Ubuntu

The photo on the left is a shot of a property in the mountains of KwaZulu-Natal, near King Shaka's family origins. The white flag flying high indicates that the young man of the house has found a bride. The students cheered, sang and ululated when they saw it. One of my guides explained to me that in Zulu culture, everyone celebrates birth, marriage and success, and everyone mourns deaths. I have begun to realize that this might make people very busy, if they observe all the celebrations and life events. Just being invited to share in an occasional event has kept me quite busy. The mountains in the scene are metaphorically the elders in a song called "Inkhombela". In the song, an old man points to a young girl to indicate that he wishes to marry her. The lyrics to the song are the words to the internal dialog that the girl expresses upon realizing that there will be this arranged marriage. Roughly translated, she says "You are older, the mountain of the Zulus. Please forgive me, but I am so young, I wish I could have had a chance...."

I enjoyed an official visit to the U.S. Consulate General in Durban, accompanied by Gugu Gule, the International Linkages Director at the University of Zululand, and more importantly - my dear friend. I have grown accustomed to surrendering my bags at the doors of stores and having the car's trunk searched on the way out of the university gates at the end of work days. So, I was not phased by having to lock my cell phone and camera into a safe and surrendering my passport at the consulate security station. The only sad part is that there is a truly magnificent view of the port of Durban on the Indian Ocean from the 30th floor window in the building where the consulate is housed. I would love to have taken a picture. Durban is the busiest port in Africa, and like so many other industries in South Africa, it operates under the near constant threat and recent fiscal effects of workers' strikes.

At the consulate, I was presented with a beautiful Ubuntu pin that has American and South African flags and the word Ubuntu featured. The idea of that word is "I am because you are" - and encourages living and acting with humanity. Ubuntu is associated with Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the renaissance that many South Africans are working hard to create. Ubuntu symbolizes interrelatedness that many Africans experience and the need for community in order to be human. I love it, because I have come to love South Africa as I love my own country, and I absolutely could not exist without the support and humanity of an absolute plethora of Americans and South Africans.

One of the South Africans who has been demonstrating Ubuntu is a choral director (and another dear friend) named Mrs. Nelly Nxumalo. Nelly has created a list of phrases that I might find useful in my work and life, which is translated into the correct isiZulu wording. English is so different that word-to-word translations do not usually work out and I have a difficult time finding phrases in my Zulu dictionaries that pertain to my own situation. So now, I can tell you what I want you to do if you are in the choir (sit down, stand, go back to the beginning, etc.) and interestingly, Nelly included the phrase "you have beautiful legs" in my list. Should I be saying that more often?

Outside of formal choral settings, I have discovered that the song "Shosholoza" has become quite popular among the university students and they will break into singing it upon request or even without requesting. I heard it on the field trip bus, and when I was introduced to my students on Friday by their regular instructor, she mentioned that they would be happy to sing it for me. They laughed loudly when I began to sing it to them. It is a happy coincidence for me, since my research is very much about the songs like "Shosholoza" that were once sung for protests and civil rights that are now sung with different context and different meanings for those who sing them. I would have to say that it seems like the spirit of the songs has remained, but the manifestations have changed. Most all of my informants agree that while context is critical to understanding South African singing, the contexts change, so the meanings change too.