Weeds Love Summer

What is your favorite summer color? Green. Weeds also love green. That is why they are most buoyant during the summer.

They are uninvited guests. They are called ukhula in Zulu. It comes from the verb -khula which means to grow. Weeds take the whole field but they don’t have a plural in Zulu. They are called one thing u-khu-la, singular. You say the first part like uber, the second like cool and the third part like last.

What was interesting about British education in Africa, was being taught about your country through English eyes. The school system taught us that weeds are foreign invasive plants. As Africans, we did not understand the foreign part. Who brought them and how did they travel? We knew about weeds u-khula. Weeds do as they please, that’s why neighbors came together to weed my field today, yours tomorrow and someone else’ next week. It was called ilima, a community agricultural initiative.

What we also didn’t understand is that these foreign invasive plants have Latin names. We couldn’t say them obviously, because the African mind is not ‘highly developed,’ said priests and white civil servants. Our great grandparents were brilliant. That why they called weeds weeds, because they were exactly that u-khula, not Latin foreigners.  It was removed when it was time to plant or build a house.

Weed in north America is a plant people smoke. It is called cannabis in Canada and it is legal. Is cannabis a Latin word? Never mind. Anyway, there are walk-in stores that could be next to a bakery or butchery, in strip malls.

Nonqaba waka Msimang

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