Technology and Zulu Words
I’m seeing Zulu words like Ubuntu and Sangoma in tech companies. Like anything stolen from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the words are not acknowledged and will lose their meaning. Other countries are given credit, like the Hippocratic Oath for physicians is attributed to the Greeks. Africa is seldom recognized.
Ubuntu: treating a human being like a human being, not a dog that sleeps outside because it guards the home. Ubuntu is kindness, empathy. Slavery was not humanity. That’s why southern states of America hung black men on trees and cut their body parts. Colonization was not humanity. The holocaust was not humanity. What happens to women that meet men online and fly to them to sell their bodies, is not humanity. This sometimes leads to suicide. Ubuntu comes from umuntu, which means a human being.
U-bu-ntu: you say the first part like uber, the second like bull with a soft ‘b’ and the last like lint, with a u.
U-mu-ntu: you say the first part like uber taxi the second like moot and the last like lint, with a u.
A-ba-ntu: you say the first part like Abba, a singing group, the second like baba and the last like lint, with a u.
Sangoma is another tech company I saw recently. I think it’s an operating system. Sa-ngo-ma. You say the first part like some, the second like lingo and the third like money.
Sangoma is a person who can see things, things that happened in the past and what will happen in future. He or she can communicate with ancestors. Calling them witch doctors is wrong. They are prophets. Because of fake prophets, their gift is highly regulated now, in countries like South Africa.
By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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