There is a vast collection of izaga about success and failure ngesiZulu, and these are some of the most common of them all (and some of the most figurative). Luck, misfortune, unsuccesful attempts, impossible feats, failure, despair, uncertainty and rivalry are all discussed in this part of the izaga. The first section of these proverbs […]
Category: incwadinsuku / daily blog
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umnyamangabomu
I’m tired of the term ‘load-shedding’. In isiZulu, it’s borrowed wholesale: i-load-shedding. That makes me like it even less. It’s a euphemism, which is one figure of speech governments use with amazing liberty in order to fudge their errors and make their distasteful utterances slightly more palatable. They are called blackouts. Entire neighbourhoods have their […]
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What I learnt today
Today I was White Zulu MC at the IEB’s User Group Conference at Birchwood, and I learnt many things. Before I fall asleep, I wanted to share some of them with you. I learnt that there is no one isithakazelo for Ndaba, and one must know the particular Ndaba in question before deciding on which […]
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Baba vs Mfowethu
This afternoon, as is so often the case on Sundays, I had a load of garden waste to take to the dump. So I made my way through the dense coolth of Norwood and Orchards, crossed the main road and the highway that I usually take to school in the mornings, past the two pieces […]
When one talks about ubuntu, it’s easy to swallow the final few drops of euphoria left over from the Rainbow Days and drift off into a reverie where everybody loves each other and we are all free and honest and tolerant and forgiving. There might even be enough of it to drown out the smell of […]
In the Inqolobane yesizwe, by Nxumalo and Nyembezi, there are 41 different categories of proverbs in isiZulu. 41. Just think about that for a second. The 41st one is ‘miscellaneous’. It alone has 100 different proverbs. There are 929 proverbs collected in this one book. This list is not exhaustive, at all. And all of […]
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Mind the Gap
There is a large gap between today, the 27th of December 2014, and when I last posted something on here. That gap represents many things. Some of them are classroom things – constructing curricula, fashioning exams from scratch and jumping right into the depths of a completely new ethos at my new school. There are […]
My head’s a divided place. Sometimes I imagine that there are bulkheads, water-tight and riveted securely in case of icebergs and other acts of god. There are valves and ducts connecting the bulkheads, but otherwise they are separate. They tend to follow the same pattern, with minor variations according to the different specifications – some […]
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Dosage
Before anyone else is up, I’ve already had my first dose. Fifteen minutes of current affairs radio while I make tea and Kreemy meal. It’s dark and still, and the last bit of night is lit only by a fragment of the dying moon, by the brightness of Venus just above the eastern horizon. No […]
In my favourite isiZulu-English dictionary, there are a few valuable veins of vocabulary, or nodes. I’ve written about them before – amabutho, izinja, imibala, izinyoka, izinyoni, iziphoso, izinhlanzi and izihlobo are the main ones. Today, and for the past few weeks, I’ve been working quite closely with the first of these groups. I(li)butho has three […]
uMabhengwane 