I Hear its Warm in California

I currently have the cold from hell, its been stalking me for at least the last 10 days, and while it makes me feel like kind of a baby for complaining -- its a cold for goodness sakes! -- the darn thing keeps trying to drag me down to a point thats just getting irritating. Fortunately, I happen to be in Pretoria right now, and PCSA has one of the best medical officers anybody could ever ask for. Not only did she stop by the backpackers where I'm staying to see me on a Saturday, she brought a small pharmacy, lots of sympathy, and even a bottle of orange juice. Amazing. So I spent all day sleeping, drugged myself out on anti-histamines and decongestants, and today feel a million times better. Die cold, die!!

I also spent a lot of time watching television, because, well, I was in Pretoria and I could. Something that for some reason has never occurred to me before, but finally did as I spent 4 hours on the couch, vegging out to Mythbusters and the Daily Show, was how much television here is in English. It never seemed too weird to me, after all I conduct most of my daily conversations in the language, almost everybody speaks it at least a little, and english is the only language tv has ever been in for me anyways, but here...it's really nobody's first language. People speak english, they learn it, business and government and school and lots of important things are conducted in it, but its still a foreign thing, it has to find its way through a filter, be translated and co-opted before whatever concept that is being relayed can be owned.

Okay, maybe that sounds a little silly, the concept of a lingua franca has been around pretty much since there have been languages, I can only assume. Maybe its not such a big deal. But it still seems odd to me that virtually 99% of life in the public sphere is conducted in a language that belongs to nobody, that there are always so many translations and shiftings happening in the simplest conversation. The word for English in my village, or rather the slang word, though its the one that everybody uses, is something along the phonetic lines of "Sloo" -- white person. Swazis speak siswati, zulus speak isizulu, white people speak...'white people.' And everybody who wants to get along, they must learn 'sloo' too. The word for Afrikaans is different, as is the word for an Afrikaaner. But the word thats usually applied to British/English speaking white people is derived quite literally from the color white, so thats more of the default, and english becomes the language of the white people.

I honestly don't know what that means, or why it seems to have grabbed my attention so much. Something about everything in the country happening in translation..from afrikaans, siswati, sepedi, nothing is original. Nothing is completely owned, its all coming from 'out there', happening on somebody else's terms, with somebody else's design. The way a language is built says a lot about how a culture thinks, so how odd must it be to have somebody else's thoughts in your mouth? Not that I think its bad that English is used so much. I love the English language, I love how it morphs and adapts and takes so many words from so many places. I love its flexibility and nuance and that you can find 100 different words for the same thing, but they all mean something just a shade different, they all have just a slightly different history behind them. And it is an international language, and it is important for people to know it. But my family and teachers have learned that just like "Mhlungu akusilo ligami lami!" ("White person is not my name!") I hate it when I hear English called Sloo. The learners must be taught in 'white person', 'white person' is the most important language in the world. We must speak 'white' because its an important meeting. That drives me crazy, for all of the obvious reasons.The 'proper' word, the one I prefer, is Singlisi. Which if you say it out loud sounds pretty much like English -- just in translation.