Journals, Newspapers and Magazines Judith T. Irvine Judith T. Irvine Article concerning the "Autobiography" of a Zulu man -- refugee from the battle of Ndondakusuka, 1856 -- a text published by Lewis Grout in his 1859 Grammar of IsiZulu. This isiZulu autobiography is compared with Grout's own autobiography, published in Vermont, 1905. Translated by Lise Garond. Two Appendices: Grout's text (his transcription in IsiZulu, and his English translation) plus excerpts from his 1905 Autobiography. English abstract:Abstract "A Tale of Two Autobiographies: From Colonial Natal to Vermont, 1859-1905" Two nineteenth-century autobiography texts are compared regarding their representation of personal experience and point of view. The texts are linked. One, published in 1859, is a life history by a Zulu man who had recently fought in a battle between factions in the Zulu kingdom. Perhaps the first published text in IsiZulu attributable to an indigenous author, the narrative was elicited and transcribed by a missionary interviewer who provided a translation to accompany the text. The other text is the missionary's own autobiography, published in America decades later. Although the two texts are linked, they are almost polar opposites in how they represent self, personal experience, and intertextual relations (such as accounts of other people's discourse). On these points, what the texts leave out is as revealing as what they include. Drawing on concepts of cryptotype (from Whorf) and erasure (from Gal & Irvine), the comparison between these texts focuses on their omissions and discusses how these are linked to ideologies of language, community, personal identity, and audience. The comparison further permits considering the relationship between the concepts of cryptotype and erasure themselves. Keywords: Zulu, autobiography, colonial Natal, missionary linguistics, cryptotype, erasure Judith T. Irvine University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107 USA jti@umich.edu Judith Temkin Irvine Submission 2026-04-24T16:03:54+0000 Public Depot/20/ART_IRVINE_LHOMME_254.pdf