Native tongue Bafana Khumalo
GRAHAMSTOWN, beautiful colonial Grahamstown. I found myself walking through its streets last week, freezing some very delicate parts of my anatomy, while trying to come up with profound critiques of the theatrical and musical productions at the festival.
This town and I go back a long way _ to the early 1980s, when I applied to study at Rhodes University; seeing as I wanted to become a big-time journalist, I thought it was the place to go.
At that time, people like me had to have ministerial consent in order to be admitted to a “white” university and Rhodes was white, from the tasteful colonial architecture to the minds of the few lucky black students, who treated us no less condescendingly than some of the white people. Realising that they were the chosen few, they revelled in their superior status, ignoring the fact that it had been acquired at the whim of some Nationalist.
I was not chosen, so I found myself at the University of Fort Hare, where I was supposed to read for a degree in communication. (By now you should have gathered that I am trying to send the editor on a guilt trip for all my terrible experiences under the regime.)
That was the beginning of a nightmare from which I am still to recover. The university was, at that time, a glorified high school _ from the radicals who embarked on a class boycott whenever the rector sneezed because they construed it to be a racist act, to the less-than-intelligent lecturers, most of whom were seconded from some Afrikaans university and regarded their tenure at this university in the same way a KGB officer would have viewed secondment to Siberia.
Rhodes and Fort Hare had a type of paternalistic relationship, for the former had better resources and from time to time a lecturer would organise a trip to Rhodes so that we could use their better-stocked library. At other times we would go on our own to do student type of things, like attending a stupid conference to plan an equally stupid conference.
Here we got to interact with our “better” brothers and sisters, who treated us like their poor, nuisance cousins from the backward rural areas who could not speak English as well as they should. They would insist on speaking English to us even if there was a common African language we could use. As we responded they would correct our grammar, accents and pronunciation.
Conversations would go along the lines of me telling a simple tale: “There was violence in kwaZakhele and the police had to be called in.” This would be delivered in the way that a lot of black people have appropriated English, with flat vowels and some words pronounced in a way that the Society for the Maintenance of English Language Standards would find objectionable.
The black comrades would find it no less objectionable, for they too would have a perplexed expression on their faces for a full 30 seconds while trying to decipher the hieroglyphics pouring from this native tongue. When they finally worked out what I was trying to say it would come as a revelation, as a relief for finally having broken the communication barrier between the First World and the Third.
This discovery had to be repeated in the correct way, just to ascertain that it was correctly understood: “Oh, you mean `there wos vi’lance in kua-Zaykhaylee and the p’lice had to be CaLLed in’?” That usually would be the end of the conversation and English lesson, to be exchanged for a white activist on too much of a guilt trip even to try to condescend to one.
It was either this _ or trying to speak like the favoured black Rhodes students. In an attempt to take the mickey out of them, I discovered that it was very easy to sound like them. All one had to do was insert the word “like” in the inappropriate places. So, a conversation would go along these lines: “Well, like I was walking down the street and like this man walks up to me and like I am minding my own business and like…”
My mind was filled with this these memories as I descended on the city this year to cover the Standard Bank National Arts Festival and was wondering which affirmative-action post in which corporation these brothers now filled.
The place had not changed much, although the awe it might have inspired during my earlier contact with it was now replaced by a calculated professional and affected cynicism. This time the town was a blur of colonial structures, as well as a more than necessary number of churches and _ a first for me _ a clothing store selling bishops’ and other religious clothing. The robes were displayed proudly as one would any top-of-the-range fashion line. “So this is where Archbishop Tutu comes when he feels like spoiling himself rotten and going on a wild shopping spree,” I thought to myself.
So I walked along, listening to the sounds of a public address system which kept on repeating an announcement about “the country’s only artist MP…” I was wondering if Winnie Mandela had taken her job as deputy minister of culture too seriously, donned a wig of dreadlocks and, with a guitar, would be busking her unique version of The times they are a’changing.
I walked around contemplating this depressing thought until I spotted a poster divulging the terrible truth: that the artist MP was Jennifer Ferguson.
At that point, I decided to find the house which a few of my colleagues and I had rented and, after realising that my skills at map-reading were as good as my singing ability, I began asking passers-by to direct me.
A blast from the past hit me right between the eyes.
The people I asked for directions were very helpful, including a beautiful student-type sister who really helped me find my way. She listened to me and my above-average Xhosa, then paused to decipher what I was saying and, when the penny finally dropped, she repeated the question.
The reason for this repetition was both for clarity and for letting me know that she would rather be spoken to in English. “Oh,” she said, “like you mean, like you wanna know where Southey Street is? Well like you walk down this street and like immediately thereafter there is like a railway line and like a few metres down that street, you will like see…”