatic judgments thus fail to do justice to the manifold and often complex instances of verbal practice. The reader should note that moralizing proclamations about language learning are my primary intended topic here, more than a careful account of how verbal interactions actually unfold in situ.

A few remarks about terminology are also in order. There is insufficient space in this article to adequately disaggregate the category of “whites,” with wide-ranging ethnolinguistic backgrounds including Afrikaner, English, and beyond, as well as vast class disparities. Most of the material here comes from the internet and from politically liberal middle- to upper-middle-class whites in the Cape Town area; I recognize this is a limited demographic (and for discussions of white South Africans’ relationship to isiZulu to the east, see Sanders 2016). By “liberal” I mean inclined to pursue the alleviation of inequality (especially race based, given the salience of race in this context) through mechanisms such as state intervention, the protection of civil liberties, and expressed enthusiasm about inclusion and diversity in institutional life.

In terms of terminology that characterizes language varieties, the question of whether to construe Afrikaans as an “indigenous language” is complex. Afrikaans emerged in southern Africa; its grammar and lexicon evolved from the Dutch spoken by the traders and settlers who arrived in the seventeenth century, with influences from the languages of indigenous groups, migrants, workers, and slaves held by the Dutch settlers: Khoisan, Malagasy, West African, and Malay. But the language takes varied forms across regions and demographics; many people in “coloured” (what Americans might call “mixed-race”) communities in the Western Cape, for instance, speak a variety known as “Cape Afrikaans” or “Kaaps,” often with an accent and prosodic rhythm influenced by Bantu languages, marking their language as “less white.” While many Kaaps speakers would say they speak “Afrikaans,” white Afrikaans speakers have historically upheld the hegemony of transatlantic whiteness by denigrating the Kaaps dialect as “unintelligent, lazy, and criminal” (Williams 2016, 114). Standard Afrikaans, which emphasizes its European origins over other influences, was appropriated by whites and held up as higher prestige; and, as the language of the National Party that instituted apartheid, it has associations with oppressive white hegemony. I do not count the standard variety of Afrikaans as an indigenous language in this discussion. I reserve indigenous for autochthonous African language varieties that had subaltern status under colonial and apartheid regimes, while also recognizing that subordinated and fluid dialects of Afrikaans fall into a gray area that defies easy categorization.

Linguistic Atonement

Linguistic politics have been inextricable from racial hierarchies in South Africa, a place where three major language groups—Khoesan, Niger-Congo/Bantu, and Indo-European—have been in contact for more than 350 years (Deumert 2014b). The two languages associated with European dominance are (standard) Afrikaans and English. The Dutch “Cape Colony” fell to the British crown around 1800, and the British and Dutch vied for control until the British established the Union of South Africa in 1910, violently appropriating enormous amounts of land for the exclusive use of the white minority. When the Afrikaner nationalist National Party was elected in 1948, it began to rigidify the apartheid structure that had less formal precursors for many years. In 1953 the government denied Africans citizenship and forcibly relocated many to so-called homelands or Bantustans, with amaXhosa relegated to Transkei and Ciskei to the southeast. Meanwhile, legislation enforced stark racial asymmetries. AmaXhosa men were largely restricted to seeking employment in the mining industry as migrant laborers, living in segregated regions around white-controlled cities. In her description of apartheid, Rachael Gilmour (2006, 12) notes that “boundaries were erected not only on language and land, but also between bodies, cultures, intellects, and moral orders.”

In this context, languages linked to dominant whites were objects of resentment and sources of ambiguous, often oppressive power. Frantz Fanon ([1952] 2008) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) have argued that subjects of colonialism who opted to speak in “the master’s voice”—that is, in dominant colonial languages—were often motivated by the doomed hope of being recognized, while marking the internalization of their own inferiority. Fanon framed the dynamic sardonically: “The more the black Antillean [in the Caribbean] assimilates the French language, the whiter he becomes—i.e. the closer he gets to becoming a true human being” ([1952] 2008, 2). While such perspectives could be accused of overlooking the complex ways in which the colonized have sometimes appropriated colonial languages to forward resistant political agendas and black consciousness, the idea that colonial and settler languages represent oppression has had staying power. The 1976 Soweto student uprising, a flash point in South Africa’s history of resistance, was sparked in part by student opposition to the imposition of Afrikaans instead of English as the medium of instruction in half of the academic subjects.

In the same era, many people of European descent treated African languages as vaguely polluting, often using them as a means to exert authority. The apartheid state outlawed racially mixed marriages and discouraged African language learning in schools for whites, so the context of learning was typically from caregivers and, in rural areas, farm workers and their families. To be sure, some missionaries, traders, and white farming families (especially Afrikaners, historically more rural than Anglophones) in areas such as the Eastern Cape learned indigenous languages fairly well. But, says the linguist Liz Johanson Botha, the “vast majority” of the white population still didn’t have familiarity with an African language—and those who did, in isiXhosa speaking regions, used a colonial variety sometimes called “kitchen Xhosa” or “farm Xhosa.” This register is typically “very limited and functional” (Botha 2015, xii), mostly used for issuing directives and enforcing compliance, like “kitchen Swahili” in Kenya (McIntosh 2014, 2016; note that whites elsewhere in Southern Africa used other language varieties to communicate, such as the isiZulu-English pidgin known as Fanagalo or “kitchen Kafir,” a “demeaning substitute” for isiZulu itself [Sanders 2016, 24]).⁴ Russell Kaschula (1989) has suggested, furthermore, that employees on white farms have tended to accommodate the already limited language abilities of their white employers, sometimes resulting in whites learning a more stunted language variety than they realize.

