/ 18 September 2014

Turn the other cheek to buttocky brouhaha

Nomvula Mokonyane says that all ANC members will be enlisted as foot soldiers to drive the ANC’s 2014 election campaign.
Nomvula Mokonyane says that all ANC members will be enlisted as foot soldiers to drive the ANC’s 2014 election campaign.

In the delightfully ramshackle Guardians of the Galaxy currently on circuit in South Africa there’s a scene where anti-hero Peter Quill attempts to charm the super-hot yet very serious alien Gamora into dancing with him, using wildly exaggerated tales from his home planet Earth.

“On my planet, we have a legend about people like you. It’s called Footloose. And in it, a great hero, named Kevin Bacon, teaches an entire city full of people with sticks up their butts that, dancing, well, is the greatest thing there is.”

There’s a beat and Gamora asks: “Who put the sticks up their butts? That’s cruel.”

Poor Peter Quill has to deal with other aliens that take things far too literally like Drax, who later insists that whatever a metaphor was it would never go over his head. “Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.”

The South African media, it would seem, have much the same delusion.

Buttocks?
In the latest in a series of incidents that can be grouped under: “newspapers jumping on an English translation of politicians talking smack”, a Monday report noted that President Jacob Zuma’s latest uber-fan Nomvula Mokonyane promised she and others would defend the beleaguered president by using their derrières if they had to.

It was first reported by Sowetan journalist Sibongile Mashaba, and later picked up by the Sapa news agency and carried by several other publications online. 

Mokonyane took it upon herself to turn the launch of a water project in Mpumalanga into a rant about why Zuma would finish his term in office despite the scandals that dog him.

“The attack is not on Zuma, but is on the ANC. Re tlo thiba ka di-bono!” she proclaimed triumphantly.

So what do those bits in italics mean? This is where it gets interesting.

The literal translation, say the original media reports, is: “We will defend with our buttocks.”

Cue the flood of Twitter jokes, wondering whether Zuma’s ministers were going to twerk their defence for him in the ultimate dance-off with the Democratic Alliance, or whether this was really just confirmation that the president had indeed surrounded himself with assholes.

Then came the second wave of reaction: the earnest opinion pieces from Sesotho-speakers who pointed out indignantly that the phrase was a metaphorical one, meaning one would fight till the very end. You’d think it would be obvious that the phrase may not be literal to any media outlet carrying the report but, apart from a brief note from Mokonyane’s spokesperson in the original article saying the phrase was a figure of speech, the headlines were dominated by the literal meaning.

Lost in translation
So far so South African: the misunderstanding to do with language dogs the media whenever Zuma tells a particularly colourful Zulu anecdote involving devils and Jesus in some far-flung locale. Once translated into English and splashed on to front pages, it loses the spontaneity and humour of the moment, becoming a Very Serious Matter indeed.

Which is the problem with Mokonyane, her earnest critics and her even more earnest defenders. While the last opined that the headlines were an insult to the language, still others from the Sesotho language group were quick to point out that the phrase ” Re tlo thiba ka dibono” was hardly some deeply meaningful idiom in their culture. According to a few it was little better than gutter slang, and nothing they particularly wanted to claim and defend. The word dibono, according to my Sotho colleagues, is better translated as the vulgar “arse” or worse, instead of the genteel “buttocks”, which would more accurately be a translation of a different Sotho word: marago.

Turns out a lot of things get lost in translation in South Africa, even when we’re speaking the same language.

The only thing that is clear from all this is that Mokonyane, despite her designation as minister of water and sanitation, is a bit of a potty mouth. And that, dear reader, is neither a metaphor nor even a pun but just your common garden variety slur.