/ 14 June 2013

Blackness has hit me in the face

'Being caught between a rock and a hard place
'Being caught between a rock and a hard place, I sought out aspects of the self in the diasporic experience.' (Supplied)

I have never slaughtered an animal in honour of an ancestor. A friend I relayed this to told me that one day, "blackness" would hit me in the face and leave me scrambling for roots to hold on to.

As much as I hate to admit it, each day brings me closer to his doomsday prophecy, but perhaps not in the way he imagined.

Ever since grade three, the last time I was taught in the language, my isiZulu vocabulary has slipped further and further away from my tongue.

The first English-instruction school I went to in 1988 (a "coloured" school that accepted black children if they Anglicised their names) toyed around with the idea of sending me back two grades while they assessed my ability to speak English. Somehow, the general assumption was that if one did not know how to speak English, one was obviously of inferior intelligence.

In honour of Youth Day the M&G has published a series of takes on all our official languages. Read the rest here.

I proved this theory wrong in grade four, but those of us who would end up as Model C test cases in the early Nineties internalised this logic, at least during the time we were ­bombarded with it, even though we knew better. We emerged from the false assimilation of our education experiment with truncated souls, having, on the one hand, imbibed an English colonial culture so sure of itself and, on the other, going home to an environment further compromised by another manifestation of that culture, Christianity.

Being caught between a rock and a hard place, I sought out aspects of the self in the diasporic experience, perhaps in the knowledge of a connective thread among all the continent's descendants, but perhaps more so in identifying with the feeling of disenfranchisement. That search has come full circle in hip-hop.

Today, with the relative obscurity of public intellectuals who advance the performative aspects of isiZulu, some hip-hop artists in KwaZulu-Natal have claimed that space. Today, there is no difference between artists such as Manelis and the work of the great linguist Thokozani Nene, who moved the language into new frontiers ensuring that it continues to have life in future realities.

Today, having to navigate life on my own terms, I am eternally grateful to my parents for allowing me at least three years to learn and study in my own language. My ability to read and write isiZulu is functional, at best, but functional nonetheless.

I have a foundation I can build on, if need be, and I can communicate in a language I have claimed for myself rather than one I was forced by circumstance to operate in.

With the birth of my son, it suddenly became important to learn the language in earnest again. By doing so, I can reacquaint myself, at least philosophically, with a way of life I spent my youth unlearning.

Perhaps, as my friend said, "blackness" has come forth to slap me in the face.