Fluency in an indigenous language remains unusual in South Africans of European descent, especially urbanites. White linguistic isolation is common, with many amaXhosa code-switching to English or Afrikaans as the contact language when whites are present. Schools and universities increasingly offer African language classes (indeed, policy is shifting in this direction, however unevenly⁵), but to date relatively few whites have availed themselves of this opportunity.⁶ Here and there, says Botha (2015, xii), one finds an exceptional person able to speak with great ease and in a “less one-sided” fashion than was typical some decades ago, but white and amaXhosa informants alike tell me when a white adult goes out of their way to learn the language, it can come as a “shock.” What is striking, and more widespread than actual fluency, is a notable shift in the possible ideological stances that whites can adopt toward indigenous languages by virtue of the changing political landscape.

After 1994, the new South Africa made a declaration of parity between eleven official languages: English, Afrikaans, and nine indigenous languages given legislative support. IsiXhosa is among these, the second most common “home language” in South Africa, spoken by approximately 16 percent of the population, many of them concentrated in Eastern Cape and in Capetown.⁷ Many amaXhosa have migrated to urban areas since apartheid’s end, where some also speak isiZulu, English, Afrikaans, and creative hybrids (including one going by the tongue-in-cheek name “Xhinglish”). But the official parity of eleven language varieties has hardly amounted to parity in practice or in ideology, and in many contexts English is the language into which others are translated, with attendant loss of meaning and reinforcement of hierarchy (Coetzee 2013). Increasingly, writes the linguist Vivian de Klerk (2006, 598), amaXhosa “with power and privilege are choosing English,”⁸ while South Africans of all backgrounds are familiar with pervasive negative attitudes toward African languages (Dowling 2010). While some young black South Africans do proudly retain and cultivate attachments to isiXhosa⁹—indeed, in this tumultuous moment for identity politics, there are growing efforts to reclaim African languages as having prestige—others find indigenous languages “uncool” because they are not tightly linked to upward mobility or cosmopolitanism.¹⁰ One highly educated urban umXhosa woman in her twenties, for instance, tells me her Cape Town peers disdain isiXhosa as “village language” and contrast their trips to rural regions with the “civilized” feeling of speaking English with their cosmopolitan friends in Cape Town.

And yet, even as many amaXhosa reach toward English, some liberal South African whites have come to question their own ineptitude in African languages. The broader context, of course, has been a kind of national soul-searching as South Africa has transitioned, over more than two decades, from apartheid to democracy, precipitating what Melissa Steyn (2001, xxi) has deemed “one of the most profound collective psychological adjustments happening in the contemporary world.” The adjustments for whites have been uneven and diverse. Though whites still enjoy vast, disproportional socioeconomic advantages, the Black Economic Empowerment scheme has given a boost to black South Africans seeking opportunities, which some whites have found anxiety provoking. Some farmers have faced violent exile from their farms, while others (particularly some Afrikaner communities) have fallen into extreme poverty,¹¹ dynamics that have prompted a Boer Nationalist backlash from the right (Boer being the Dutch and Afrikaans word for “farmer,” used to denote descendants of the Dutch-speaking settlers).¹² Meanwhile, whites in the Cape Town suburbs grapple unevenly with diversification—one coloured professor told me of moving into a white-dominated suburb and watching a neighbor walk into a pole in order to avoid looking at him—a fleeting moment, but one that speaks volumes about a vast and complex societal discomfort.

In this fraught context, liberal whites struggle to find their moral and national footing. The white South African philosopher Samantha Vice (2010) wrote a widely discussed article arguing that the only morally fitting stance for South African whites is one of shame and removal of the self from political activity. Some white students, however, have been vocal activists, joining the recent “Rhodes Must Fall” and “Fees Must Fall” campaigns to pursue such aims as the decolonization of South Africa’s universities and the mitigation of class hierarchies in education, even though their involvement as whites has invited controversy. While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s proceedings linger in national memory, recent American discourse about racial inequality has also made its way transnationally to the lips of young south Africans in the form of, for example, the phrases “Black lives matter” and “white privilege.” Liberal whites find themselves in a context where the possibility of expressing their own guilt or historical insensitivity is always imminent and subject to public assessment. For some whites, their crisis of belonging means new affinities for indigenous lifeways—including, for instance, young white South African men joining amaXhosa agemates for initiation ceremonies (I have heard about such happenings through word of mouth; see also Botha 2015, 107). And as Quentin Williams and Christopher Stroud (2017) write, South Africans on the terrain of post-apartheid diversity grapple with their sense of citizenship through intimate, subtle, and informal linguistic stances. Stroud (2009, 217) contends that in South Africa, as in many contexts, language serves as “the very medium through which citizenship is enacted and performed.” No doubt the metapragmatic commentary I encountered (commentary that confirms how morally saturated language choice is in light of apartheid history) was acutely inflected by this historical moment of heightened concern about white privilege. I focus on whites who mediate their concerns about belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages.

In other publications (McIntosh 2014, 2016), I describe some related dynamics among Kenya’s smaller population of settler descendants. While many European settlers considered Kiswahili, Kenya’s lingua franca, as inferior to “proper” language (Whiteley 1969, 8), mostly suitable for giving orders, younger white Kenyans today speak good, sometimes excellent, conversational Kiswahili, and self-consciously tout their language abilities as a badge of belonging. Their professed love of the language is so acute it seems a kind of “linguistic atonement” (McIntosh 2014): a stance of ostentatious enthusiasm toward a language variety, pitched as if to mitigate a history of colonial discrimination. White language ideology, then, has become a powerful instrument for the performance of a morally laden white nationalism and white belonging.¹³

