Nonqaba said ...

Rest/take a break in Zulu is phu-mu-la . Be careful at work about taking breaks.   Staff members that are close to the boss don’t look at the time.   They take more than 15 or 30 minutes.   They take even more if they smoke outside with the boss.   It’s a privilege you don’t have, so don’t try it. I’m on vacation, you proudly tell your friends.   That is supposed to be resting, but we take our laptops to Barbados. Mama used to come home tired and I would bring a basin of warm water and massage her feet.   It is still done in many parts of Africa. Parents are always on the lookout for plain laziness shrouded in resting.   You don’t say elders have had too many drinks.   They are sleeping because they are resting.     Phu-mu-la also means men and women resting.   A-sa-mbe si-yo-phu-mu-la da-li wam (Let’s go and rest my darling). It is difficult it console someone who has lost a loved one, so people say the deceased is at rest from all the hustle of being alive, u-phu - mu-

All conferences have chairpersons, so does basketball. Masai Ujiri, Toronto Raptors President is the newly minted chairman of the NBA’s Eastern Conference because his team won the Conference final by dunking the Milwaukee Bucks on May 25, 2016. Bucks lost because of all the crazy folks on Yonge Street in Toronto, rooting for Ujiri’s team.   I was rather envious.   That’s why I say they were crazy.   I lived in Toronto for many years and experienced firsthand franchise loyalty.   That’s just about it.   Basketball is not my strong point (too many stats to remember), but I know a lot about business conferences.   They are not the most exciting places to be because most of the time, the conference outcome is usually decided by top management, way in advance.   Conference chairmen are already in the know but mum’s the word. Masai Ujiri is where he is this month, this year, this historic year for the Toronto Raptors because of how he conducted his team conference, not the NBA East

Struggling to make ends meet is ci-ci-ye-la in Zulu. How do I say that?   Some things are unbelievable or disappointing.   You look at them and shake your head ci-ci-ci-ci-ci!!!!!! Ci-ci-ye-la . You say the second part like year and the last part like lass.   Ci-ci-ye-la mainly means working with limited resources like money or love.   It also means perseverance/tolerance. Women know how to ci-ci-ye-la . They are the original recycling team, way before it was socially required to be kind to the environment.     Women from any part of the world will tell you about struggling to make ends meet, and a large part of it is not throwing away anything.   They make beautiful quilts from scraps of fabric, literally making them meet.   Women created recipes like pork pies, chicken legs stew, pudding from stale bread, ham hocks etcetera, from leftovers and food the rich didn’t eat. Ci-ci-ye-la also means nursing a delicate situation like holding on to a loveless marriage or relati

Buying a house? No, you are buying land.  Banks know it.  We don't.  They urge us to ditch renting and buy homes.   Its pretty convincing most of the time because of the pretty ads with mom and dad, two kids, boy and girl, a dog and cars in the driveway. However, your home can be a good investment if you are on the same page with banks.   They know that like most people, you can never finish paying off the loan/mortgage they gave you, not in this unpredictable economic quicksand that closed Sears Canada, the department store, in January 2018. You can be on the same page with banks if you merge the two intentions, to have a place of your own and to make money when you decide to sell it.   That is where buying a house at a street corner comes in.   When you sell it after say 15 years, I can buy it, demolish it to the last brick and sell it to a gas station that needs the land badly. A good example is the photo in this blog.   It used to be a one storey blue house, now it

Three bags?   Are you going to wear all that? And why are you taking the laptop?   All your files are in the ‘smart’ phone which means you can still run your business on vacation.   But then, what’s the point of going in the first place? Tough call about packing.   I don’t have a problem because I’m an in-frequent flyer for many reasons: airport security frisking me with magnetic baseball bats, confiscation of sharp objects like a small pair of scissors, getting a middle seat, bathroom trips when air hostess is serving drinks, no space in the overhead luggage and my legs in prison for more than five hours.   Oh! No! Now you know that I don’t fly business class. The Frugalista Files , Natalie McNeal’s book just reminded me that airlines are not amused about extra bags.   That’s why they charge you.   Passengers who pack six pairs of shoes to go with six outfits don’t mind the extra cost I suppose, because they are scared of all cameras, great and small (cellphones).   T

