Settler colonialism speaks
Early contact varieties in Namibia during German colonial rule
In this article I explore a particular set of contact varieties that emerged in Namibia, a former German colony. Historical evidence comes from the genre of autobiographic narratives that were
written by German settler women. These texts provide – ideologically filtered – descriptions of domestic life in the colony and
contain observations about everyday communication practices. In interpreting the data I draw on the idea of ‘jargon’ as developed
within creolistics as well as on
Chabani Manganyi’s (1970) comments on the
‘master-servant communication complex’, and Beatriz
Lorente’s (2017) work on ‘scripts
of servitude’. I suggest that to interpret the historical record is a complex hermeneutic endeavour: on the one hand, the examples
given are likely to tell us ‘something’ about communication in the colony; on the other hand, the very description of
communicative interactions is rooted in what I call a ‘script of supremacy’, which is quite unlike the ‘atonement politics’
(
McIntosh 2014) of postcolonial language learning.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: Language and colonization
- 2.Historical overview: Namibia under German colonial rule
- 3.Jargons: Margins within margins
- 4.Colonial encounters: Settler women and their Dienstboten (‘servants’)
- 5.The master-servant communication complex: Scripts of servitude, scripts of supremacy
- 6.Conclusion: Jargon or pidgin? Reflections on diachronic continuities (and subversions)
- Notes
-
References