SPRING - SEASON OF FOLDED PANTIES, JEALOUSY AND THE WISDOM OF TAXIS
Tessa Dowling

The Sunday Independent
October 7 2007

Spring (Xhosa/Zulu: intwasahlobo; Sotho: selemo; Pedi: seruthwana; Tswana: dikgakologo) kwaMzoli is always a time of new beginnings. The girlfriends extend their extensions, wear strappy tops and bring their babies home from the rural areas.

"Eish, I haven't seen that little son of mine for four years now. It is time he comes to Cape Town and learns proper English. Where the hell is he going to get in life if he can only speak bloody Venda?" This uttered by Sis' Thandi, who had children dotted all around the former homelands of South Africa.

"I had to sample a man from each tribe," she defended herself to Sis' Lulu, who was looking decidedly shocked. "And one thing I can say - although I am a Xhosa woman, I would never, NE-VA marry a Xhosa man! Hayi bo! Give me a Sotho any day.

"A Xhosa man won't even wash your panties. [Editor's note: You will not find the word 'panties' in any African language dictionary. Funny, hey, they are written by African men.] But a Sotho man, if he loves you, will not only wash your panties, but iron and fold them too!"

"Who needs their vokken panties folded?" Bra February's T-shirt said "Chick Magnet", and his expression suggested that no panty in his vicinity ever got the time to be vokken folded.

"I can't believe what I am hearing!" Bra X thumped his fist on our little table that hardly had space for a fist, there were so many glasses and bottles and what-what. "Magents, maleyidis (township: gents and ladies), this is HERITAGE month, the month in which we should be celebrating WHO we are, our languages, our KALTSHA (township: culture - also, in some dialects: Khayelitsha), our UBUNTU! But no, oh no, we have ascended so bloody low, our only extinguishing characteristic is the way we treat our girlfriends' panties."

There was an embarrassed hush. Sis' Dikeledi coughed. Sis' Lulu touched the pimple on her forehead and sucked in her breath. "It's so bloody painful," she moaned. "Thambisa ngeswekile, sana (Xhosa: Rub in sugar, babe)," whispered Sis' Thandi. "It works wonders." Then she turned respectfully to Bra X.

"You know, bhuti, unyanisile (Xhosa: you are right). I am proud of my heritage. Exspeshal (township: Especially) my mother tongue - ulwimi lwenkobe, ulwimi endiluncance ebeleni (Xhosa: the language of the cooked mealie, the language which I sucked at the breast) - but there are things I see that I am not so proud of. For example, JEALOUSY." She mouthed each syllable of the word again, in case people had not understood the first time: "JE-LOH-SEE."

"Jealousy is not part of our culture," piped up Bra X. "It comes from the Khoisan."

"What!!!" Sis' Thandi nearly spat her Bacardi Breezer straight into his face. "What!! We got our clicks from them, and maybe our colour, but fokol else. Mamela (Xhosa: Listen), my bru, there is so much bloody jealousy in the townships, the only way you survive is to pretend you are doing as badly as everyone else."

Bra Nkuja agreed. He said he wanted to pay his water account but couldn't, because his neighbours would be jealous when he had running water and they didn't. So he just used the money he would have used for the water account on drinking "Iinyembezi zikaVitoliya" - the tears of Victoria, ie brandy - instead.

Kagiso, a Tswana IT specialist with a passion for self-help books, said we should look for the positive aspects of our heritage to celebrate and not dwell on the negative things. For example, he suggested, why not learn from taxis?

"Taxis!" screeched Sis' Lulu, emerging from the ladies' toilets with a plaster on her pimple. "Now, that is worse than panties!"

"No, no, let me explain.Taxis are becoming very educational." Kagiso talked about the way in which the names and sayings adorning taxis were both philosophical and linguistically complex.

"A good taxi these days is reading matter." He looked around the table. "I have been writing down some examples." He took out his laptop, which had a screensaver of his dog watching the Tswana news.

"OK, here we go. This is what I have learnt from taxis."

"My bru, the only vokken thing I have learnt from taxis is survival techniques," piped up Bra February, who always showed a keen interest in lifelong learning.

Kagiso, who always dressed like a newsreader and smelled of the most expensive aftershave, ignored Bra February and opened a file named "Taxi terminologies". On the screen came the following:

Ea bohlale o ithuta kamehla. (Sotho: The wise person learns something every day.)

"Yes!" screamed Sis' Dikeledi. "That is so right! Today I learnt that my boyfriend is cheating on me, the bloody tsotsi!"

Kagiso winced, but continued to scroll down, "Here's a beautiful one - Umuntu incwadi engafundeki (Zulu: A person is an unreadable book)."

"Heyi! Also so true, because I never knew he was sleeping with someone else until I found a pair of Woolworths jeans, ladies size 36, under our bed." Sis' Dikeledi prided herself on her trim, slightly anorexic, size 32 frame.

"What's this one?" Bra X read it out in his best Zulu: "Indlala ibanga ulaka (Zulu: Hunger creates anger) - "That is a blue fact! (blue fact: idiosyncratic township expression developed in heightened states of drunkeness; meaning obscure) Iphi inyama? (Xhosa: Where is the meat?)".

He banged the table again, and, because it had suffered many a thwack from Bra X's beefy fist, it split neatly in two. Kagiso managed to save his laptop by pressing it to his lap, and Sis' Thandi kept her drink because it was her custom never to let it out of her hand, but the others lost theirs to the floor. The in-house mutt whose name was Phuma inja! (Xhosa: Get lost, dog!) because that was the only thing anyone ever called it, lapped up the cocktail of drinks and was later seen weaving through the cars miaowing like a cat.

We never got to see the rest of the taxi wisdom, but two weeks later we noticed that Bra X (who had been the victim of much verbal abuse because of his karate chop of the table) had put up his own sign on the rear windscreen of his Polo: "Le nto uthi ndiyiyo, nawe uyiyo. (Xhosa: That which you say I am, you also are.)"

Tessa Dowling is a director of African Voices, a company that produces multimedia and audio materials for learning African languages. She got her information on taxi signage from the brilliant Zulu teacher, Estelle Rassman.