uMabhengwane
I folded the A3 sheet into 8 rectangular sections, and laid it out in landscape – 4 on the top and 4 on the bottom. I arranged four different coloured pens, each for a specific aspect of the exercise. And then, from memory and from various sources scattered around the room, I began to fill […]
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 […]