Studying Language in the ‘Moral Wilderness’: Methodist Linguistics in the Eastern Cape

By the end of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, the Xhosa language featured as part of travellers’ ethnographic accounts of the complex social, political, and linguistic relations in the eastern Cape frontier zone. Writers like the colonial official John Barrow, whose communication with Xhosa people had often been experienced as fraught or confusing negotiations, used the lens of natural science to try to re-present language as orderly and knowable, against a backdrop of social relationships which were frequently anything but orderly and knowable. Around the ‘open’ frontier, relations between Xhosa, Khoikhoi, San, and Boers were complex and protean, based upon struggles over land and resources in a context where no one authority was recognized as legitimate by all parties.