Don't touch me on my Zulu

I hate the sound of English in the morning. Especially over the weekend. I mean, I spend the bulk of the week twisting my tongue and honking my nose in my earnest attempt at speaking English as she is spake by my white colleagues.

I hate it when white people keep saying: "I beg your pardon?" simply because a darkie has mispronounced an English word, so I try my best to be as close to the real pronunciation as possible.

But much as I love the English language, I hate the sound of it on a Saturday or Sunday morning. I want to dream and wake up in Zulu over the weekend.

So, when my children come to my bedroom on a Saturday morning and speak English to me, I want to run out of the house, down the street and, like Wesley Snipes in the closing segments of the movie Jungle Fever scream: "Nooooooooo!"

For crying out loud, I miss my mother tongue and I try my best to protect it because even my black colleagues, many of whom are Johannesburgers by birth, do not give me the satisfaction of speaking Zulu to me. We communicate in English most of the time. If they do speak Zulu, it is the Joburg variety which makes my hair bristle. Joburg Zulu reminds me of fanakalo (some say fanagalo), the white man's corruption of my mother tongue. For example, a Joburg guy will speak about babazala when he means umukhwe (father-in-law). You see, in the Zulu language, when you are a man, your father-in-law is umukhwe, and your mother-in-law is umkhwekazi. However, if you are a woman, your father-in-law is ubabezala, and your mother-in-law is umamezala. But these Joburgers don't get the point. The Lord knows I have tried to teach them, Lord I have. But they continue to butcher my language, saying things that remind me of fanagalo. Now there's a language I hate with a passion. I don't even know why I am calling it a language. It is not.

I recall some hilarious fanagalo phrases from the Fanagalo Phrasebook, Grammar and Dictionary (Kitchen Kafir) by JD Bold:

Wena azi lo golof? Mina hayifuna lo mampara mfan. (Have you caddied before? I don't want a useless boy.) Tata lo saka gamina. (Take my bag of clubs.) Tata mabol, yena doti. Susa yena nga lo manzi. (These balls are dirty. Clean them with water.) Muhle wena tula loskati lo-mlungu ena beta lo bol. (You must be quiet when my partner plays a shot). Tula! (Be quiet). Noko wena lahlega lo futi bol, hayikona mali. (If you lose another ball, there will be no tip for you) Susa lo-mtunzi gawena. Hayikona shukumisa lo saka. (Move your shadow. Don't rattle the bag.)

Needless to say, this "dictionary" was first published when we still had countries such as Nyasaland (Malawi since 1964), Bechuanaland (Botswana since 1966), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe since 1980), and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia since 1964). The dictionary is outdated and colonialist and offensive to first-language Zulu speakers. Note the subtitle, "Kitchen Kafir"!

You see, fanagalo was the tongue the baas used when dispensing instructions to his workers. You can't have a civil conversation in fanagalo. I am aware that mineworkers some years ago did try to converse in fanagalo among themselves. This is so because many of them were not educated, and English is very difficult for them. Many came from countries such as Malawi, Lesotho and so on, and resorted to fanagalo to facilitate communication among themselves. Imagine a homesick miner telling his friend: "Eyi, chomee gamina. Mina kumbula lobafazi gamina (My friend, I am missing my wives). In real Zulu that would be: "Mngan'ami, ngikhumbule amakhosikazi ami." Short, simple.

The funny thing - not funny haha, but funny irritating - is that I have had a number of run-ins with white people who, after studying the fanagalo phrase book, thought they were speaking Zulu. I recall a white guy who was amused by the fact that I couldn't understand what he was saying. He was speaking fanagalo, which I refuse to understand because it insults my language.

I miss the Zulu as she is spake in the kingdom along the coast. As a result, I cherish every moment when I can indulge in this beautiful language. So, don't speak English to me over the weekend, if you can help it. Speaking Zulu over the weekend also gives me a respite from some difficult English sounds and/or letters of the alphabet. The most troublesome letter to a Zulu tongue is the "r". We don't have an "r" in my language. As a result, the "rand" becomes ilandi . Land Rover is Land Lover. All my flends call me Fled over the weekend because I have told them I don't want to hear the letter "r" then.

If you truly want a Zulu guy to reach out for his knobkerrie in utter irritation, you must ask him to say the following sentence quickly: "Lady, let's have eleven long brown rolls with thick layers of Rama low-fat margarine and a litre of raspberry cold drink." Ah, that's a tongue twister to a Zulu guy - especially the rural type. If it's any consolation to my people, even the innovative Chinese also have issues with the letter "r", so my people are in good company.

It was therefore an honour and a pleasure to be invited last Friday to the launch of the Oxford Bilingual School Dictionary: IsiZulu & English. It is the first Zulu-English dictionary in 40 years. It is quite a decent tome, which will help English speakers learn Zulu words at their own pace. The beautiful thing about this dictionary is that it doesn't just give the new learner of Zulu the meaning of words, but it teaches how one can use the words in a sentence. It will also teach the Zulu language speaker new words in English, and how to use them.

The examples given are based on contemporary developments - stuff that you can get from Zulu-language newspapers, or TV programmes. As a result, the examples are not stilted, but very much alive. Words that we use on a daily basis would include imishanguzo (anti-retrovirals), umakhalekhukhwini (cellular phone), isikhahlamezi (fax), Altogether, there are 5000 Zulu words to be learnt from the dictionary, according to the managing director of Oxford University Press Southern Africa, Lieze Kotzé, who says it took her company just over three years to compile the book.

The publication of this tome is a long way towards nation-building at its most basic.