LOOSENED TONGUES: ON ABELUNGU SPEAKING INDIGENIOUS LANGUAGES

If you closed your eyes and listened only to the cadence of his voice, you would swear that he is a descendant of one of the groups that have come to be known as amaXhosa. Everything in his tone; the delicate inflections of his voice and the way he moulds his words says this person knows the language intimately. Unlike some of his fellow white counterparts whose furled tongues have held a quiet protest against indigenous languages for hundreds of years, isiXhosa flows out of him as though it is his mother-tongue.

“Len’ i-business ndayiqala ndina 18 years, uphuma kwam esikolweni”, he tells his onlookers, one of whom is filming him. He speaks about how he started his farming business as a young man fresh out of high school. He goes on to complain, in a jovial manner, that some potential buyers come to his farm, take pictures of the livestock they promise to buy at the end of the month and then never return: “Uyakwazi umntu afik’ apha athi, ‘uyalibon’ eli thole, eli thole, nale mazi, nale nkabi, month-end ndiz’ apha’. Awafote, ungab’ uphind’ umbone!”.

An infectious laugh erupts from the belly of the person taking the video. He is obviously enjoying the white man’s ease with isiXhosa and to perhaps keep the star of his short film on the impromptu stage, he asks: “Akho nenkukhu onondinika yona?” (Do you not even have a chicken you could gift me with?) The white farmer, recognising his role in the performance, responds without missing a beat: “Hay’ hay’ andiphisi ngankukhu mna, ndiyathengisa”. And the 28 second video ends there, with the white farmer insisting that he is not in the business of giving chickens away for free.

I first saw this video clip on my Twitter timeline at the beginning of January, 2020. It was posted by Member of the Executive Council (MEC) of Education in Gauteng, Panyaza Lesufi, with the caption: “Hi @afriforum, this is the South Africa we are building”. Throughout his tenure as the MEC, Lesufi has challenged white Afrikaner schools in the province for their racist, language-based admission policies which invariably exclude learners whose mother-tongue is not Afrikaans. Even though Afrikaans is an African language, that was “formed as a creole in the mouths of slaves”, its legacy as a “language of wounding, misrecognition, displacement, oppression, apartheid” and a tool of Afrikaner nationalism, persists, as Pumla Dineo Gqola argues. It is this legacy that Lesufi rightfully challenges with great fervour.

One can assume that the MEC, by addressing Afriforum directly, was sending a message to the lobby group about the value of multilingualism for white folk in South Africa. The sight of a white man, whose mother-tongue could very well be Afrikaans, speaking isiXhosa so fluently, must have warmed Lesufi’s heart and seemed to him the perfect visual representation for his campaign against single-language education policies that serve Afrikaner interests. For Lesufi, a white person speaking an indigenous language is worthy of praise and celebration because it indicates a commitment to a non-racial future. However, without entering a debate about the futility of non-racialism in the face of anti-Blackness, Lesufi’s reasoning is naïve for two main reasons.

Firstly, the MEC assumes that Afriforum members are not themselves well acquainted with indigenous languages because in his mind, right wing Afrikaners are not likely to take an interest in what they probably deem to be inferior languages. But if slavery, colonialism and apartheid have birthed a ‘fatal intimacy’ between Black people and white South Africans as Njabulo Ndebele would say, then white people speaking indigenous languages is only testament to that entanglement rather than a reflection of a high regard for Black people and/or their languages.

Secondly, the MEC is so distracted by the theatrics of the performance of the white man in the video that he pays no attention to the content of what he is saying. Within a context of land dispossession and government’s half-hearted attempt at its redistribution to the most vulnerable of the Black population (not just the Black elite), a white man bragging to an audience of elderly Black men about his acquisition of a farm as a mere teenager is a cold reminder of the realities of South Africa’s negotiated settlement. The language in which that not-so-humble brag is delivered is inconsequential. What is truly heart-breaking are the Black people, described by the white farmer; who go to the farm, take pictures of the cattle on their mobile phones and never return to purchase the livestock. For the white farmer, this is merely business lost in what is primarily a transactional relationship between himself and the potential customers.