Among some liberal South African whites, the wish to reach toward indigenous languages is powerfully and anxiously felt. One middle-aged Afrikaner man from Durban tells me, “Most of us have moved beyond the apartheid mentality but we aren’t believed when we say it. I feel confident in my belonging but insecure that I won’t be perceived as belonging.” He goes on: “Learning Zulu is on my bucket list,” part of publicly establishing himself “as an African. … If I tried to say [‘I’m an African’] in public right now, people would stone me.” Sanders (2016, 9) concurs that “learning [Zulu] has, for some, been a way of becoming African” and has frequently heard compatriots “wistfully” remark, “I have always wanted to learn Zulu” (23; but see discussion of their inhibitions, below). Hagen Engler (2013), writing for the Mail and Guardian, self-identifies as a “bleeding-heart liberal” who is trying to learn isiXhosa. Now married to an umXhosa woman, he traces contemporary social segregation in part to language dynamics: “I believe that one reason white people eschew exclusively black company is because we would have no idea what was going on. Our language abilities are so poor that we’ve become social paraplegics, no, quadriplegics.” Journalist Barney Mthombothi (2015) uses similar phrasing, marveling at white South Africans who “pounce on you at dinner parties, asking all sorts of questions about what’s happening in the country, as if they’ve just flown in from Mars. They’re South Africans born and bred, but they have the feeling they’re missing something. And they’re right. They don’t understand the language spoken on the dance floor. To be unilingual in today’s South Africa is to be socially and politically retarded. It’s a handicap.”¹⁴

Crippled, “retarded”—metaphors of total linguistic disability haunt attentive whites. So, too, does negative moral judgment. Mthombothi goes on: “There can be no excuse. … What’s lacking is the will or desire to [learn these languages].” Apparently whites who do not speak an indigenous language may risk being judged as deficient in their moral and cultural citizenship. Some white politicians have taken note of this dynamic. The controversial Helen Zille, premier of the Western Cape, former mayor of Cape Town, and former leader of South Africa’s opposition party Democratic Alliance, famously urged each white member of her party to learn an African language. She tells a BBC journalist, “Of course [language learning’s] not enough … [but] what we have to do is show people across lines of ethnicity and race that we really care for each other.”¹⁵ Zille herself speaks isiXhosa (though her gaffes have gotten her into trouble¹⁶), as does another Democratic Alliance party member, Athol Trollip, 2016 mayor-elect of Nelson Mandela Bay, whose fluid code-switching between English and isiXhosa in his public addresses were enthusiastically noted by many (if not all) in the mass media and public.¹⁷ Some commentators saw his election as a sign that South Africa might be leaning away from strictly racialized voting patterns, citing Trollip’s language abilities as intrinsic to his appeal. Speaking indigenous languages, of course, does not guarantee that a politician will see the world like a black citizen—consider, for instance, Zille’s suspension by the Democratic Alliance’s Federal Executive in June 2017 after she posted a message on Twitter about the “positive aspects” of colonialism in a stark failure of empathy with many of her constituents.¹⁸ The fact remains, however, that language learning remains semiotically powerful, taken in some contexts as an index of good will.

Within this climate, well-meaning whites sometimes go out of their way to learn indigenous languages or to encourage such language learning among their children. Journalist Brent Meersman (2013) writes, “Every thinking white South African must have at least toyed with the idea of learning to speak an African language.” The effect in his own life has been positive: “you feel you can belong in places you never really did before.” A white high school student posting on a blog, enthuses that “Learning an African language [is] a way to show that we’re committed to reconciliation in our country. … It’s a gesture which aims to forge connections between us and people we wouldn’t usually interact with.”¹⁹ The director of a Cape Town language institute, Sarah, tells me the majority of her white South African adult students are “morally driven” to learn an indigenous language. “They feel it’s time to break down barriers. It’s time for them, as citizens, for them to take this on.” Many, she adds, have been wanting to do this “for a long time. It’s really about belonging; wanting to belong but feeling excluded.” Sanders (2016), too, finds that guilt (at being the beneficiary of a historically wrong system set up by his predecessors) and a wish for forgiveness are deep psychodynamic drivers in his years-long quest to learn isiZulu. This sense of urgency comes to a head in the semiparodic cartoons from white South African artist Brett Murray in his 2002 exhibition “White Like Me.”²⁰ In one image, a captain of industry kneels in striped pajamas by his bed as if in prayer, squeezing his eyes shut and affirming: “I must learn to speak Xhosa.” In another, we see Saint Peter at the gates of heaven, instructing a white man to engage in the ultimate gesture of linguistic atonement: “Say ‘I want to go to heaven’ … in Zulu.”

Whites’ motivations involve not only atonement but also, in some cases, a longing to connect. Some frame language learning as the key to greater understanding of marginalized perspectives, adopting a folk-Whorfian view that such perspectives are imminent in the very structure of African grammars. Meersman (2013), for instance, writes, “There is much beauty in a language such as isiXhosa; the way words are formed, for instance: umntu ngumntu ngabantu (a person is a person through people), to which can be added the concept of ubuntu (not easily translatable), mankind (uluntu), African culture (isiNtu [sic]), or a person whose health is of grave concern (intunu-ntunu). That Xhosa is constructed out of morphemes (a unit of meaning) itself in a way mirrors African culture’s emphasis on communion and co-operation as opposed to Western individualism. You can only really understand a world view through its language.”

The penultimate sentence will amuse those with linguistic training, for all languages are constructed out of morphemes, which are simply minimal units of meaning. Meersman is probably trying to invoke isiXhosa’s agglutinative structure; Bantu languages often string together multiple affixes in a single word, and he seems to find this indicative of the communal links between isiXhosa speakers themselves (see Irvine and Gal [2000] for a discussion of this semiotic mapping of linguistic features onto speakers, which they term “iconization,” and later “rhematization”²¹). In Meersman’s portrayal, language structure is a neat mirror of cultural values and perspectives—and perhaps, as well, a mystical means of entrée into a different cultural mind-set. The assumptions are problematic, but they also highlight a yearning to understand and commune across racial lines that were once taboo to cross.²²

A young anglophone white South African, Craig Charnock,²³ tells me of the feelings of racial alienation that led him to learn isiXhosa and ultimately open his own small language institute. He grew up in the affluent seaside suburb of Camps Bay, but in his twenties he came to question the mores behind the business science he had been studying at University of Cape Town. He started to explore non-Western religions, while questioning what he had taken for granted as a child: “[I had this] this tremendous sense of, like, how come I love these Xhosa mamas [his nannies] who are in my life, who lived in my home, who fed me, clothed me—I love them deeply, and I’ve never been to even their township home, I’ve never been to their villages, I don’t know anything about their culture, my basic Xhosa is very poor; it’s like ‘Can I have supper, thank you very much.’” Charnock also began to ruminate about the linguistic double standard among whites: “People think, ‘well, I’m not a racist; I’ve got black friends.’ It’s like, well, that black friend is very aware they can’t speak to you in their language or can’t really talk to you about this or about that. You know, there’s all these restrictions.”

