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 […]
Tag: isiZulu
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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 […]
Waking up to the rain, on this morning of all mornings, this word is in my head. Usually, it’s accompanied – esikaNandi. In recorded Zulu memory, the greatest lamentation ever felt is idiomatically captured as “the lamentation of Nandi”. EsikaMadiba. Namuhlanje sikhala isililo sikaMadiba. isiLilo is the wailing, the lamentation, over the dead. It consumes […]
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umhlaba (k)awunoni
The earth does not grow fat. It eats and eats and eats, young and old, men and women, great and small. It has eaten brothers and fathers, sisters and friends and colleagues and mothers. It has eaten whole nations, and yet it does not grow fat. Just once, I wish that the earth would say: […]
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O- (12 iziqu)
ngesiZulu, very few iziqu (word stems) begin with the sound ‘O’. The sound is used very often elsewhere in the language, as it the result of a coalescence of ‘A’ and ‘U’ and it is the prefix for plurals of all names, many family members and some borrowed titles (like omama, ogogo, othisha etc) – […]
“I’ve been doing Zulu at school since Grade 6. I’m now in Grade 11 and I don’t understand what’s going on in class. The class is taught entirely in Zulu, and we mostly just listen as the teacher reads from the set-work, translating word for word. I know I’m going to fail next year.” – […]
In trying to explain the way that words are modified ngesiZulu, I often find that the words that isiZulu uses for grammatical terms are far more useful than their English equivalents. The two words above both denote ‘suffixal change’, but they have completely different ways of getting there. isijobelelo – a suffix (literally the modifiable […]
Last week I began with -bomvu, only to be interrupted by the horrors of living in a world where a little girl can almost be raped by a man who’s only defence is that he’s drunk. I’m going to move on now, in the hopes that this will be somewhat therapeutic. Red is -bomvu, as […]
Why is a wedding dress white (at least in modern western culture)? When someone’s in a black mood, what does that mean? If you call some ‘green’, how experienced are they? Colours mean many different things in different cultures, but most often that meaning is imputed by metaphor or analogy – so there are a […]
If you’re still willing to read more, there are three more branches to the isiZulu concept of ‘abuse’ (and possibly many more undocumented or as yet unfound, seeing as how abuse combines so many taboos, therefore having so much euphemism associated with it): potoza, cubhacubha & d(l)wengula Firstly, potoza. It has only one meaning: “press […]