Now that the national coronavirus command council has extended vaccine registration to anyone aged 18 and over (standing ovation here please) the question is how to communicate to young people the vital need for vaccination if they want to save the world.
Young people are generally quite keen to save the world, or at least to change it for the better, so this shouldn’t be too hard.
It might, however, require a more robust form of communication than the bland “get vaccinated or more people will die” message so far used on adults.
If you want to talk to young people, you need to speak young people’s language. To this end I called on my colleagues at TshisaLIVE, or as some of us call it, the Lit Department.
“Lit” here is not short for literary. (That department belongs to the extraordinarily well read Jennifer Platt, Sunday Times books editor and fellow ST Daily columnist.)
The other meaning of lit is awesome. If a party is lit, it does not mean that it was held on a day free from load-shedding. It means it was hip, happening and hella happy.
Bougie is a desired state of being, except when used as an insult.
Getting back to my colleagues from the lit side of the newsroom, I was hoping they might help with some dope and dank words that could help convince millions of millennials and Gen-Zers to roll up their sleeves for a double dose of life-saving antibodies.
Two expressions had already occurred to me, and although there was some debate about my interpretation of these, the lit dept more or less agreed with my summation.
The first, seen here and there on social media, is the Zulu phrase “phuma silwe”. Depending on who you talk to, this literally means “go out” or “go out to fight”, but as an idiom it describes someone who is out there, outgoing, outspoken and sometimes a bit outrageous.
A young man or woman who is phuma silwe can be either criticised or admired, depending on how out of your depth you are when they are exercising their outright right to free speech and confrontation.
The other word, sometimes employed as the antithesis of phuma silwe, is “bougie”. Bougie, to any disco babes of the 1970s, has nothing to do with dancing. It is an Americanism adopted into slang in SA in the past decade or so, but actually it goes back quite a long way.
The Collins dictionary calls bougie a shortening of the word “bourgeois” and says it means “having bourgeois tastes or attitudes”. It dates back to the French Revolution, when bougie was an insult for the apathetic semi-gentry.
Bougie evolved, as words and sometimes people do, to mean middle-class, mild-mannered, generally conventional and sometimes “aspirational” (a terrible word that should be finished off by guillotine).
Bougie folks are informed. They are up with the latest trends and interested in many arcane things. They tend not to shout or rock the boat much, although there are exceptions.
Unlike phuma silwe types, bougie people are seldom considered outrageous but are mostly thought to be respectable. Bougie is a desired state of being, except when used as an insult.
Those who get vaccinated are bougie in the best sense of the word. Those who couldn’t be bothered or who think it might be all cool and rebellious to refuse could be called phuma silwe, though you might also find phuma silwe people loudly recommending vaccination, which would make them righteous rebels with a cause who should be applauded.
What would be really excellent would be a situation where the phuma silwe peeps and the bougie brigade joined forces to deliver hope for the future of the world.
Whether they are loud or calm about it, this generation can drive change for the youth, by the youth. Let’s hope they do right by us all.
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