Knowing the value that some Africans in rural communities associate with owning cattle and the tragic tales of how much cattle has been lost over the generations, one can only imagine the anguish of the unfulfilled desire to own livestock. How many of them took those pictures with the names that they would give to their calves already dancing on their tongues? Seyibhokhwe! Velefutha![1] How many of them imagined themselves blowing clouds of warm air into the cold morning before settling down to find the bulging udder of their proud beast?

Yet what the MEC draws our attention to from this encounter are the white farmer’s language skills rather than the tragedy of centuries of legitimised land grabbing. White folk speaking African indigenous languages, even when they are as fluent as the man in that video is, is an empty and performative gesture that does nothing to fundamentally alter the structural position that we occupy as Black people.

Intombi eneshori: Futile Attempts at Resistance

“Molo ntombazana. Ndingakuncenda ngantoni?” the white man behind the counter asks me as I step into the poorly lit spaza shop. The family-run, make-shift store is situated a short walk away from my house in the tiny, farming town of Berlin or ‘Bhalini’ as the locals here call it. The centre of the town is a little far off and so the spaza saves me from walking longer than my teenage legs care to carry me in the summer heat.

“Hi there, I would like to buy a loaf of brown bread, a granadilla Twizza and half a dozen of eggs”, I respond. “Ufuna isonka esinjani? Esisikiweyo okanye?” he enquires, in order to establish whether I am willing to pay extra for sliced bread. “Sliced bread, please”, I respond. “Ikhona eny’into?” he asks, with a broad smile revealing several blackened teeth that have long surrendered to their erosion. “No, that will be all, thank you”, I answer back, intent on not smiling. I watch him as he reaches for my items and counts my change. I notice again that his skin tone is several shades darker than the white kids and teachers at the school I attend; an unsolicited permanent tan that is hardly a signifier of leisure and wealth. In my teenage mind, I have simply concluded that poorer whites are exposed to the elements in ways that their more affluent counterparts are not, and so I can generally spot them from a mile away in my town. “Bye-bye, enkosi”, he says, as he hands me my items. “Alright, thanks, bye”, I respond, walking out of the spaza shop into the harsh December sun.

In recent years, I have recalled several such exchanges from my teenage years with the white isiXhosa-speaking folk of my hometown. I remember that I always insisted on responding to them in English and refused to engage in isiXhosa. Although I cannot be certain about my reasons for that, I suspect that as a student in a former Model C school, it mattered to me that the white shop owner did not lump me with other non-English speaking Black people. I might have even felt insulted that he did not recognise in my manner of walking or my general aura that I was a different and refined brand of African who has some level of proximity to whiteness.

At the same time, knowing the class dynamics in my town and understanding that my lower middle-class family was most certainly in a higher position than the poor whites in the neighbourhood, I needed the shop owner and the rest of his ilk to know that despite my Blackness, I was better than them and my command of the English language was the evidence I needed. Besides all that, something about their ease with the language, my language, annoyed me to no end.

And so each time I went to the spaza shop, I loaded a little arsenal of English words that I would fire across the counter leaving the white shop owner utterly stunned (or maybe simply indifferent having barely noticed that he was in some kind of battle when selling me bread and Chappies). But once I left the shop, it did not take very long for me to realise that I had won nothing from that encounter. That there is always one true conqueror and it is never the little Black girl using English as some pathetic weapon to insist on her value in the world.

Even so, I remain as stone cold as I was as a teenager towards white people who speak isiXhosa or any other indigenous language. Unlike Panyaza, I am not at all invested in white South Africans learning indigenous languages or understanding local cultures better. For instance, I cringe without fail at the sight of Democratic Alliance leader, Athol Trollip charming voters with his fluency in isiXhosa even more so when he claims that wasincanca ebeleni as he did in an interview with Chester Missing.

Ordinarily, such reference of the passing down of language through the imagery of a baby suckling it through their mother’s breast would conjure up images of intimacy and closeness between mother and child. Said by Trollip however, it has a rather vampiric tone to my ears; the Black body sucked dry of language and life by a ravenous infant.

Of course mine is a singular view amongst many held by Black people in relation to white South Africans speaking local languages. In her memoir, The Ochre People, for instance, Noni Jabavu describes the command of isiXhosa of a “European shopkeeper” as “exquisite” and her delight is palatable through the page. Elsewhere she describes the languages skills of a “Boer” named Botha who was a close family friend in the following manner:

“…the old man was one of the finest idiomatic Xhosa speakers in the district like Mr Glass of English settler descent, who even wrote it so beautifully that despite the changes in its orthograph during his life time in the town, it flowed ‘like pagan cattle-kraal language”.

