Everything I ever needed to know about Kiswahili I learned from the Lion King.

So, as I have previously stated, Kiswahili is a ridiculous language. Unlike before, I am actually picking it up very quickly. Many of the first words and phrases I learned I have actually known for years. “Jambo” means hello (even though it is not all that commonly used compared to other greetings). “rafiki” means “friend” and “simba” means “lion.” Timone, Pumba, Nalla, and Scar, unfortunately, mean absolutely nothing. “Hakuna matata” translates to “we have no troubles,” or “there are no troubles.” People actually say this all the time. Children’s movies can have a useful application for life.

         As a general consensus, every Tanzanian tells me the learning of Kiswahili holds no difficulty. This is not true. Originally designed as a trade language, learning Kiswahili, certainly gives one less trouble than learning English, say. There are no articles, no strange verb tenses, and everything is spelled phonetically. Okay, that makes it sound easy. However, Kiswahili has 9 different noun classes (though only 5 are ever really used) each with a different prefix and the prefixes change for plural and singular (except when they don’t). For instance, the M-W class contains only humans with the exception of the words for animals (myama) and insects (wadudu). The Ki-Vi class contains only objects and things, except for blind, deaf, or lame people, which also belong in this class. The prefix of the noun matches the prefix of any adjective or adverb you use. For example, “wadudu wengi sana” means “very many bugs” but “ndizi nengi sana” means “very many bananas.” This seems straight forward, except, though many words fit neatly into the various noun classes, many words seem haphazardly thrown in. For example, we find the word “chupa” or bottle, in the “n” class, and not in the “ki-vi” class where we find almost all other words that begin with “ch.”

         Over the course of the past century or so, due to the influx of new cultural elements, as well as, the influence of globalization, etc., many new words constantly appear in Kiswahili. Such words as “bia, boksi, chayngi, simu, schule, komputa, shillingi,” and others have been introduced into the language only relatively recently. I use most of those words all the time. They translate to “beer, box, change, cell phone, school, computer, and shilling (the monetary unit here),” respectively. In Kiswahili, (and I suppose they do the same thing in most languages) all borrow words are merely phonetic spellings of their mispronunciation of words from other languages. However, this creates a problem in Kiswahili. I have no idea which noun class any of these words fit into. That means that I have no concept of how to say “a good beer” or “few computers.” I just have no idea how to conjugate the prefixes. Kiswahili, as a language, grows every day at a rapid pace to cope with all the new modern inventions. In the past, they maybe just used an old word and gave it another meaning, for example, “ndege” means both “bird” and “aircraft.” Now, that simply won’t cut it. This wouldn’t be a problem if the governments of Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and some other countries held a conference to standardize the language (something not unprecedented). If they do not do this, in, say, one hundred years, the language will become and even more impossible morass of verbiage than English. They need a Kiswahili OED.

         Also, problematically, you simply cannot express certain concepts and ideas in Kiswahili. Sometimes this means that people will not understand a joke you make, for example “nitakupika” means “I will cook you.” We made the joke to a friend who helped us learn verbs and he said our grammar was correct, but you do not cook people so it does not make sense. I can imagine this complicates anthropological teaching. I also have no fucking clue how Catholicism spread here given the incredible difficult in explaining things like Transubstantiation or the Trinity. “What? You cannot eat a human let alone a god? What? It is a thing and a person? But things and people are in different noun classes? Does God have some sort of physical deformity?” Kiswahili has no word for fresh. One person explained to me “you see because this is a tropical region, everything is fresh, so we do not have word for it.” I beg to differ. I have seen the large, fly covered piles of dried rotten minnows ya’ll eat (dega). These are certainly not fresh, in fact, they are about as far from fresh something edible can be. Perhaps I made my statement too hastily, for you see, “fresh” or in Kiswahili “freshi” is a word. It means fresh as in the slang term fresh, for those of you how are not hip-hop inclined, fresh as in Fresh Prince of Bel Air. This means that youth all over the country use this word every day, and not only do not know the actual meaning, but also do not even understand the concept behind the word. For another example, if one recalls the “we slept together” incident, you must realize it would never happen in Kiswahili. There is not really a way to say this. It is almost as if they decided “one cannot express this idea because men don’t sleep together, silly goose.” As far as know, Kiswahili has no word for homosexual other than the (I assume) offensive slang term “kitifu*.”