Charnock’s journey of the soul took him to the former Transkei at first, to train as a sangoma (an indigenous healer), though later he would grow reflective about the politics of cultural appropriation. He then lived in a township as a teacher, and over the course of these years picked up quite a bit of isiXhosa. Other white South Africans reacted strongly, he says, telling him: “‘Oh wow, oh gosh, oh wow, I really wish I could talk [like that]. … We’d love to speak—how did you learn Xhosa, won’t you teach us?’” Charnock opened a nonprofit he optimistically called “Ubuntu Bridge” (ubuntu is a Bantu term for common humanity, including sociality and mutual dependence), in which he and several amaXhosa colleagues teach isiXhosa to interested parties, especially South African whites. He explains why his clients come to him: “There’s a common bunch which are pretty standard. … I think people are embarrassed that they don’t speak it. [I mean,] anyone with a heart and a brain should be downright ashamed that they can’t pronounce people’s names perfectly. Give them that humanity, perfectly.” Charnock’s umXhosa co-worker, one of the instructors at Ubuntu Bridge, describes their mission: “We’re working towards a country where, you know, it won’t be shocking or surprising for a white person to be speaking isiXhosa or isiZulu.”

Charnock is vulnerable to the accusation that, as a white man who has opened an isiXhosa institute, he is perpetuating old hierarchies. He doesn’t strictly disagree. He has given up lucrative career opportunities to run Ubuntu Bridge and lives very modestly compared with the circumstances in which he grew up (Ubuntu Bridge has struggled financially), but he nevertheless feels guilty about the structural hierarchies perpetuated by his position:

I’m a white male. That plays very heavily on my heart. Like on the one hand yes that’s great, I’m a white male so therefore I’m a role model for other white males to, like, be humble. I’ve, like, washed black people’s dishes for them, it’s good for you, and—learn their language, learn their culture, and be respectful. Great. But I’m also aware that if [Ubuntu Bridge] is too successful or I’m occupying too much space in terms of making … videos or this and that, it’s a white male occupying a space that could be occupied by at least a woman or by a black woman or by whatever.

Charnock knows his hand-wringing does not erase the fact that whites own the language institutes where other whites learn the language. Indeed, most isiXhosa textbooks are authored by white South Africans as well (such as Tessa Dowling and Paul Wise’s 2006 Xhosa for the Classroom and Alexandra Bryant’s 2007 Xhosa for Second Language Learners). He increasingly tries to feature amaXhosa people in his presentations and videos, but Charnock’s white face, he notes with chagrin, is part of what appeals to prospective white learners. Larger forces have stacked the political economy and the politics of racial interaction in such a way that, in a country with millions of first-language isiXhosa speakers, whites are the most prominent exponents and perhaps beneficiaries of white language learning, even as they hope to atone for the hierarchies of apartheid.

Almost as striking as the wistful white enthusiasm for language learning, however, is the relatively low proportion of such whites who follow through and learn an indigenous language well. About his peers who yearn to learn isiZulu, for instance, Sanders (2016, 23) observes “a wall of ‘buts’ erected against” their expressed wish. “After witnessing the hand-wringing time and again,” he notes, “one begins to suspect the operation of a deeply rooted prohibition against the endeavor, or at least some powerful inhibition … the black languages, as some call them, they are just too hard.” The social and structural inhibitions have indeed been many, but the question of whether these languages are “too hard” is a semiotic-ideological matter to which I now turn.

Click Enthusiasms

As some white South Africans have aspired to learn African languages in this era of the “rainbow nation,” white descriptions of isiXhosa have undergone a shift, in keeping with the truism that language ideology tracks broader social and political ideologies. There are once again analogues in Kenya, where settler descendants have gone from the early twentieth-century perception of Kiswahili as lowly, broken, and unpleasant to perceiving it as “a beautiful language” (McIntosh 2014). For white South Africans apprehending isiXhosa, the main semiotic flash point has been the click consonants in the language. Whites have framed and reframed these clicks over the years to embody blacks’ Otherness or their common humanity, depending on the historical and cultural moment.

The clicks in isiXhosa originated in the Khoisan languages spoken by hunter-gatherers and pastoralists in Southern Africa, and with the Bantu expansion into the south by Nguni-speaking herders, Nguni languages (now isiXhosa and isiZulu) began to incorporate click sounds from Khoisan languages. Though some Khoisan were integrated into Nguni communities, Nguni-speakers initially wielded click sounds as icons of social distance; according to Irvine and Gal (2000:40), “it was apparently for the very reason of their conspicuous foreignness that the clicks were first adopted into the Nguni languages, providing a means for the Nguni speakers themselves to express social difference and linguistic abnormality.” This phonological integration gave form to a respect register called hlonipha (Irvine and Gal 2000). In the hlonipha register, one would not directly pronounce, for instance, the names of one’s respected in-laws, but would substitute clicks for some consonants in their names as a mode of indirection. Subsequently, through repeated use, clicks became commonplace in isiXhosa phonology (Herbert 1990; Irvine and Gal 2000).

