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Author’s Note

The South African linguistic landscape is fraught with discursive danger. This book, deliberately perched precariously between the dangerous and the critical in its writing, seeks to contribute to the surfacing of the brutality of South Africa’s everyday language, while at the same time addressing the sensitivities of racialised wording as it is produced and reproduced. Where an offensive term, like ‘garden boy’, could be avoided altogether or replaced with a potentially less offensive term, like ‘gardener’, without affecting the clarity of argument, it has been done. The tension between, on the one hand, a paid garden labourer (sometimes called a ‘garden boy’) and, on the other hand, a property owner, considered by some as the ‘real’ gardener, is central to Chapter 2. These subject positions were not and are not now purely linguistic. In other instances, like housing planning discourse, historically specific racial classifications – ‘urban Native’ (Connell et al. 1939) before 1950 and ‘urban Bantu’ (NBRI 1954) thereafter – reflected not only racial assumptions by white planners, but also a set of real, ontological grounds of possibility. Of course, no matter how brutal certain linguistic acts were, people found ways to resist and subvert them and this book hopes to be attentive to these tensions and contestations.

Scare quotes around troubling words such as ‘boy’, ‘garden boy’, ‘houseboy’, ‘shamba-boy’, ‘maid’, ‘native’, ‘Bantu’, ‘kaffir’, ‘master’, ‘madam’, ‘dyke’ and ‘poor white’ are used sparingly, except where they are being discussed explicitly as a concept or linguistic term – the notion of the ‘urban Native’.

Similarly, names of cities, homelands, provinces, countries and terms that would have been used in specific historical times remain as they were.

Some of the sources cited and terms used in this book are in Afrikaans. In each instance, translations are provided in the text. All translations from Afrikaans are my own and reference is made to the original sources.