Ernst Oswald Johannes Westphal

Who was Ernst Oswald Johannes Westphal?

Ernst Oswald Johannes Gotthard Gotthilf Westphal, was a South African linguist and an expert in Bantu and Khoisan languages.

Ernst Westphal was born at Khalava in Venda, the son of German Lutheran missionary parents. Already as a child he was fluent in German, English, and Afrikaans. His first and native language, however, was Venda, and as a child he was initiated into the partly secret Venda rites for young men. He studied Zulu and Southern Sotho under Clement Martyn Doke at the University of the Witwatersrand and, after graduating in 1942, was a Lecturer there 1942-1947. He was Lecturer in Bantu Languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London 1949-1962, and Professor of African Languages in the School of African studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, from 1962 until his retirement in 1984, and recognized as the world's leading authority on the click languages of the San, the Khoisan languages, in many of which he was almost supernaturally fluent. His Portuguese was good enough to allow him to translate texts and inscriptions found in Mozambique from their original language into Portuguese, and he spent time doing this at the request of the Portuguese government, also collaborating with Prof. de Almeida.