I can’t speak for coloured people from anywhere else; I grew up in the old Transvaal… my days and weekends were spent rolling in the kakiebos in and around Eldorado Park, Western Coloured Township, Noordgesig, Newclare, Bosmont, Riverlea, Kliptown, Soweto and Alex.
The first major surgery I had was at Coronationville Hospital (now Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital), at a time when nurses were quiet, caring and considerate. I shan’t share the horrors of recent hospitalisations.
Anyway, in these places of my childhood we spoke Afrikaans. Sure, there were English-speaking coloureds, but they were few and far between, and anyway, we (erroneously, mischievously) imagined they were hoity-toity.
Although I learned isiXhosa by the time I was seven (I won’t bore you with stories about forced removals that had us living in Grahamstown for a few years before my seventh birthday), the mélange of languages I learned until I began to take English seriously was, well, a mélange of isiZulu, Setswana, Sepedi, and Tshivenda, interspersed with Afrikaans.
The Afrikaans we spoke was itself dotted with words of isiXhosa or isiZulu. Everyone used Afrikaans. When you listen today to some of our more radical politicians, you may hear words and phrases in Afrikaans, or at least part of that mélange.
Notions of purity
Thoroughly revolted by any notion of purity as I am, I often find the nativists among us to be terribly expedient, manipulative and, well, not very smart. There are, of course, good reasons to learn one’s mother tongue, and, not to get too academic, we negotiate and renegotiate our identities through language, among other things.
For instance, most of us coloureds from the former Transvaal referred to ourselves as “bushies” (a word we appropriated from racists who dismissed us as “bushmen”), and as a collective we were “darkies” (see this column for an insight). Whites were “lanies”.
The Afrikaans we spoke was much more inventive and creative; more so, I would argue, than “pure Afrikaans”. If our ethno-purist nativists would care to take a leaf from the expression KwaHluzingqondo (when an American told me last year that I pronounced Kamala wrong, I asked him to pronounce, KwaHluzingqondo or Qunu; he has more guns so he is always right) they might learn a few things about some of the origins of Afrikaans among the enslaved at the Cape during the era of Dutch settlement.
The caprices of fashion, probably the greatest obstacle to intellectual honesty and integrity, has the effect of forcing everyone to prove who is more pure and, by extension, who has a greater claim to belonging — and who is more African. It does not help that DNA testing has become a cottage industry that seems to be more pernicious than progressive. I could be wrong.
Speaking in idioms and metaphors
Getting back to the Afrikaans we spoke (sorry Kapenaars), we often spoke in idioms and metaphors. For instance, what the British fondly refer to as a “chip butty” or the Capetonians as a “Gatsby” — we called “spy-dight” (or a “biff”). A “spy” was not well, a “spy” as in spook — he was only of the group, and we made “dight” with bread, chips, polony and atchar that was shared. The word “dight” is probably derived from “diet”.
I have yet to learn what a “biff” means…
I was never sure where another word we used, “shandies”, came from, but it is used in place of “trouble”, as in “here comes shandies/trouble”. The word is used by people across Soweto, and until the recent wave of nativists, nobody had a problem with using the word “tjatjarag” – a hybrid word born in the black community across the Transvaal. At least that’s what I seem to recall.
There are words that are more widely known, like “tsotsi” or “skeberesh” (a not so nice word for someone who sells their body, or generally used to describe an odious person).
There were, all over the townships, shebeens, or “huiswinkels” (house shops). The word “spaza” generally referred to something that was not quite the real thing. Hence the spaza shop.
So, if you imagined that someone was your girlfriend, she was your “spaza ousie”. “Ousie” was/is a curious word. It could refer to your girlfriend (the male version is “ou”).
One expression that has wide use is “pap-geld”. It has to be pronounced properly, though, as “pap-shelt”, and refers to monthly maintenance paid for children. Incidentally, up north when someone was pregnant she was described as “tiet”. In Cape Town the expression is, “sy’s met die lyf”… Again, don’t ask. I just don’t know.
The coloured Afrikaans lexicon is massive, and it grew and shrank over time. Two or three that stand out are: “jy draai in die rook” (you turn in the smoke). That refers to someone who is confused. Imagine someone going around and around in thick smoke, and you will get the meaning.
Relying on the imagination
Another is “ek bére hom n bumper” (I store him a bumper). This one relies on the imagination. Imagine someone being hit by a car’s bumper. Now, think of the Afrikaans word “bére”, which basically means to put something away for use at a later date. This way you get to “bearing a grudge”.
The doozy is “jewish”… This, Cape Town’s coloureds never quite get. In the north we all wanted to dress “American” and all the shops that sold “American” clothing (mainly in Doornfontein) were owned by Jewish people. And so, clothing was called “jewish”.
You could say, from Diepkloof Zone 5 to Kliptown that someone wore “mnca jewish” and everyone knew that that person was well dressed. The Indian-owned shops and tailors were on Kort Street, where the best jewish was sold.
Everyone went to Kort Street for lebaran outfits. Lebaran was the Malay word I grew up with and that has been Arabised in recent years to “Eid”. Something of which I do have a lot to say, but at some other time.
All of this sounds terribly nostalgic. But, I should add, language should necessarily change over time, as does identity and self-knowledge. This, in an era where “the Afrikaners” are being demonised — or, if we believe Donald Trump, are in grave danger.
Impure
There was a time, during my childhood, when (even) among coloured people my family were considered to be impure Afrikaners (by other coloured people) because we did not speak the pure language.
One reason for this is that Afrikaans was held as the exclusive property of white Afrikaners who were in the process of creating a distinct identity, and Malay Muslims were excluded from this exclusionary race-based project of identity building.
A good starting point for anyone interested in early Afrikaans writing among the enslaved in the 17th century is the work of Achmat Davids, who went into great detail in tracing the “social milieu in which the Arabic-Afrikaans literary tradition emerged”, and how Muslim Afrikaans speakers adapted the Arabic alphabet to preserve their own unique sounds.
I am not particularly interested in this history — at least not in this column, which is submitted in the spirit of appreciation of Afrikaans, and of the people who speak it, including bushies, darkies and lanies. DM