LEARNING ZULU, a secret history of language in South Africa

198pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Johannesburg, 2016

First published in the USA in 2016.

"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 is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. His books include Complicities: The intellectual and apartheid and Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and literature in the time of a truth commission.