Some ideas marinate for a long time before reaching the right moment to come forth. I had written the words down on an envelope, about 9 months ago. That envelope has travelled with me all over, tucked into the depths of whatever bag I was carrying or floating freely in the back of my car. […]
Category: umbhudulo
Happy St Patrick’s Day! Make sure you’re wearing into eluhlaza! Blue-green conflation is what I like to call it. Others prefer ‘confusion’ rather than ‘conflation’, and still others talk about ‘Grue’ languages – ones that do not have separate words for those two colours. What matters to me is that my students almost universally react […]
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Sounds of Silence
In my endless research on izenzukuthi (ideophones), I have begun to get an idea of different groups – monosyllabic, disyllabic and polysyllabic – and what sort of sounds are associated with what ideas. Because, in case you didn’t already know this, ideophones are all about sound. Specifically, they represent the association of a sound with […]
There’s a verb stem that seems, strangely, to be on everyone’s lips. It’s strange because the stem has, up until recently, only been used in religious or political contexts – but now it’s used to talk about a particularly virulent form of intergenerational transactional sex. Here’s a riddle for you – how are State Capture, […]
This post is the second part in a series on gender or ubulili ngesiZulu. Please read the first part if you’re lost at any point. The essential word for human is umuntu. Though it has a related connotation of African human, it is the most generic word. From it are derived the word for child […]
This is the first part of a three-part series on Gender ngesiZulu, which is something I’ve recently been researching for two different friends. This is an ancient or ur-Bantu root meaning ‘bed’. It’s very different from the word u(lu)cansi, meaning ‘sleeping mat’ or (euphemistically) ‘sex’. There are no cognates of -lili meaning ‘bed’ specifically. This […]
There’s been a lot of this lately, in various different forms. Asinavalo. Abanavalo. Uvalo. For those of you needing clarification, here’s a short dissertation on the word. Firstly, it comes from a verb – uku-vala. The verb means the following things: close or shut suppress or deceive; bribe; bluff; cheat protect against evil or use […]
The idea of choice is at the heart of an election. E-leg-ere is a Latin verb, meaning ‘to pick out’ or ‘to select’ from a list of candidates. And the Zulu verb uku-khetha means exactly the same thing. I’ve spoken about it before, I think. I should have, at any rate – my darling wife’s […]
I just read that the SABC will no longer show footage of violent protests. I almost have no words. I understand that there might be issues around showing violence in general, but there is also the imperative to report accurately on what is happening in South Africa every day. It happens in many many parts of […]
I arrive at my lesson a little early, and catch my student unawares. While he gets his mind in order, and I unpack my stuff, I offer him tea. Yes, I know I’m the guest – but I make myself at home wherever I go. Boarding-school vibes. I say: ufuna nhloboni yethiye? He understands the […]