In the years before 1994, most white stances toward clicks and click languages were pejorative, just as colonials generally tended to denigrate non-Indo-European languages (Errington 2001). According to the sociolinguist Ana Deumert (2014b), it was important to some colonial linguists in their early dictionaries and grammar books to portray indigenous languages as easy to master, supposedly like the Africans who spoke them. But the archives also document an extensive history of colonials and missionaries perceiving clicks as a daunting obstacle. If early Nguni-speakers had initially heard foreignness in clicks, some European travelers projected a different kind of iconicity onto them, hearing them as inhuman, animalistic, or otherwise emergent from nature—much like Africans in the European imagination. Reports characterized clicks as sounding like hens clucking (Gilmour 2006, 37), magpies chattering, stones hitting one another (Irvine and Gal 2000, 40), “croaking guttural sounds,” “unearthly sounds” that no orthography could capture (Irvine 2008), and “strange and barbarous articulations” (Deumert 2014b, 211). One nineteenth-century philologist, Wilhelm Bleek, even suspected the clicks would furnish linguistic clues to the missing link between humans and other apes (ibid.).

In some narratives, furthermore, the alien quality of these languages meant Europeans should have difficulty acquiring them. Many early travelers, perhaps especially British ones, deemed isiXhosa and its clicks indeterminate, mysterious, confusing, “extraordinary,” or “difficult” (Gilmour 2006, 49, 37). Some expressed both wonder and dismay that some Afrikaner colonists on the frontier could speak isiXhosa so well, something they usually did, says Gilmour (37), owing to the care of African nannies. The absorption of a caretaker’s language is predictable within the framework of human psychobiology, but British narratives of wonder appeared to draw on the notion that Europeans are ontologically ill suited to learn these “uncivilized” (because they are African) languages. When they did, it seemed both unnatural and a vaguely suspect kind of intimacy.

Today, clicks have taken on a whole new set of positive or magnetic meanings. Some Khoisan revivalists, for instance, are invigorating their collective identity with the help of clicks, which they insert as an indexical icon into speech and orthography (e.g. “!Khoisan”), thus “evoking ancestral roots even in the absence of fluency” through a kind of “sound-symbolism” (Brown and Deumert 2017, 586). For Western outsiders, the clicks featured in a series of instructional YouTube videos made by an isiXhosa speaker have garnered a disproportionate number of erotically interested comments that fixate on the clicks as exotic and sexual (Deumert 2014a); most of those remarks have come from outside South Africa.²⁴

Among white South Africans, it seems a point of contention now is whether the clicks and the language generally are “hard” or “easy.” The politics behind these judgments are complex. Charnock tells me of his dismay at how few white adults actually make the effort to learn isiXhosa and in his public presentations, such as a recent Tedx Talk in Cape Town, one has the sense he is trying to combat years of Othering and alienation with a campaign of demystification.²⁵ At one point, for instance, he shifts abruptly from his South African accent to a British one to imitate a pompous Briton, possibly a colonial type: “Oh golly, those darned clicks, I just can’t do them, I say!”²⁶ Charnock then tries to bring his (largely white) audience back to basics, breaking the clicks down accessibly: “I would like us now to all learn them together. There’s three clicks.” On “Bush Radio,” Charnock reiterates the point, saying, “Look, I can literally teach anyone in about a minute how to do the three different clicks … you just need to sort of identify them and simplify it … you’ve just to tell people the ‘X’ click is the horse-riding click [he goes on].”²⁷ To a journalist, he says, “Xhosa is very phonetic and I find the grammar to be consistent and logical. It’s much easier to learn than English.”²⁸

In conversation with me, however, Charnock is humble about the isiXhosa grammar and lexicon, recognizing, for example, that in spite of his apparent fluency, a truly deep grasp of it would take him many more years. (Worth adding, too, is that linguists count nine or more clicks in isiXhosa, though they do have three main points of articulation, dental, lateral, and postalveolar, represented orthographically by the letters c, x, and q, respectively.) Like Sarah at the other language institute, too, he concedes that all too many whites are daunted by how challenging and complex the language is and end up leaving off their studies. Charnock’s performances in public, then, don’t seem intended as flippant statements about isiXhosa’s simplicity, but rather as an attempt to bring whites over to learning it. In Charnock’s rendering, the language has gone from being “mysterious” and “alien” and “hard to learn” to being accessible, logical, and something to embrace, just as—the semiotic subtext is—white perceptions of African people should have shifted.

Looking at these shifting language ideologies in the aggregate, we might say there’s been a shift from the historical notion that clicks and click languages are animalistic (and thus either easy for whites to master or hard because alien to whites, depending on how one spins it), to the contemporary representation of clicks and click languages as perfectly human (and thus easy, because right within reach, or hard, because their complexity must be dignified). Put another way, in representing indigenous languages, whites in South Africa have wielded both “easiness” and “hardness” in service of racial hierarchy and racial equality. Today, liberal whites broadcasting their enthusiasm for the new, pluralistic South Africa take the latter as their language-ideological springboard.

The Promise: Post-Apartheid Connections

How, then, do black South Africans, especially isiXhosa speakers, receive these white linguistic efforts? On line, there are quite a few celebratory voices with isiXhosa handles in comments sections responding to the toddler videos.²⁹ Examples include: “OMG that is so freaking cute … this is cool.” “Lo mfo uzokhula esithetha njengabantu abantsundu isiXhosa [This guy will grow up speaking isiXhosa like black people]. Now this is a good story to tell for South Africa.” One viewer comments that Alex de Kock is “in the +ve direction of South Africa. Thousand [sic] of men and women with such an attitude will help us move forward with action not words as usual.” Says another: “Kudos to the parents for allowing him to learn Xhosa, I know some parents who wouldn’t allow that.” Finally, again from someone with an isiXhosa handle: “this kid shall be president one day, he’s just too awesome.” Presumably JP is imagined here as a leader who would be able to reach across social divisions (though one notes a potential double standard; millions of South Africans of color have spoken English and Afrikaans over the decades without being considered presidential).

