isiZulu

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Ake sifunde sifundisane!
Let’s learn and teach each other!

I’ve been teaching isiZulu for more than two decades. Just saying that makes me feel old, but it does give me some street-cred. I have taught a full range of people, from grade 4 (aged 8) to grade 12 (aged 18) to young adults (20s) and mid-adults (30s to 40s) and the rest, all the way to 70! I have taught monoglots and polyglots, bilinguals and frustrated multilinguals, and have no set preference for the kinds of languages that my students speak before they start learning isiZulu. I have also taught artists, actors, musicians, writers, editors, mathematicians, political scientists, flaneurs, poets, businesspeople, strategists, marketers, doctors, economists and lawyers. I love people, of course. As you may have guessed, I am an extrovert. I am also experimental, building up my understanding of the way I teach through trial and error.

I do not have a professional teaching qualification, but I have taught Latin and Greek (at university and at school) and English (as a Foreign Language and as Home Language), Classical Civilisation (incorporating History, Theology, Art and Architecture, Archaeology, Anthropology, Drama, Poetics, Philosophy, Mythology, Law and Sociology), and isiZulu. I have accumulated about 30 000 hours of teaching since I was about 16 years old. I reckon that’s pretty good for RPL? What do you think?

I am, in regards to isiZulu, mostly an autodidact. I studied the language from Grade 9 to Grade 12 only, and got my IEB matric in it. But I did not study it at university.

I am firstly a translator. That is my primary identity, and one to which I retreat often. It is my recharging place. It is where I gain my energy. It is through the act of translation that I have honed my understanding of isiZulu, a language that I have spoken since I could speak but which lagged for many years behind the English that was my medium of instruction at school. It has taken me many years to bring my understanding of isiZulu grammar and idiom up to the same level as my English, since my isiZulu did not have the same fertile soil of carefully graded imaginative literature for me to devour in the same way that I devoured English and other languages. That is why I have devoted myself to publishing more imaginative literature in isiZulu than existed before I was born.

But I didn’t start with writing literature. I started with writing a few poems, and some of the stories that I grew up hearing from my father and others while growing up. The first story I ever wrote down in full in isiZulu was the story of my great-grandfather surviving an attack by the buffalo he had wounded while hunting in the Lowveld in the late 19th century. And that was for my Matric portfolio. I remember it clearly.

But how does all this relate to teaching isiZulu? Basically, for me, the language was never foreign. It was inside me, knitted into me when I was formed in the womb, woven into the fabric of my childhood and adolescence, inseparable and emotionally charged. And I always wondered why it was so hard for others to understand it. Why it was so hard for others to make sense of its beauty.

What came to me was that the issue is that it is completely different from English. It shares so few things with it that comparing it is like finding the similarities between a reptile and an octopus. Yet they are both animals, and they are both sentient. In the same way, isiZulu and English are both languages, they are both (mostly) SVO, they have similar parts of speech and share a significant amount of phonology. But they are in other respects completely different. And that is why I enjoy teaching isiZulu so much. Especially to people who speak languages from the Indo-European family. Because there’s a familiarity in those languages, a certain set of characteristics that they all share. And I delight in finding the things that don’t match up nicely.