Unsettling the Ranks: 1930s Zulu-Language Writings on African Progress and Unity in The Bantu World

While much of the extant scholarship on The Bantu World has
addressed the English language content, this article shifts the
focus to previously unexplored 1930s Zulu-language writings on
African advancement and unity. It makes an intervention into the
study of African explorations of the possibilities and limits of
progress amidst the abiding challenges and paradoxes of colonial
modernity, in a setting characterised by increasing segregation.
The Zulu pages, the article claims, enhance our understanding of
contributors’ involvement in shaping and expanding the very
constituency the editor, RV Selope Thema, sought to create. In
particular, Zulu-language letters to the editor, often written in
response to editorials and articles, convey ideas neither fully
anticipated by Thema, nor fully articulated in the more restrained
English pages. Located in the rich body of work on African print
cultures, the article first discusses the ideologies behind this
multilingual weekly newspaper. It then foregrounds the key place
of Zulu-language usage in The Bantu World, as well as the (maledominated) networks, publics and communities of readers
created through the vernacular, which flourished despite
attempts to marginalise African languages. An examination of key
1930s controversies over the notions of advancement,
entrepreneurship and unity shows that the Zulu pages partly
destabilised prevalent elite ideas of progress as intertwined with
white patronage.