         Conditional sentences constitute a major part of English day-to-day use. “If I can, if I am able, could I, may I, if it is possible, etc.” have no real equivalent in the language. As we know, Americans never like to commit to anything, and if one commits to something and does not show up, she or he has just made major faux pa (I am fairly certain I misspelled that). If a person says flat-out no to something, we consider this rude. Not so in Kiswahili. If somebody says they will do something they very well might not do it, or at least take several days or even months**. For us as foreigners, especially, people here constantly ask us to do things, many of which are quite difficult. Luckily, all the many lovely noncommittal things English has to offer can be (sort of, kind of) expressed with the phrase “nitajaribu” or “I will try.” However, for the most part language is really devoid of gray era, which make many things incredibly difficult. It either is or it isn’t. No. The world is filled with viscous-metaphysical-volcanic-ash-cloud–nom-de-plume-Tom-Waits-albums-moral-ambiguity-motherfucker-irony-carnivours-flower-timebomb-vaudvile-act-I-don’t-want-to-but-I-feel-obligated-to-mustard-gas-ham-sandwich-hold-the-mayo-inncorrect-grammar-on-purpose-see-Kurt-Vonnegut-for-refferance-not-just-yes-or-no. Ugh. You can imagine how difficult this makes teaching something like history or physics. “Light is a particle and a wave? Huh?”

         Sticking with the black and white simplicity thing, in Kiswahili using the command form does not seem rude to anyone (including when they speak in English). Thus, children on the street often tell me “give me money,” or once, “give me my money” and it does not register as something rude, even though we generally only associate this phrase with pimps. “Trick hit the track and trawl, I want my money.” I try not to take insult, even though the worst crackhead bums in America would never say that and expect a dime. There are sorts of ways to ask for things politely, but, for the most part, you only really use these with “wazee” or old wise people.

         Perplexingly, there is not problem with a word having multiple and completely unrelated meanings. For example, nyanya can mean either tomato or grandmother. Moto can mean both fire and hot, that one makes sense. However my favorite has to be kupiga or to beat. When learning a language one generally learns the most useful and common words first. Imagine my chagrin when one of the first verbs I learned was beating. Also, mwongo or liar, was an early one. Keep in mind I speak much better Spanish than Kiswahili and I only learned mienteroso as a joke talking about telenovelas. Beating can mean a variety of things in Kiswahili, you beat someone in a race, you beat an instrument, you beat your cell phone when you want to call someone, or you beat women and children.

         In a Kiswahili speaking world, devoid of grey area and hypothetical situations, I think back to the Lion King and its incredible improbability. Animals don’t speak. Timone and Pumba’s interspecies-homoerotic relationship would go either completely unnoticed or they would be hacked to death with machetes. If someone else is king, then you are not king. If somebody says differently they are a liar. If he or she is a liar, you should probably beat them, especially if it is a woman. A more likely scenario involves a bunch of rich, culturally insensitive Italian tourists going on safari and getting ripped off by the locals who proceed to get hammered on pombe in the shamba after a hard day of not work. Children’s movies don’t teach you everything. Hakuna Matata, what a wonderful phrase.

 

*I learned that one from my students.

** For example, I asked them to make me a bookshelf nearly three months ago. I would have just built my own, but they want standardized ones for the hostel’s look or something. So far, every other volunteer has gotten one (and to be fair they got theirs after 2 months). It does not take three months to make a fucking cabinet. They also miss measured it once, and another time the simply did not write down the measurements.