In another part of the book, she gushes about the abilities of white people to speak isiXhosa and describes a court scene thus:

“I heard the prosecutor, Mr Stofelberg murmur as he wiped his brow with a large, clean, white handkerchief, ‘This place is getting a little bit shushu’. It gave me one of my pangs of obstinate pleasure to hear that spontaneous, and apparently unconscious use of the Xhosa word for ‘hot’, it reminded me of passage I read somewhere about the ‘modifications taking place in the cultural life of the Europeans of South Africa owing to their contacts with the natives’. I settled down to watch, for the court scene illustrated some of the contacts and modifying of the inheritances of the different racial groups”.

Throughout the book, Jabuvu is very conscious of the use of isiXhosa by her family and community and often explains expressions she is unfamiliar with due to her time spent abroad from a very young age. From Makhosazana Xaba’s study of Jabavu, it is clear that the intricacies of language, any language, are an absolute delight for her. Whether it is the grammatical structure of English, a language she confessed to having had a “love affair” with or the poetic nature of isiXhosa names, Jabavu’s relationship with languages is intimate and deep. This is most likely influenced by her exposure to languages from the many countries she visited and lived in and the central place that literature had in her life. Even as she claims to having had a “love affair” with English, she does not in any way exalt it above isiXhosa and in her writing often intentionally “manipulated English in order [for it to] conform to isiXhosa in order to privilege the meaning of isiXhosa above the meaning of English” as Athambile Masola highlights in her PhD.

Her appreciation of a white man speaking isiXhosa must therefore be understood within that context but there is something particular about her experiencing “pangs of obstinate pleasure” when she hears the white prosecutor use an isiXhosa word. For her it demonstrates that whites are just as impacted by their encounter with Africans on the continent and while that may be the case, there is no comparison in terms of how Black people are affected by the dominance of European languages and the marginalisation of African languages. Jabavu is no doubt aware of this but there is something about white people speaking indigenous languages that gives her visceral joy, nonetheless.

As social media posts similar to Panyaza’s demonstrate, there are many others who derive a similar pleasure. It has become customary for instance, for some social media users to respond jokingly with generous rewards of land to whites who are fluent in these languages or have mastered an aspect of Black popular culture like a dance. What would motivate largely landless Black folk to parcel out imaginary hectares of land to white folk who own a disproportionate amount of the land? Even if said in jest, there is something worth understanding about what these kinds of gestures symbolise for Black people who do not respond with the kind of hostility that I hold onto.

Is it perhaps a welcome oasis of recognition of our languages after centuries of deliberate attempts to erase them? Do some see it as a willingness to integrate on the part of more progressive white people? I am sceptical of any firm relationship between integration and the overall project of Black liberation but I do not discount that the sight of white people speaking indigenous languages inspires feelings of joy in some, whatever the reasons might be.

Recently, while watching a conference about African languages and heritage, I found it interesting that one of the speakers, historian and academic, Nomathamsanqa Tisani, suggested that a certain 19th century missionary’s ability to speak local languages demonstrates that he was an intellectual. Having thought of views on this issue as largely polarised – either resulting in joy or repulsion, I was a little blindsided by this seemingly unemotive appreciation. I was charmed by the idea that interest in local languages is a sign of an intellectual mind rather than the result of more sinister motives that I imagine like using it as a tool for surveillance or depriving natives of the pleasure to gossip amongst themselves. I’m more open to entertain different and multiple readings while always keeping this warning close by from one fictional coloniser to another in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King: “if you can’t speak to them, you can’t govern them”.

Moreover, Tisani’s presentation emphasised the complexities of modern indigenous languages which she argues are made up of streams of other languages and therefore resist purist fantasies. I reflected then on my sense of entitlement to isiXhosa and my irritation at white people indulging in its beauty when expressions that I relish such as iinyembezi zikaVictoria, kiss-madolo, gowishing or ifratsi are not only impossible without the colonial encounter but sometimes just land better. For now, my take is that the violence that gave me these delightful expressions is not of my own choosing and I’m proud of our ability to mould colonial languages for our use. At the same time, I defend my right to be annoyed and petty when I please; to not overthink my anger or shape it into something rational and audible. It is what it is.

