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Clement Martyn Doke was born in England in 1893. He graduated from the Transvaal University College (now the University of Pretoria) with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1911. Being deeply religious, his ambition was to be a missionary and in 1914 he offered himself to the South African Baptist Missionary Society to serve the Lamba people. At Kafulafuta he assisted with the building and sometimes even had to hunt for meat for the pupils in the school. He studied the Lamba and specialised in learning their language; he prepared a series of readers in the vernacular; translated St Mark's Gospel into Lamba (published 1918) and completed the translation of the New Testament in 1921. Doke's A Grammar of the Lamba Language was accepted for a Master of Arts degree at the University of South Africa.
Clement Doke married Hilda Frances Lehman (1893-1948) and the couple had five children, Erica Aldyth, Joan May, Margaret Carey, Eunice Marion and Havelock Clement. In 1921 the Dokes left the mission field because of ill health caused by chronic malaria. The family went to England where Doke studied at the University College of London. In 1923 he was appointed senior lecturer in Bantu Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand where he lectured in Zulu. Two years later he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis The Phonetics of the Zulu Language. He was granted a Carnegie Fellowship and in 1931 was promoted to a professorship.
Clement Doke published two dictionaries, the Zulu-English Dictionary and the Lamba-English Dictionary. He also wrote on Lamba culture and folklore, Khoesan phonetics, produced Zulu and Ndebele schoolreaders, Bible translations, hymnals, a catechism, and published many articles in academic journals. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by Rhodes University and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of the Witwatersrand in 1972.
Doke stimulated the development of African linguistic studies in South Africa and elsewhere and made a vast contribution to the methodology of African linguistic analysis and description. The "father of Southern African linguistics" died in 1980.
Clement Martin Doke: The man of two missions - Short article by Sydney Hudson-Reed
Doke Family tree
Bibliography
Davenport, R and Saunders, C: South Africa: a modern history. Fifth edition. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000.
Herbert, RK (editor): Not with one mouth: continuity and change in Southern African language studies. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993.
Hudson-Reed, S: Clement Martyn Doke: man of two missions. Cape Town: South African Baptist Historical Society, 1998. |
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