P.S. The word for “bell pepper” in Kiswahili is pelipeli hoho

A Few Tales of Idiosyncrasy and Shame

These are just a few stories that I find rather humorous from my stay here. Many of them stem from cultural misunderstanding at which I often find myself the center of. Some are not necessarily stories of either idiosyncrasy or shame, but certainly, the have entertained me and I hope they do the same for you.
There are two places to access the Internet in Hanga, the vocational school and St. Benedict. St. B has only two computers that have access, and they are usually snatched up on a first come first serve basis (usually by teachers, and the students never have the chance to use them, sort of defeating the purpose if you ask me). The vocational school has a wireless hub, so I go there so I don’t steal a computer from a student, and I am able to use mine. This story takes place the one time I have spent any time in the computer lab at St. B, when I was waiting to meet another teacher.
While waiting, I read Infinite Jest, and with such a dense bastard of a book, I did not make much headway because when one sits quietly reading a book in Tanzania, people to not culturally recognize the don’t-bother-me-I-am-reading-a-very-difficult-seminal-piece-of-literature sign blinking in front of one’s head. In one such case, a teacher using the Internet asked me for my help. I rose and went to solve his problem. He had a user name and password that did not mesh with the website he was trying to use. I typed it myself, thinking it was case sensitive, and it, again, did not work. I told him I did not know the answer and maybe that the password to the site had expired. Then I paused. “Wait, what is this site?” It was something like Anastasia .com. I scrolled down a little. “Russian mail order bride!?!?” I half shouted. “You never want to use a website like this.” “Why?” he asked somewhere between cunning and innocent, “what is wrong with this?” It was wrong on so many levels I did not know where to begin. There exists many possible scenarios, both in terms of this man’s opinion and the purpose of this website. For instance, he might be thinking, “What? What is wrong with wanting to buy the marriage of one of these scantily clad Slavic women?” It is entirely possible that he though it was something like a dating service where you procure a beautiful white women as a bride who will take you to somewhere in Europe where everyone is rich and nobody wants for anything. Somehow or another, he must have thought that this was some legitimate way to get a wife (it doesn’t matter who, because she was scantily clad, therefore easy, and white, therefore rich), either some machismo attitude that treats one as a commodity or he thought this was a normal way to get women in industrialized nations. Either one of these leaves me with a greasy, skeezball feeling. Put to the delicate task of explaining this, I could tell him that this website either:
A. Exploits women trying to get out of poverty, and is little better than sex slavery
B. Is some Internet scam
C. Is just a porn site being access by a teacher at a Catholic school during school hours on a school computer
D. Something of dubious repute he is doing other than writing his fucking lesson plans

I tried to explain the first and I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I opted for the second and gave the details of an Internet scam. Note to self, watch this guy like a fucking hawk when he is around female students.


On a completely normal and average afternoon I walked past the hostel with my friend Eva, one of the volunteers from Austria. One our favorite monks, Br. Dominic, one of the young ones and a visitor for Zambia, walked by and we began with the customary barrage of greetings. They are way big into secret handshake type handsakes here. We exchanged ours and when he and Eva did also, she exclaimed something to the effect of “Ow, not so hard.” He then responded with the joke “you have to be strong like a man!*” and then he proceeded to give me another one of our sorta secret handshakes. At that exact moment both Eva and I noticed that during our entire conversation he had been hiding a pink Barbie bag craftily obscured behind his back. A moment of recognition passed between us, and in that brief calm moment, I fumbled in my head for something witty to say, Eva reached into her bag to get her camera, and Dominic began to run toward the monastery at break-neck speed before we could do either. He reacted so quickly that he was half way there (like 20 meters or something) before our gut wrenching laughter could even start.

This is not actually my story, but it belongs to Helena, German volunteer I got closest to, and Br. Marcelino**. Br. Marcelino is like freakin’ Santa Clause. He is this really jolly fellow who is always smiling and just makes you happy to be around him. He often refers to his huge belly as his “obesity.” “I will be back. I run slow because of my obesity.” He is a chef and he got his degree in hotel management in Kenya, and he loves to cook. This makes me like him even more. He is starting a cooking school for local widows and children of widows. He’s awesome. So anyway, he and Helena were talking, and he made the comment “See the fat nun? She was my student.” Helena responded “which fat one?” “Ah, the very fat one. Many of them are fat, but she is the fattest.” We on the volunteer end of things found this incredibly amusing.