‘Cash or credit?’ ‘Confidence,’ I replied. ‘Excuse me?’ said the cashier baffled. You heard it right.   That is the fun part of shopping.   Paying.   The cashier is addressing me but ears behind me are all rabbit and praying that it should be cash.    Cash is confidence even if I’m paying with tips from waitressing or washing cars. Counting the loonies, quarters and dimes drives people in the check out line crazy because they are in a rush to go home and do nothing. But they can live with that because silver is still confidence.   It is right there on the cashier’s desk, unlike debit and credit cards.   That is another planet, venturing into the unknown, a keeping your fingers crossed or lord help us all situation. The machine can reject my debit card because I thought I had $30 left.   That is temporary insanity because banks are like gardeners, they airbrush the $30 dollars for their administrative fees, which are punishment fees in fact, for 2-digit account balances

Yelling is me-me-za in Zulu. Now, let’s talk about the English influence on the language isi-Zulu or how Africans tweaked English.   Shout and yelling are the same I believe, but shout became u-ya-sha-wo-da .   The right Zulu word for talking loudly is me-me-za . Wimbledon umpires don’t want supporters yelling Naomi Osaka, Rafael Nadal and other players. “Quiet please, ladies and gentlemen.” Me-me-za .   Speaking loudly in anger is yelling.   At the same time, looking for a lost kid means going around the forest or streets shouting his name.   Yelling can lead to divorce.   The yeller yells out of frustration because the other party is stagnant emotionally, like waters in a dam.   A character in one Yoruba movie said he didn’t marry the woman he loved because he couldn’t envisage a lifetime of yelling. Lots of yelling in sports, as demented coaches yell from the bench.   Kids are the most painful aspect of domestic violence.   They cry once the yelling starts, before

Followers and the followed. Little girl scared of the falcon. Social media.   Fact or fiction? Definition first.   S = society O = online C = communicating I = intentionally A = at L = large You have a better definition?   No problem, which brings us to followers and following and how the two never meet beautifully like a cobweb.     Mama wouldn’t agree. To her, cobwebs outside windows meant that I was not cleaning them regularly.   Mama please indulge me.   I think I’m a wordsmith, so I can play with words, put different toppings on the pizza, so to speak. Back on the blog.   Followers and following.   People like Amitabh Bachchan, a Bollywood superstar and Michelle Obama do not return the favour and follow the millions that follow them.   Scratch my back I’ll scratch yours does not apply to social media. They are in the social media space but are anti-social.   They are not alone.   It is the norm with the rich, famous and followed.   The followed do not even know who

Don’t know in Zulu. A-nga-zi .   I don’t know. A-sa-zi. We don’t know. The root of the verb is - zi -.   I don’t know.   It’s very popular and it’s something someone said just now, before you started reading this Zulu lesson. I don’t know is O.K. I guess.   It becomes bad when it shifts the blame.   Who broke the photocopier?   I don’t know but I saw Sonto with the empty paper tray.   Most of the time, Sonto is not there to defend herself.   I don’t know, also kicks when we land in the emergency unit after a heart attack.   It’s payback time for our lifestyle that demonstrates affluence which is also made glamorous by movies and television. We don’t know.   That is what we’ll say when we run out of land to dump plastic bottles, drinking straws, cans, cellphones, mattresses, carpets, cars, T.V. sets and other objects we discard for the latest model, or when cities are flooded because the Arctic is no longer cold enough to form ice. I don’t know.   We say that about

Swimming is bhu-ku-da in Zulu. Summer is around the corner in Europe and North America, which means being outside enjoying the sun and the sea.   This does not include the Dead Sea.   No swimming there, too much sodium. Kids look forward to swimming, a secret they don’t want to share with us.   It’s scary how they connect with water, especially along the seashore, playing games with waves, something equally mysterious.   It’s one of nature’s wonders and scientists should stay out of it, because if they uncover the secret, it will be developed in laboratories, given a brand name and marketed on the stock exchange. Swimming used to be political in South Africa.   Africans, the majority and owners of the land could only swim in the smallest part of the beach.   East Indians had their own section.   The rest was reserved for Europeans, the smallest population.   The sea ignored the Group Areas Act because water flowed over the Coloured, black, white and Indian bodies. Peopl