The video is titled, in capital letters, “AMAZING TODDLER CAN SPEAK AFRICAN LANGUAGE.” 1 It opens with high drama: an epic soundtrack by deep-voiced singers in the amaZulu mbube style, as glowing purple font against a black background introduces “JP,” de Kock’s toddler. In December 2013, an Afrikaner man named Alex de Kock posted a short video to YouTube that, as of August 2017, had garnered more than 1.6 million hits. I suggest a potential remedy is to conceptualize language learning as a process not of self-comforting but of self-discomfiting, requiring both listening and humility. Some critics charge that white self-congratulation can amount to what I call “lingwashing”: using language learning as a moral cover for enduring inequities. After contextualizing white aspirations to linguistic belonging, some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, and various white metapragmatic judgments, I discuss promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, then argue that language learning invites a reckoning in which whites grapple with questions of interracial dynamics in the new South Africa and their own “structural oblivion”-that is, their failure, as elites, to understand precisely the reasons for which they are resented. This article focuses on the liberal South African whites in Cape Town who mediate their crisis of national belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages.
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