Some white South Africans who speak isiXhosa report feeling they have been better able to adapt to changing post-apartheid conditions, and better able to humanize amaXhosa interlocutors. Liz Johanson Botha (2015) finds such a dynamic among her subjects, four white adult isiXhosa speakers, most of whom had a strong linguistic base from childhood through interactions on their family farms in Eastern Cape. One of these men, Ernie, is evidently respected as a kind of cultural broker, sometimes called on to mediate disputes about (for instance) shoplifting at the supermarket where he is a manager. He is proud that one of his friends, an umXhosa doctor, refers to him playfully as “a white Madiba,” the clan name of Nelson Mandela (151). And Brendon, an academic, has mastered isiXhosa to the point of immersing himself in its oral poetry and having political discussions that he says almost compelled him to join the Pan Africanist Congress (142). Clearly, in some cases, bridges are being crossed—at least, from the perspective of these white speakers (their amaXhosa interlocutors might not see it just this way).

Craig Charnock describes a positive response to his own efforts, with some interlocutors appreciating the very fact that Charnock appears to value isiXhosa and its speakers enough to make an effort to learn it:

The response from Xhosa people ever since I started learning was just so much warmth, gratitude, surprise, encouragement, you know, um, but like literally people thanking me. Which always embarrassed me because I’m like geez, you know, like, this makes no sense, you know, that they’re thanking me [he laughs ruefully]. But the point was that they really really appreciated it. Because it showed on some level, like, that I actually valued their culture, their language, or even just them as human beings, you know, and like, rather than treating them the way people had become accustomed to being treated by white people which was basically not as people.

A friend of Charnock’s, a young umXhosa woman, says approvingly, “It’s just super rare for a white guy to speak fluent Xhosa.” Most adult learners at Ubuntu Bridge and other language institutes never approach fluency; more typically, they learn greetings and a few basics. Still, white learners report their interactions in Cape Town with native isiXhosa speakers have been enhanced, from their perspective, anyway, though these interactions often take place across class lines rather than on socially equal terms (see also Walker 2005, 139–40). So, for instance, one woman reports that after years of driving in silence past the security guard at her office parking lot, she began to greet him in isiXhosa, and they now smile and chat with each other each morning and afternoon. A man reports that a traffic official was about to ticket him, but was so pleased by the man’s ability to speak some isiXhosa that he knocked 2,000 rand off the fine. And a young man was at a social club with his elderly grandfather, who was characteristically gruff with the staff. Drawing on his new language abilities, the grandson uttered the crucial phrase “Ndicela uxolo [I’m sorry],” as if to suggest, “My grandfather comes from that generation, and I see the problem, and I’m different.” By his account, this apology for his grandfather’s attitude, in a language his grandfather would never have apologized in, transformed the mood among staff. Sometimes, then, the use of isiXhosa by whites—particularly when the register is perceived as friendly rather than patronizing—feels to them like it creates a context of shared friendliness. For reasons like this, Charnock sometimes adduces a well-worn quote attributed to Nelson Mandela: “If you talk to a person in a language they understand, you speak to their head. If you talk to them in their language, you speak to their heart.”³⁰

The possibilities opened by these interactions are real—but so too is the potential for cynicism. It is not especially common for these interactions to transcend class barriers, for instance, which opens the question as to how much “connection” is taking place. As Botha (2015, 48) reminds us, furthermore, white speakers of isiXhosa “could be seen positively or negatively, depending on the situation, his or her positioning in relation to the audience and the register of the language that he or she speaks.” Riann, who works in agricultural development and uses isiXhosa extensively in talking with farmers, is “sensitive [that] when you speak Xhosa in a professional capacity one must be very careful not to speak the boere Xhosa, the old farm Xhosa, the authoritative voice … if you respect people you don’t do that” (130). Another of Botha’s informants, George, works with amaXhosa employees at a timber company, and since his isiXhosa abilities are more limited, evoking the grammatically stunted “kitchen Xhosa,” his work colleagues sometimes tease and laugh at him for it (137). Clearly, whites speaking isiXhosa haven’t been uniformly well received. The reasons for that, furthermore, go far deeper than objections to “old farm Xhosa.” They extend as well to a subtler dynamic, one that cautions whites about facile self-congratulation.

The Perils: Structural Oblivion and Lingwashing

Like liberal elites everywhere, even the most well-meaning white South Africans can encounter a gap between their good intentions and their reception. The condition of “structural oblivion” described in the introduction can take many forms, and one manifestation is the difficulty elites often have in seeing the complex social politics of their semiotic choices. This brings me to “lingwashing,” a term I coin to put a finger on a very specific type of structural oblivion. The phrase is inspired by the term “pinkwashing,” used by critics of Israel and discussed by scholars such as Jasbir Puar (2013). Puar notes that Israel and other nations, including the United States, tout the state’s LGBTQ acceptance and tolerance as a barometer for its moral and democratic righteousness. Along the way, though, these“gay-friendly” stances can distract from—“pinkwash”—other forms of state oppression. Although language learning among South African whites is not a state-run dynamic, it seems some South Africans of color suspect white language learning—or, at least, ostentatious white language learning—may sometimes be a kind of decoy or moral cover that holds the speaker up as heroic, but obfuscates other, enduring forms of exclusion, even if inadvertently or unconsciously.

Those videos of white toddlers, for instance, have been subject to as many critical voices as complimentary ones. The video of JP provoked a serious backlash, in part because of its title: “Amazing Toddler Speaks African Language” (the Sowetan Live website received similar critique for treating the other toddler video as newsworthy). Most YouTube videos titled “amazing toddler” depict toddlers skateboarding, playing musical instruments, doing advanced math, or otherwise engaged in some precocious accomplishment. Critics of the toddler videos, then, sometimes adopted a strategically underwhelmed stance. Says one: “I’m not phased by this … if we can speak English well, surely a Mlungu [a white person] doing the same shouldn’t be a shock!” Says another: “Kids learn languages faster than adults. Many black kids speak English at that age. It is long overdue. No news here. Next article please.” Another critic objects: “What is extraordinary about it ‘specially if the nannies are Native Africans? What is odd is rather that Whites in South Africa refuse to learn Zulu, Xhosa and other native languages.” Some commentators use sarcasm to make the point: “In addition to IsiZulu, my young children can speak SeSotho, English and a bit of Afrikaans. Please Sowetan, write a story about them. I want them to be famous like these … white kids who happen to speak fewer languages than my children.”

