The Xhosa Joan Collins

Now, this is obviously a 'Mama'*

"You use 'mama' for women one generation older than yourself and 'sisi' for those who are about the same age", the Xhosa**-teacher explained to his classroom full of pale white students. We had just learned the words for 'hello' (molo) and 'how are you?' (kunjani) and it was time to move on to the proper naming of the Xhosa people you encounter. "But what if you call some-one 'mama' who in fact is only slightly older than you?", one of my co-students wanted to know. Will that person be insulted?

But what about her?

The classroom begins to buzz. Apparently most of them had the same thought. "Once I stood up for an old man in the subway in London and he got angry", a guy says, "and everybody knows that women can be insulted easily if you think they are older than they really are". Are Xhosa women as sensitive about their age as western women? Is it a compliment if you say 'sisi' to a woman who is actually a 'mama'?

And her?

The teacher laughed at this display of westernized thinking. "It is a sign of respect to call an older woman 'mama'; no one will regard it as an insult". A doubtful hum went through the room. Nobody really truly believed it. In our minds we were thinking what would happen if we ever encounter the Xhosa-version of Joan Collins or Cher.
As a safety measure I made sure to learn the word for 'lady' (nkosikazi). No one will ever consider that an insult (I hope).


* picture courtesy of Herman Warnich
** Xhosa is one of the eleven official languages of SA. It is the home language of Nelson Mandela.

The three wise (wo)men

What if the three wise men were women instead?
This Afrikaans X-mas card gives the answer.
It says:

It would have been very different if were three wise women who followed the star.

They would have asked for directions and would have arrived on time, taken pieces of cloth as a present, helped out with the baby, cleaned the stables and prepared food. Then they still would have felt bad for not being able to do more. Merry X-mas.

(Dubble click on picture to enlarge and read the text)

Mandela vs Cruijff

Question: who is more famous world wide former SA president Nelson Mandela or Dutch soccer legend Johan Cruijff?

My South-African friends claim its the first one, I am inclined to go for the latter. What do you think?

No House of the Rising Sun

The old (apartheids) flag of SA as portraited in a bar in Cape Town

"That song The House of the Rising Sun was not allowed in South-Africa, because it’s about a whore house", says my companion while we’re talking about the U2 and Green Day song. "My father is therefore very proud of the illegal copy he has got somewhere". But if you don't know it is about a whore house than you will never pick that fact up from just the lyrics, I reply. He shrugs. Apparently that didn't matter to the apartheid-censors and apparently it wasn’t hard to get bootleg copies too. I know his father and he doesn’t strike me as a guy who knows people who know people, if you know what I mean.
Apartheid was first and utmost a crime against the black people of South-Africa. But there were some other 'side-effects'. An example of that is the strict censorship that was applied to everything that was against the 'morals' of the nations' leaders. (The irony of which always makes me laugh). Every song or book with the smallest reference to boobs, nudeness, sex, anarchism etc. was banned. It must have been some dull Sixties here. Once I enquired after the presence of hippies in the country in those days. Yes, there were youngsters with long hair and weird clothes, was the answer. What did they protest against, I remember asking? The silence that followed spoke for itself, I guess. Demonstrating was forbidden. Not just for the anti-apartheid activists, for everybody. As a dentistry student my (white) father-in-law and his fellow students were not allowed to demonstrate to get fluoride in the tab water to prevent cavities.
Erotic magazine were allowed though! Only, gold stars were covering up the 'good' parts of the women. Ever tried to scratch those stars of the paper, I asked my South-African boyfriend once. Of course, he said. "But it never worked. They were printed in the paper".

What is weird about this?

The top picture is taken in Amsterdam two weeks ago, where it is supposed to be winter. The bottom one I took today from my balcony in Cape Town, where the summer holidays are coming up.
Rain in Cape Town during the summer is weird, bathing in the sun with leaves still attached to trees is weird in wintery Holland.
Global warming it must be?

Back from....

A warm welcome to all my readers. Its been a while since I updated my website. The enormous delay was caused by several circumstances of which a trip to the Netherlands and moving contributed the most to the silence on my website. Apparently it is not possible in South-Africa to move one day and have the ADSL moved the other day ehh week, I mean. (You have to grant them a small waiting period, right?). Anyway, I am back online now.
Besides a trip overseas and a change of apartment we also got into a road accident in Namibia. While driving 120 km/hours one tire of our bakkie burst, which caused us to end up upside down. Thank god the four of us all lived, although one friend of mine experienced some awful head injuries.
The doctor in Keetmanshoop patched her up while telling us all about his Dutch wife. How hard headed she was and stubborn etc...Since three out of four of our travel party are Dutch we were very interested and asked where she was from. (Holland is small;between the three of us we probably know 99% of the places there). Turned out she had never been to the NLs! She's born and raised Namibian, but as a third generation Dutchie from her fathers' side she regarded herself Dutch before anything else.