30 September
Posted By Sika on October 2, 2007
Chichewa words of the day: bwana, azungu: Bwana literally means boss, and if you’ve seen as many movies about apartheid era South Africa as I have, you probably already know that. But since I know very few people who were as obsessed with apartheid as I was, that knowledge may have understandably escaped you. I suspect that bwana is the same throughout all of the Bantu languages, of which Chichewa is one (according to Agatha, the easiest of all of the Bantu languages to learn because there are no clicks.). The difference between bwana and azungu, besides the preponderance of azungu and relative lack of the word bwana, is that bwana applies to anyone who appears to have money, regardless of race or citizenship. Azungu, on the other hand, has come to mean specifically (white) foreigners with money, although its roots are very similar to bwana. Azungu is what the children chant when they see me and most of my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, who are overwhelmingly white. They hop up and down and get all excited and sometimes scream with a mixture of fear and delight. Sometimes it’s cute, most of the time it’s tolerable, sometimes, when there are many children and they don’t stop, it makes one consider the merits of child abuse and/or hermitage. Adults say azungu, too, but they should know better and so it always irritates me. Of course, us PCVs use azungu to refer to ourselves and other foreigners because it’s a good shorthand. But we don’t go around screaming it as if every white person was named Azungu. In Chichewa, the prefix Chi- means, among other things, language of. So, for example, Chichewa is the language of the Chewa people. English is called Chizungu and so is the language of the azungu people.
Firstly, I would like to officially thank my parents and grandmothers for teaching me how to make a bed with hospital corners, because without it being such an ingrained habit I never would have discovered that hospital corners are the only way to keep a bed intact when it’s made with 2 flat sheets, which is what we have here, until I become super bwana when my mother’s next package arrives and I own a fitted sheet.
In order to tell this story I have to go back to a time long long ago, back in the village, when Agatha was our language trainer. Agatha liked to contrive to make us say naughty words and then act scandalized. For instance, one day Agatha asked Bryce what he had bought at the tuck shop in Mterera. He said bolopointi, which was exactly what the Anna’s amayi had said when she sold it to him (Bryce, by the way, has this incredible knack for accidentally exploding any pen that is in his possession for longer than 24 hours. If you’re ever in need of that kind of skill, his rates are probably cheap.)
Agatha giggled, covered her mouth with her hand and ran and hid behind the crack in the middle of the blackboard which was standing under a fruit tree in her front yard. This was invariably a sign of an upcoming lesson in off color jokes and human anatomy. Sure enough, it turns out that while bolopointi is legitimately the word for pen, mbolo is the word for penis. Either our azungu ears couldn’t hear the difference and our azungu tongues couldn’t pronounce it, or Agatha just enjoyed driving us crazy telling us that we were accidentally saying penis. Eventually we learned a different word for pen; it just seemed easier.
One day we were learning about temperatures and the weather, complaining a lot about how it was too hot (largely because of the twenty thousand layers we had put on to protect us from the freezing cold earlier) and Agatha asked Martha if she was hot, too. So Martha said, “Ndikutentha” which should mean “I am hot.” But Agatha giggled, covered her mouth with her hand, and ran behind the blackboard. So obviously it didn’t mean what we thought it did. Eventually we prised from her that the proper thing to say is “Ndikumva kutentha” “I am feeling hot” because the other is roughly equivalent to saying one is horny.
So, a couple days ago I was walking back to school from town when a guy started chatting me up a bit. It was all fine, he asked about the school and asked how the weather compared to home. I told him that it’s hotter here right now than in Seattle. He knew that I spoke some Chichewa and so he asked in Chichewa how I felt about the weather. So I said, “Ndikumva kutentha.” I swear he sounded disappointed when he said, “Oh, mukumva kutentha.” I think he wanted to get me to say the wrong thing. He didn’t speak to me again. Who knew that Agatha’s lessons on naughty words would be valuable beyond the immediate entertainment value?
No comments yet.