We ate dinner, as per usual, one night at the Seminary with our friend Riehner, as well as the other usuals. Riehner, one of our best friends here, is a candidate for the monastery and also just finished his student teaching and is completing his last couple semesters of college***. Another of our friends, William, is in a similar situation and he went back to University of Dar Es Salaam a week or two earlier than Riehner. Both of their English is exceptional and they some of the most qualified teachers I’ve seen here (myself included).
So, at dinner after the day William left, we asked Riehner what they in did in Songea the preceding night. He told us the story, “we ate some food and drank a couple beers, then we got a room and slept together, and in the morning I saw him to the bus station.” The stereotypical, milk coming out the nose sort of laughing ensued. He was rather mortified when we explained the normal English usage of the phrase, and immediately began to correct the misnomer****. We’ve been making fun of him for a couple weeks now, each time taking it the point where he almost gets angry or really irritated, and then not mentioning it again for a couple days.

Fr. Kastor is quite possibly the most ridiculous person I have met here thus far. He’s this larger than life character, and when he enters a room, you know it. One almost always finds him on one of his two cell phones*****. At the Seminary graduation, for instance, I sat next to Kastor and a Peace Corp. volunteer named Amanda. I nudged Amanda and subtly pushed a small stenographer’s pad toward her. It contained a message reading “I think it’s totally legit for us to pass notes because Kastor has been texting this entire time and he’s the primary school’s headmaster.” Andrew has described Kastor as a dude (note, not a dude-bro). He is about the savviest person I’ve met in Tanzania. Keep this in mind. One time, I was drinking a beer with Kastor and shooting the breeze as we waited for some of our friends to come. The topic of discussion shifted to music, and I think I was playing some Bob Marley on my laptop or something (which is just about the only music I have that anyone over here has ever heard of). As we talked about what other music we liked, and Kastor replied “me, I like the music of Celine Dion.” Intrepid readers, you will remember my premonition from the first blog that this countries Celine Dion fetish would be some sort of cruel theme, if you will, a sort of recurring dream that just doesn’t quite want to die, and reminds you of it when you least expect it.
Kiswahili is a funny language. Most cases, instead of creating a new word to deal with a new situation, they will use an old word. That is why, for instance, the word for bird and airplane are the same. Moto means both hot and fire. Kupiga means “beating,” but it can also mean “dial a phone.” You can imagine my initial shock when I saw signs that told you to beat your cell phone. Anyhow one such word is simama, meaning stop. I once asked a person in the village who works at a store to confirm the meaning for me (as she speaks a little English). “Get up?” She said. I immediately though I miss spoke and backpedaled hurriedly and apologetically. Oh, I forgot to mention this woman has no legs. “Hapana, hapana, pole sana******.” I later found out I was correct. It means both “stop” and “get up.” Fucking Kiswahili.
So, another funny Kiswahili story involves a pretty massive cultural fuck up. The word for “corn” is mahindi. The word for Indian is mhindi. Note, I am talking about “Indian” as in the sub-continent variety. For those of you who don’t know, the English they speak here is much more similar to U.K. English. Some in the U.K. still use the supremely offensive term “Red Indian” to refer to Native Americans, and certainly all used it at the time they colonized East Africa. In other words, somewhere along the line, either some pith-helmeted venture capitalist dick-bag, or some supremely ignorant African linguists fucked up. Or both.

*Unlike many people here, Dominic is not some machismo douchebag in the slightest. He was just being funny.

** And who I miss very much.

*** I think that’s how you spell his name. On a side note, people here have this weird penchant for giving their children Anglo-Saxon and Latin saint names. It’s kind of the opposite of the states where, many African Americans have African first names and like Johnson or something for the last name.

**** Keep in mind that homosexuality is just about the biggest taboo around here. In fact, I believe it is illegal.

***** It actually is cheaper to have two cell phones here because of the way the providers compete against each other and often, they times do not enable the other company to use their service towers. But still.

****** No, no, very sorry.