‘Aah my lahnee;’ a familiar greeting to any SAffer who’s ever backed up into a mall parking lot. The car guard, in his reflector bib, a soapy bucket if he’s industrious, offering to keep an eye on the car – wash it if you’ll be in there awhile. Lahnee, once a station whereupon sat a white man. Then democracy came bumping in, pimped up in the language of redress and, ever since, flashy cars have become an equal opportunity kickback. Equitably distributed; skin colour’s no biggie just as long as you’re cruising in a Merc.
It skims over one’s head how a few slang words can untangle you out of tight situations. Dismantling language barriers, this whilst you pay little thought to their workings and etymology. A craft all on its own, this workaday’s nomenclature, often emerging limping and overspent out of the slum only to be high-fived back to life in the suburbs. From the self-explanatory howzit to the more evasive chaila; a favourite amongst blue-collar workers when the clock has struck five and it’s time to chaila. Sounds a lot like ‘tshayela,’ Xhosa for sweep. Makes sense given that one cannot just up and leave the shop floor all grimy after a day’s business.
How about ‘chow?’ From American movies perhaps? In the township, ‘eating’ wears many hats: gaw’la (to chop down), papisa (literally to ‘pap it’) or as a crude invitation as you pass a plate out to a friend, you say mas’bethe – let’s tuck in. One that totally blew me away was when a surfer straight outta Durban walked into a Bloemfontein restaurant wanting to know what ‘graze’ was on the menu. His designs were to ‘chill and graze’ but an elderly Afrikaner woman wanted to ‘kuier,’ a youngster, his pants sunk in the style of a battle rapper, wanted only ‘to kick it in this joint.’ Tell me what else embodies the diversity of the Rainbow Nation than such a disparate scene that everybody seems to get?
Next to food, greetings are the other hot property. Of course howzit is patently Mzansiversal. But when you find yourself in youthful company, you may want to prove you’re still proper with the tuning. Malan’s ‘level with the gravel’ I haven’t heard in years, but these remain the tried and tested; eita daar (ey-tah-dha), hola (sounds a tad Spanish but it works just as well); ngca (the trick here is the click. Not the crackling sound that leaves Eastern Europeans gawking at Miriam Makeba’s Click Song but the whincing one you’d make when summoning the family Terrier). Not nc nc nc than ‘ncga’ with an ahh deep in the vocal chords.
In school, while the more sympathetic teachers assigned ‘effort’ to slang, most decided it belonged in the street or prison. Indeed that is where the best of it wound up. Thus academics like Jonny Steinberg went and published essays and at least one award-winning book about it’s more criminal elements. An ex convict, John W. Fredericks, typed out (famously with one hand) a memoir which was turned into a screenplay that washed up at the 89th Academy Awards, bagging a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. All of a sudden linguists descended on the ganglands of the Western Cape cursing themselves for sleeping on this expression so long under their noses.
What they may have missed, though, is that whilst the famous bandit Nongoloza Mathebula and his highwaymen were developing truly the most impressive criminal slang on the planet – first from the minedumps of Joburgh and later in the prisons of Durban – the miners were way ahead of things. With fanagalo, a mash-up of Zulu Pidgin, a little Afrikaans and English thrown in, was a comprehensive lingua franca amongst the migrant labourer and his local cousin in the repressive mines of South Africa.
But I digress. What good is a meal without drink? And can you truly call yourself a homeboy if you’ve never commenced the benders with an oral entree? ‘Let’s drink and be merry,’ once declared a dead uncle, ‘for tomorrow we die.’ He was a Bibliophile most days and a sanctimonious philanderer the rest of the week. If he’d left the writers out and kept it streetwise, he’d have settled for something pious like suip or dop. Like what are we suiping today, broer? That’s the equivalent to ‘what’s your poison, mate?’ But on the other side of the tracks, they are saying, ‘masib’hlabe‘ – let’s stab it all.
That’s where the violence enters the fray. You don’t want it but it becomes necessary when everyone has suiped enough to ask you to step outside. Here, there’s a library chock-full of them. The English go-to is the-whole-world-knows-it F-word. The world’s feet bow at its altar but whether it packs a punch or shakes the guy in front of you in his boots, is still up in the air. So the Afrikaner, ostensibly for old time’s sake, was so ticked off that if he couldn’t beat the Brit in war, at least he would swear him down as he, the Boer guerilla, surrendered.
Now across all the townships of South Africa, brawls often are precipitated by the stiff-brow donner or bliksem. Both noun and verb, as in: That bliksem stole my car, and for his sins, I’ll bliksem him to a pulp.’ Ditto for donner. Though it all sounds guttaral and so 1652, it’s actually more genteel than the squares would have us believe. Who needs a lavatory when numbers can substitute the unspeakable orifice business? Like, when excusing yourself from the table, you simply let everyone know you’re off to the 6-9. And when you’re standing at the urinal, that’s a Number 1, the seated etiquette is a Number 2. For the most part, the inventors of these words clearly took a dim view to things like feminism. Ordinarily, this part of the business would now lead us out of the ‘dump’ (see what I did there) and into the bedroom. Chaste and romantic when a man could hunt his own square, nowadays so pornographic that closed-mouth kissing is akin to the yellow press’s sentiments on Communism.
And out of the marital 6-9, when the woman has stepped out on the man and he wants to kill everybody as a result, begets more violence. In such volatile situations it’s best to avoid starting any sentence with jou ma se… (your mama’s…). Those never end well; usually in a blue eye and there’s always blood on the floor. Now that we’ve plugged you in on the decorum of keur-ing it’s time to hook you up with the ways of bidding your hosts farewell. ‘Cheers’ serves more than just as a prelude to a toast. But if you’re feeling a little experimental you can tell them it’s time to ‘vaya,’ (from the Afrikaans waai – to go) ‘line,’ ‘bounce’ or gooi.
Of all the country’s twelve official languages, slang may be by far the most accessible. Without the stiff-lipped elements of formality, complicated rules of grammar and its tendency to nick from most of the local dialects, it is fairly easy for most people to learn the basics and – if they are creative enough – throw in their own words. But the really cool thing about it is how it transcends race. YouTube is full of videos of white vloggers who dabble in the most advanced criminal slang (the Number or sabela). Highly entertaining and its creators command an impressive following. But whether iintsizwa, the captains of The Number in prison will appreciate the humour, well, they are not known to take kindly to those who air their dirty laundry anywhere outside the prison cell’s ‘four walls.’