ABSTRACT
In 1903, 89-year-old Thununu Gcabashe conversed for three weeks in the isiZulu language with Natal colonial official James Stuart about the history of the Qwabe clan to which he belonged, and about his life as an attendant to the Zulu king Dingane in the 1830s. At one point in their conversations, on which Stuart made notes, he remarked, apparently with some asperity, ‘You can write and remember but we are simply izithunguthu’. The word is not known to scholars today and appears in only one of the isiZulu dictionaries we have consulted. Gcabashe seems to have been using it to refer to people without writing, like himself, whose spoken knowledge of the past was being rendered of no account by colonizers with written knowledge. If this was his intended meaning, it was a rare statement about an extraordinarily important moment in the intellectual history of what is now the KwaZulu-Natal region. Our essay is in part about the journey of a word, in part about the intellectual journeys of Gcabashe and Stuart at specific points in their lives, and in part about our own journey in thinking about izithunguthu.
