Good things about Apartheid South Africa - YOU THOUGHT YOUR LANGUAGE WOULD LAST FOREVER

Some social activities cross cultures easier than others, and "wetting the babies head" must be in the top ten ten of this list, if not the top three.

This topic came up while celebrating the birth of Nathi's 8th grandchild.  We were about four rounds in, and after telling me all the detail around the birth of little Bongi, and lots of chatter, laughter and some bad jokes that had us all giggling, the proud grandad grew quiet. 

He told me that his mother had been unhappy following a family gathering in Nkandla.  Kin had come from all over the country to celebrate a wedding, and the event was a great success.  One evening, his mother was sitting with the grandchildren and great grandchildren telling them stories, and she had realised that two of the little ones were not laughing as hard as they should have been. 

She kept an close eye on these two over the next few days, wondering whether they were either deaf, or perhaps a bit slow.  Slowly, the truth became obvious.  They could not fully understand what she was saying.  Their parents had moved and were living in Mpumalanga, and were doing well for themselves.  Their Mum was a nursing sister at a private hospital, and their Dad was a sales rep for a large corporate.  The children attended a semi private school, and were both achieving good results.  Because the children were learning in English, the parents had taken to speaking English more and more often at home to support this.  English had, in fact,  become their first language.

Nathi spoke fluent English at work, but proudly regarded isiZulu as his first language.  His mother speaks very little English at all, and in her everyday life, she has little reason to learn it.  Nathi had, until then, assumed that isiZulu would be the first language of his descendants for generations to come, and the expression on his face as he told me his concerns is hard to describe.  It was an expression of confusion, sadness, anger, and fear.

I include this here because somewhere in that animated discussion he did mention that this would never have happened in the old South Africa.  I smiled, and nodded, and said,
 "That may be true, Nathi, but then they never encouraged people to talk to each other much back then." 

For an moment, around that fire and with the beer in his hand and a tear in his eye - Just for that one moment, I think he would have traded a conversation with me, for the certainty that all members of his family would retain his language as a first language for at least the duration of his lifetime.