This fascinating book challenges the too often accepted binary vision inherited from colonial and apartheid eras of the ethnographic representations of African peoples. The author posits that language and identity have not been scrutinised enough by scholars who want to understand the relations between two seemingly close ethnic groups: the amaZulu and the amaXhosa. J.S. Arndt convincingly shows that language is not a stable entity that remains unchanged but, on the contrary, evolves and mutates according to the locutors’ environment and, what is more it can be modulated by external influences such as the missionaries’ simplistic view of the people they endeavoured to evangelise. He points out that some people have been acculturated by one of these languages for political reasons, and do not even know their original mother tongue such as the Hlubi who are part of the legacy of what the author calls the Xhosa–Zulu divide.

Leaning on various archival sources the author shows that language, being at the root of many identities can be manipulated to the extent that people may lose sight of their origin and base their (violent) actions on twisted identities. The book delineates a theoretical background to language/identity battlegrounds which may be useful to analyse any multilinguistic country that exposes the tensions between its citizens on a linguistic basis. It also sheds light on the problem of historical oversimplification which tends to portray an ‘ethnic’ group as homogeneous while members of the same group may have difficulties communicating amongst themselves although they have the same ‘Nguni’ heritage.

From a historical perspective the author has gone into such micro historical details that no attentive reader can close the book and still think that one people/one language is the norm. We learn that there are various types of ‘isiZulu’ (or isiXhosa) which thus defy a unique definition of Zuluness (or Xhosaness) and that reviving and promoting Hlubi language has become a cornerstone for the establishment of a Hlubi identity. Another interesting point made by the author is the fact that black interpreters did not point at major differences in languages as they came from ethnic groups (the Gonaqua, the Gqunukhwebe and Ntinde) for whom language was not a marker of identity and thus was not a political tool to differentiate one from the ‘Other’; this attitude differed from that of the missionaries who, while searching for accurate data for the translation of the Bible, developed the Zulu–Xhosa divide. Readers interested in history, social interactions and violence and linguistics will undoubtedly appreciate the author's explanation of the 1990s riots in South Africa through the linguistic lens as well as his very thorough scrutiny of modern associations, which, through social media and language teaching, try to go beyond the hegemony of Zuluness and Xhosaness.

The Zulu–Xhosa divide is, as convincingly demonstrated by the author in his conclusion, a fundamental element for the understanding of the ‘new South Africa’ (213) and should be more seriously considered by anyone who wishes to analyse the evolution of South African society since the end of apartheid and its endeavours to come to terms with colonialism and apartheid. This book is a major contribution to the understanding of the links between language and identity and their impact on the social development of a society which acknowledges eleven official languages and is still struggling to find a consensual way to define itself.