We see a few strands of critique in here. One concerns a double standard. If we treat this little boy as heroic and amazing, the argument goes, we are settling for too little. JP hasn’t overcome any terrible obstacles; he’s simply performed the inevitable childhood cognitive act of absorbing the language around him, so praising him feels like overvaluation of minimal white effort, coupled with amnesia about the multilingual pluralism that was historically foisted on South Africa’s people of color, who had to be multilingual to survive. Another strand of critique recalls the essentialisms (McIntosh 2005) that made European arrivistes feel they were witnessing something unnatural when they heard rural white Afrikaners speaking isiXhosa. These white children are only amazing if one assumes different races are born with different kinds of minds and are constitutionally, innately inclined to speak deeply different languages, in which case it’s unnatural (amazing!) for this primitive language to emanate from a highly evolved white body. To treat JP’s learning, then, as if it’s a remarkable sideshow act or some sort of double rainbow is to traffic in perilous essentialisms.

And then, there are those both online and offline who find it potentially patronizing when whites speak isiXhosa. A young umXhosa woman in Capetown tells me that if a white person abruptly initiates conversation in the language, it “suggests they are less civilized.” Botha’s informant Riann cautions as well that one must be careful not to “start off in Xhosa immediately” when meeting someone for the first time, since one might be received defensively: “Do you think that I can’t understand English? Do you think that I’m stupid?” (132). Similarly, a 2013 cartoon in the Mail and Guardian features a white man speaking isiZulu from a book to an umZulu friend, who replies “Why are you speaking guidebook Zulu to me? Don’t you think I speak English? Am I a cultural curiosity to you?” (Engler 2013).

Other online commentators feel that obsequious enthusiasm for white language learning may reaffirm racist hierarchies. One phrases his objection bitterly: “So Sowetan must we now celebrate just because a son of racist can speak Xhosa?” Writes another, responding to some enthusiastic commentators: “Such inferiority complex! … In as much as most white people hardly bother to learn an African language, that doesn’t mean that we should exuberantly marvel at those who take the time to learn. … It is like we are seeking affirmation from white people, argh.” These writers are doubly disgusted; first, by the structural oblivion of whites who imagine they merit applause for this language learning without realizing the manifold forms of structural hierarchy that are not resolved by it and, second, by their peers who applaud, thus being willing to overlook whites’ structural oblivion.

Sarah tells me she’s sometimes encountered precisely this reception. Cynics have informed her that her language instruction efforts seem like a patronizing, “petty answer” to “deep, historical, situational problems,” rather than a “real solution.” She concedes there is an idealistic enthusiasm among the “new-age Cape Townians” who sign up for her courses hoping their efforts might result in “harmony and equality.” Perhaps there are shades of lingwashing as well in Meersman’s hope that in learning isiXhosa grammar he can grasp “the Xhosa world view”—after all, at least some European settlers have spoken these languages for centuries without apparent sympathy or cultural colloquy. As Botha has documented, many amaXhosa are well aware that isiXhosa-speaking white farmers have historically “made false assumptions and assertions about how much they knew about the natives” (2015, xiii). And some whites engage in rudimentary communications that never take them out of their comfort zone—such as the Afrikaner student at a northern university who appears far more comfortable “practicing her Zulu on her housekeeper” than with amaZulu fellow students (Walker 2005, 139–40; see also Cotton 2015, in her discussion of Anglophone university students who study isiXhosa). In such stances and interactions, whites may comfort themselves with a false sense of connection and understanding, one that obfuscates race-based class structures.

Optimism itself, in fact, may sometimes be complicit in lingwashing. Take, for instance, that widely cited Mandela quotation about reaching a person’s heart through their language. It’s true: Mandela encouraged mutual language learning as part of reconciliation in South Africa. Yet there are acute hierarchical politics to speaking the language of the Other, as Fanon ([1952] 2008) and wa Thiong’o (1986) recognized. As one online commentator responds to the invocation of Mandela’s words, furthermore, “Black kids have speaking English and Afrikaans for decades now … why didn’t it help with racism? S’dididi [confusion].” The Mandela quote can also be challenged on grounds of its presumption of good will. If whites speaking African languages are to “reach someone’s heart,” this hinges on an exceedingly gracious and politically forgiving response that, clearly, some people are prepared to offer, but others are not. Meersman (2013) has encountered this problem and tries to keep his self-congratulation in check: “Some young black people take offence. … The attitude is: don’t think because you learned to speak a few words of my language you’re okay. The reply to which is, I don’t.”

One anglophone South African blogger pursues this dilemma to a disenchanted endpoint, in a post titled “I must learn to speak Xhosa and other white girl problems.” After embarking on early study of the language, she ways, she encountered a quote by J. M. Coetzee that “said something along the lines of since millions of South Africans speak perfect Xhosa, why would anyone need me and my bad accent? … I realized I had an exaggerated sense of my own relevance, and that the wheels of poverty and corruption would keep turning whether or not I was able to ask the petrol attendant for R500 unleaded in his own language.” In a resounding criticism of lingwashing, the blogger concludes that “My learning Xhosa will not change history, erase the past, nor give deserving people homes with sea views.”³¹

On Listening and Vulnerability

So what are liberal white South Africans to do? Can they avoid lingwashing without giving up on the endeavor of learning indigenous languages? If Sarah and Craig are to be believed, a crucial addition to the will to learn language is the willingness to be humbled in the process. Humility is the antithesis of colonial- and apartheid-era language ideology. Nineteenth-century isiXhosa phrase books for settlers were packed with imperatives and other directives, suggesting “an almost entirely unidirectional model of communication” (Gilmour 2006, 94). But linguists have argued that when a would-be language learner assumes a “psychological distance” from native language speakers, trying mightily to barricade their own ego and identity, language learning will be compromised (cf. Schumann 1976, 401). Relinquishing a certain sense of authority, then, will help one’s language skills. It will assist other kinds of learning as well. To signify that one is willing to listen rather than lingwash, learners must be clear that what they’re setting out to understand goes beyond conventional notions of language in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and phrase books. They must be willing to dwell in several types of discomfort and to regard language-in-use as interwoven with unfamiliar perspectives.