Songs of Freedom?

SONG 1: Madam Please

Madam Please

Before you shout about your broken plate

Ask about the meal her family ate

Madam Please

Before you laugh at the watchman’s English

Try to answer in his Zulu language

[…]

Madam Please

Before you call today’s funeral a lie

Ask me why my people die

Ask me why my people die

SONG 2: Lodo Mhlada Bada

Nanku etheth’ isiXhosa,

esintsokothileyo oh siy’amncoma

Nanku etheth’ isiXhosa

Thyin’ uquthe no mlomo oh siyamncoma

VERSE

Bath’ uyalaz’ olu lwimi

Wazi nditsho namaqhalo

S’Xhosa usithetha ngathi

Sis’zukulwana somzi kaPhalo

Andinangxaki nalo nto

Angas’thetha agqabhuke

Hay’ and’na ngxaki mntase khaya

Angasitheth’ amil’ imixhadi

Iny’into endiyilwelayo

Umhlaba lo

Ayingowabo

I begin this section of my contemplation with two protest songs. The first, Madam Please, written by Mackay Davashe and Barney Simon for the 1972 musical, Phiri, and sung by Sophie Mgcina. The song starts with a short dialogue between Mgcina’s character and another Black woman in the play who wants a letter written to her white employer explaining that she cannot find a plate similar to the one she broke. The woman asking Mgcina’s character to write the letter sounds fearful of the consequences of having broken a plate and the song brings to focus the terror of Black domestic labour in white homes. One might be fooled by the title of the song and assume that the singer takes on an apologetic tone but from the first note, it is clear that Mgcina is not begging the madam but impressing upon her to see the irrelevance of her concerns. “How does a broken piece of crockery compare with living a life shattered by apartheid?” the song seems to ask.

At her own home somewhere in the townships, breaking a plate may have inspired someone in the sitting room or in the garden outside to shout; “Zophule zonke!” followed by fits of laughter at the sarcastic instruction for her to break all the plates. But in the home of the White madam, even a small transgression (or none at all) may invite her wrath and send the domestic worker combing through the streets of downtown Johannesburg looking for a replacement of the plate whose ghost haunts her.

Madam Please lists a range of scenes from Black working class life that Mgcina demands the white madam consider. Amongst the listed appeals to the madam is for her to try to speak the Zulu language of “the watchman” instead of mocking his poor command of the English language. The song’s core investment is in easing the burden of Black suffering through white people acquiring a conscience about their positionality and being more compassionate. It imagines that if white people assimilated better by speaking African languages and understanding the plight of Black people then this would somehow contribute to our emancipation. However, anti-Blackness exists in spite of the moral disposition of individual white people because the very conditions that Madam Please discusses: the chronic starvation experienced by many Black people and our excessive deaths are the very foundation of what make White life possible.

The second song, Lodo Mhlada Bada, is a song that I wrote and composed in around 2014. It differs from Madam Please in two fundamental ways. Firstly, unlike Madam Please which is addressed to white people and appeals to them to speak an indigenous language, Lodo Mhlada Bada, refers to a nameless individual that one assumes is white. The song is therefore not seeking for a compassionate ear amongst progressive whites but is speaking to fellow Black people about an internal debate on the question of language. This is important because it underscores the futility of appeals to white people to behave better as a tactic for ending anti-Blackness, and instead focuses on the varying views held by Black people on the subject.

The two songs also differ in the sense that while Madam Please sees value in white people speaking indigenous languages, Lodo Mhlada Bada declares an indifference towards their interest. “A white person can speak isiXhosa until they burst a vein, for all I care”, the song says, “but the land is not theirs”. It is a response to the social media trend mentioned above in which Black South Africans jokingly offer land to white people who are fluent in indigenous languages.

