When Professor Louis Molamu was a laaitie in the 1950s, his stomach full of his mama’s cowboys and crooks (samp and beans), he grew up speaking Tsotsitaal outside the corner shops of Sophiatown. The passers-by wore Pepsis (two-tone shoes) and, if they could afford it, Uncle Sam Gab — American-style trousers with zip-fly, six belt loops, two hip pockets, 18 inch bottoms, and two inch turn-ups. On winter days, their Vasco Da Gamas peeked out — warm underwear named after the Portuguese sailor who rounded the Cape in 1497. These were the kind of things
Molamu and trumpeter Hugh Masekela reminisced about in New York in 1989 when they got a chance to wietie wawa — meaning to speak Tsotsitaal (from the English word, “witty”). Tsotsitaal is an argot, the lingua franca for urban black folk in the Fifties and Sixties. It is made up of loan words from all nine South African indigenous languages, sweet-nothings from French, lines from films like Street with No Name and Scarface, and even a word of Yiddish. Much of it was borrowed from Afrikaans, but on the streets of “Sof’Town,” they played around with the meaning and order of the words until they had broken up the baas-taal. In exile, Masekela would wietie wawa to himself in Central Park like a madman so that he wouldn’t forget. So he suggested that his majieta (mate) gather up the language of their vanishing youth into the first dictionary of Tsotsitaal. Fourteen years later, Molamu has finally published Tsotsitaal: A Dictionary of the Language of Sophiatown (Unisa Press). These days, with his wood-panelled office on the 12th floor of Unisa’s
central administration block, Molamu is pretty much a situation (a middle-class black person). The term is derived from the standard-issue headline, “Situations Vacant”, above classified newspaper job advertisements, few of which the black professional class could pursue in the 1950s.Sitting outside Wandie’s Place in Soweto to squeeze out the last of the day’s warmth over a phang-phang (generous) helping of pap and stew, and a couple of bottles of beer, Molamu unravels some of his past.This is one of the shebeens where he researched Tsotsitaal. He is what you’d call a timer now — 58 years old, a man who has had a full life. While we talk, street people wash his silver BMW.Molamu’s grandfather came to work on the mines in 19-ot-ot (early 1900s) part of the huge wave of black folk who streamed to the city after their traditional lands were whittled down. He was born in Die Kas, bordering Sophiatown, in 1946, the son of a school principal. Tsotsitaal was often spoken by gangsters like the Nylon Club and the Russians. So a Clark Gable in Tsotsitaal was somebody who showed an admirable amount of aggression.When the cops — most of whom spoke Afrikaans — raided the homes of the shebeen queens, looking for their home-brew, they couldn’t grasp the meaning of the maddeningly familiar language being bandied back and forth over their heads. “It was a secret language meant to exclude the state apparatus,” says Molamu. By 1962 Molamu’s grandfather’s old house in Sophiatown had been demolished, and his family was moved under the Group Areas Act from Die Kas to Moroka, in Soweto. Molamu, a graduate from Fort Hare, went into exile in 1973 — first in Britain and then in Botswana, where he taught sociology. While he was away, Tsotsitaal became passé among the post-1976 generation, frowned upon because of its roots in Afrikaans.When he returned from exile in 1996, soon becoming the academic registrar at Unisa, his work-in-progress on Tsotsitaal meant more to him than the financial compensation for his family’s demolished home in Sophiatown. “I spent most of it on beer,” he jokes. Hanging out with the majietas in what he calls “terrains of belonging” — shebeens, weddings, parties, funerals — gave him a chance to document not only the vocabulary of Tsotsitaal but also the proper nouns fading from the collective memory — the Odin cinema, The Dogs football club and the Ah Sing record shop. His beer glass empty, Molamu heads to his old neighbourhood in Soweto. As he crosses a boundary river he describes how apartheid divided Soweto into rental areas according to ethnic group, a practice he says that violated the spirit of Tsotsitaal. He loves it that a new generation have created their own lingua franca, s’camto, on the streets of Soweto. Just as he did back in his youth, kids around here spend most of their time on the streets. When he arrives at Moshe’s shebeen — whose owner, Moshe Kalane, an old school friend, worked closely with him on the dictionary — some of the bleary-eyed ma-Gents in cloth caps brighten up considerably. As they say, “‘n Jieta wat diep in is moet cook nyoping vir hom bras [The guy with deep pockets must pay for the drinks].”Down the road is the clump of trees under which the two boys used to blom (hang out). Under the long, green table dividing the room is a gaggle of pantsula sneakers. The exception is the smart shoes of the situation, Molamu. Kalane adds a fresh round of drinks to the forest of bottles, and the conversation steers, naturally, towards girls. Above the clink of glass on glass and the jazz on the radio I hear Molamu distinctly say “good afternoons” — the Tsotsitaal word for the pert buttocks of the Sophiatown cheries (darlings) still crowding their collective memory.
Talking the talk
Ken Cage is the author of Gayle: The Language of Kinks and Queens (Jacana), which explores the inventive slang of gay men in South Africa.
Gayle developed from an academic study and is now presented in popular form. Cage has studied and taught African languages and lives in New Zealand with his partner.
Describe yourself in a sentence.
I see myself as iconoclastic without being subversive.
Describe your book in a sentence.
An eye-opening revelation of a speech reality that has existed in South Africa for over half a century, of whose existence most people have been unaware.
Describe your ideal reader.
Someone who is generally interested in language (regardless of sexual orientation) and particularly interested in the cohesive role language plays in affirming and binding a subculture within the greater society.
What was the originating idea for the book?
As someone who has used Gayle personally for over a quarter of a century, I am aware how Polari, the British gay language, seems to be dying out. I felt that it would be a good idea to document Gayle before it possibly underwent the same fate. It is a valuable reference book for current users, giving them a historical background to the vibrant and amusing language.
Describe the process of writing and publishing the book. How long did it take?
This book had its genesis as a master’s thesis at the Rand Afrikaans University in 1998. After I presented a term paper on gay code-switching, my lecturer convinced me that this “gay language” needed researching. When I completed the research in 1999 there was a lot of public interest in my work. I decided a popular version of my research would make my work more accessible to a wider audience who were obviously interested in the subject.
Name some writers who have inspired you, and tell us why or how.
Generally I tend to read gay non-fiction and the one writer who has
inspired me the most is the late John Boswell who published a seminal work on the history of homosexuality in the western world called Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. It was his revelation of the hidden history of a persecuted minority that made me want to document an important historical aspect of the gay experience.
Is there anything you wish to add?
I hope that this book will rekindle an interest in “camp talk” among gay people as it is a witty and creative form of discourse.