uMabhengwanePolitics wasn’t something separate from my daily life growing up. It was pervasive. The schools we went to, the abuse my brother and I received at the hands of other little white boys for being k*****boetjies, the bullets from which we took cover in the back of our father’s bakkie on the way into Edendale, […]
This is an experiment. I have been translating these and working with them for a while now, with my grade 7s and 10s. They are my favourite pieces of oral literature, and an anchor to many memories of September in KwaDukuza. They are the praises of uShaka kaSenzangakhona. These are my translations (and alternatives and […]
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 […]
In the dying hours of that day, with the moon rising orange and heavy into the winter sky, I met a man from eMtshezi. I greeted him at the gate, and his face changed. He smiled. He asked me my name. I replied and said that I was the new utisha wesiZulu at the school. […]
It’s been a year. The paths are crowding over with the long grass, with puddles filling in potholes, with the imminent beachward flight of Jozi’s residents (and the inevitable binge of mall-cramming shopping preceding it) singing a cloying tension into the air. It’s been a year. A year of different tongues in different heads with […]
1946. The world is no longer at war. The avenue down which your father drives each day is still under construction, named after a man who is that very moment elsewhere, probably chatting to his friends in New York, forgetting about this homeland of his, mindful only of the need to leave something lasting. I […]
At the end of every term, from standard three to Matric, I write you a letter. I know that you expect these letters, in the dense coolth of La Lucia, written in my slow and deliberate scrawlings of dark-blue ink. When one is missing I receive a brief phone call. In refined, rounded, vowels you […]
This evening, on the last evening of this month of heritage, of amagugu or amafa, I cook amadumbi. They’ve been bubbling away on the stove for a good while, the dense smell of rye bread baking in the background, and I have tested them a few times. When I can feel the fork pierce them […]
Just to be safe, I’m stating this up front – this is not a blog about the US spying on everything we do (although the principle is almost exactly the same). This is a blog about one of my favourite occupations as an undercover polyglot in South Africa, and about the flip-side of it: eavesdropping […]
It’s 5:25, and my last class of the day is about to end. Through the windows I can see the snake of traffic coiling red and orange down Rivonia, showing me the way home. No one has yet looked at their watch, but I’m aware that we’ve already crammed enough into this hour. So I […]
uMabhengwane