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: isiZulu
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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 […]
When it comes to wisdom about relationships and enmity, isiZulu has a total of 94 separate proverbs to use in almost every situation. These are some of my favourites, and I particularly enjoy teaching my Class 10s about threats and grudges. In fact, I could write a whole post just about the 24 common proverbs […]
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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 […]
There are two very common verbs in isiZulu which present a number of problems to first-time speakers – ukukhohlwa and ukukholwa. As you can see, the first problem is that they look and sound very similar to one another. For those of you with a bit of isiZulu under your belts, you will probably also […]
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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 […]
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TMM
Politics 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, […]