Ideally, says Sarah, the feeling for her students in learning isiXhosa should be “like starting over,” with embarrassment and vulnerability an inherent part of the process. Botha (2015, 193), too, contends that whites need to “adopt a learner identity,” immersing themselves in a community of isiXhosa speakers and, uncomfortable though it may be, accepting their own ignorance in matters both linguistic and social. Charnock strongly prefers his students learn through homestays in Eastern Cape, for a similar reason: “When you’re actually immersed within a culture and learning the language … you’re almost being rebirthed. You’re a baby, at first. Stumbling with your words. You have to listen more than speak. You know, you can’t express your opinions. So you’re basically being a child again, but as an adult. … It’s humbling … absolutely I think it changes the way of thinking, for sure … it exposes you more to the wound and the pain and you know also to the joys of our society … it’s just a great space of discomfort.”

The discomfort is positive, he explains, in part because it temporarily “flips” racialized power dynamics. Not only are white learners infantilized by lack of ability, but they are also prodded to empathy, as they experience (however provisionally) the difficulty of navigating the world in a second or third language: “That opens a can of worms, like social conscience.” As one’s abilities grow, the learner can perhaps better understand the vantage points of those living without white privilege. One of Botha’s informants, the academic language specialist Brendon, finds that in speaking isiXhosa with friends, he’s had “moments of guilt, you know, about being a white person,” because his understanding of racial privilege has been “intensified” (Botha 2015, xviii–xix). Sarah adds that speaking the language “is going to bring up political issues rather than resolving them,” with one mechanism of discomfort being grappling with the cynics themselves. That is, the very fact that speaking isiXhosa doesn’t immediately erase racist histories or tensions could be seen as a virtue of the learning process, for it forces the white speaker to grapple with the pain and potency of these legacies. Sanders’s (2016, 1) version of the learner’s discomfort includes dwelling in the isiZulu phrase (almost the same in isiXhosa) “Ngicela uxolo [I beg forgiveness].” The saying is appropriate both to the learner’s incessant linguistic errors and, if these are treated as a synecdoche for broader historical processes, to the white speaker’s more general humility before native speakers.

And then, there is the matter of expanding one’s definition of “language.” Conventional models of languages as interchangeable codes, readily mastered through textbook learning, overlook the culturally distinctive interactional patterns of speech communities. The linguist Keith Chick (1995) has extensively documented communicative misfires between isiZulu-speaking and anglophone university instructors even in “the same” language (English), misfires that obtain in part because of richly different ways of framing the social and moral world. To grasp these differences, one needs to immerse one’s self in and humble one’s self to different linguistic pragmatics and perspectives, not just syntax and vocabulary (pace Meersman). Carli Coetzee (2013) writes extensively of the untranslatability of languages and the merits of honoring linguistic diversity in South Africa, in part so as to value diversity of subject positions while resisting the absorption of African vantage points into the hegemony of dominant cultures. The ensuing friction, she adds, can pull conflictual histories to the surface and be productive of transformation. Rhodes University professor Naledi Nomalanga Mkhize, too, reminds us that linguistic diversity is perspectival diversity. She was criticized when, in 2015, she code-switched for several minutes between isiXhosa phrases and English translations during a history lecture to discuss the cultural significance of dreams for sangoma in responding to European domination. Some white students reported feeling excluded. In her rejoinder, Mkhize alludes to the difficulties of translation: “Not being a first-language isiXhosa speaker myself, the aim was to make the students aware of how tricky it is to write history when one has no sense or feel for a language.” But also, she adds, there is something to learn even from incomprehension: “You need to sometimes live with the uneasiness of being insignificant.”³²

In some cases, when one can’t approach anything like depth of cultural learning or linguistic prowess, it seems the very attitude of humility, indexed through linguistic efforts, can make a difference. Mia, a white woman in Cape Town, was working in a hospice with elderly amaXhosa women, communicating through a translator. She was distressed by the linguistic gap and so took a class to learn a few isiXhosa greetings and basic phrases, returning to speak in fragments to express her concern and ask the women about their fears. To her surprise, the elderly patients began speaking to her in English. It seems they could have done this all along, but something had shifted; perhaps Mia’s apparently good faith effort to learn isiXhosa helped to destabilize the hegemonic English-language matrix. Eventually the women in hospice began to use their English to teach her more isiXhosa, and for the first time, Mia reports, there was laughter in their conversations. Mia was in the role of student, and the women warmed to their new role as teachers.

Whites in South Africa are hardly alone when they feel anxious about their linguistic ineptitude. Other whites in postcolonial contexts—from Kenya and Zimbabwe to Bolivia and Peru³³—have been reaching to learn indigenous languages. In so doing, they may be reflecting a global crisis of postcolonial whiteness, in which those who have lost a degree of white supremacy begin to see themselves being seen by the subaltern, and to mind what is reflected back to them (cf. Alcoff 2015; McIntosh 2016). In their spectrum of reactions, some cast about for remedies to racial inequality, even if merely symbolic ones, and language learning seems a ready possibility—perhaps especially because in itself it does not require a transfer of resources. And yet, for precisely this reason, the issue of power remains a delicate one. Language learning, critics remind them, should not be enlisted in a structurally oblivious daydream of communion or considered a neat solution to structural problems. What the critics are asking for, it seems, is for whites to eschew using language as a badge of their own virtue and to settle into the humility of the learning process; to destabilize white comfort rather than augment it; indeed, to listen rather than to lingwash.