Where the songs are similar is that both are primarily concerned with issues that are important but certainly not essential underlying factors of anti-Blackness, as Frank Wilderson would argue. Neither the adoption of African languages by white people nor the revolutionary repossession of land in this country by Black people would necessarily result in the end of anti-Blackness. For as long as it is possible to imagine a South Africa in which white embrace the languages of the indigenous population and the land is redistributed fairly but anti-Blackness remains a fundamental organising structure of life in the country, the two songs kind of miss the mark. Such a critique is not a commentary on the great composition that is Madam Please or how effective it was in pissing the apartheid government off or the pleasure I derived from writing Lodo Mhlada Bada; I am merely arguing that the songs do not capture the essence of freedom from anti-Blackness. And maybe that is a burden that very few songs can carry.

Caught Off Guard

It is May 2018 and we arrive at the Lebone II College of the Royal Bafokeng in the North West on a Saturday morning on the invitation of one of the teachers. He is a progressive member of staff who wants my companions and I to see the school and connect him to people in our networks who might add value to the programmes he runs for his students. The vast and breath-taking school premises, covering about 80 hectares, were built by Royal Bafokeng Holdings which manages the royal house’s mining reserves. Each part of the school boasts affirmations about being an African, including a fully stocked library which has countless mounts of shelves filled with African literature. As we visit the science laboratories, dining areas, music rooms, auditoriums and playgrounds, my heart breaks for the millions of Black children who do not have access to such resources let alone basic ablution facilities in many South African schools.

It being a Saturday, the school is fairly empty save for a few students attending choir practice and other extra-curricular activities. As we conclude our tour of the school, we come across a white student along the passages of one of the buildings. She steps aside to allow the grown ups to pass and as we do, she smiles and says, “Dumelang, baholo”. Something inexplicable shifts in me. In the same way that the body sometimes confuses hunger with thirst or love with pity, I cannot tell what exactly the overwhelming emotion I feel is as I smile back at that charming white face. Up to this point, I have ardently held onto my resentment for white people speaking indigenous languages and yet somehow, that greeting alone feels like a delicate coup I came unprepared for.

How could it be that I was experiencing “pangs of obstinate pleasure” of my own from a simple greeting? Is it because it was a white child speaking Setswana that made the hardened walls of my heart crumble? Is it because she said those words in the middle of an African centred institution in which I, as an African woman, was already beaming with pride about and feeling affirmed? Had it been an African immigrant child from Rwanda or Nigeria uttering those very same words, would I have responded in the same way? What was it about this little white girl’s place in the world in relation to mine that made my admiration for her Setswana greeting feel dangerously close to worship?

Before I could answer any of these questions in my head, it was time for us to go and as we left the mountains of Phokeng behind and made our way towards Joburg, I took in the scenery around me and resolved to simply embrace the contradictions.

LIST OF REFERENCES

[1] The names used here appear in Sindiwe Mgona’s novel, Chasing the Tails of my Father’s cattle

Panyaza Lesufi Twitter timeline https://twitter.com/i/status/1215304283710730240

Reference to Njabulo Ndebele is from Asakari by Jacob Dlamini

Lesufi Utterances Regarding Afrikaans are Offensive and Violate the Dignity of Afrikaans Speakers, Afriforum Statement https://www.afriforum.co.za/en/lesufis-utterances-regarding-afrikaans-offensive-violate-dignity-afrikaans-speakers-afriforum/

“Love, Language & Anguish” in A Renegade Called Simphiwe by Pumla Dineo Gqola

The calves’ names are borrowed from Chasing the Tales of My Father’s Cattle by Sindiwe Magona

The Ochre People by Noni Jabavu

Jabavu’s Journey, MA thesis by Makhosazana Xaba http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/5289

Journing Home: Exile and Transnationalism in Noni Jabavu and Sisonke Msimang’s Memoirs, PhD thesis by Athambile Masola

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

Afropessimism and the rituals of anti black violence https://mg.co.za/friday/2020-06-27-part-ii-afropessimism-and-the-rituals-of-anti-black-violence/

Inside the Royal Bafokeng nation's R450 million school in rural North West, Article in Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.co.za/royal-bafokeng-nation-r450-million-lebode-ii-school-phokeng-north-west-2018-9

NOTE: This piece was shaped by the contributions of the following people: Lonwabo Kilani, Lubabalo Mgwili, Masello Motana, Funzani Mthembu. Any moemish moves in it are mine and not theirs.

COPY EDITOR: Bongiwe Tutu bongiwe.tutu@gmail.com