ISSN: 1570-0178 Volume 11, Issue 2 (19 February 2009) Swahili remembered Two conversations transcribed , translated, and annotated by Johannes Fabian University of Amsterdam address: Amsterdam School for Social Science Research University of Amsterdam Kloveniersburgwal 48 1012 CX Amsterdam The Netherlands   Introduction Text One Text Two

Text One

A conversation with Jean Matafari (M) and Kalundi Mango (K) recorded in Lubumbashi on May 27, 1985. The setting was the yard behind Matafari’s house on Avenue des Usines (close to the center of town). Baba Matafari had retired from his job at the Gécamines where he had worked as one of the two Swahili editors at the company paper Mwana Shaba (see Archives of Popular Swahili, Vol. 1). For further information, see the Introduction.

Swahili text and English translation

Notes

¹ The Swahili designation mu/wazungu is difficult to translate because it has complex social, historical but no clear racial or color connotations. I have addressed that problem in several publications and also in notes to other texts. In this text, I opted for a single gloss instead of alternating between Whites, Europeans, expatriates. This sometimes becomes awkward, especially in the singular ("the White" or "a White") which is not really idiomatic. Still, the less elegant term is appropriate in a conversation about colonial memories.
² A clumsy translation of uzungu (kizungu would have been the more usual term), the way of life, the language of the Whites. At that point I had mistakenly assumed that Matafari, like so many others, had begun his working life as a recruit from a rural region.
³ By using the respectful term of address I said something like: Tell me about it, nevertheless.
⁴ Kalundi says je suis un muTabwa, the first of many instances of code-switching, a term I like to reserve for complete French sentences in a conversation in Swahili. Single terms and short phrases in French are even more frequently used by all three participants in this exchange (more frequently also in comparison with other conversations deposited in Archives of Popular Swahili). In translations of some other texts I noted such code-switching. Here I decided not to do this in order to avoid yet another source of interrupting the flow of conversation (see general notes above).
⁵ This is elliptic for "Does Ngoy, your colleague at Mwana Shaba, also come from that region?
⁶ The recording indicates that I am reacting to someone or some gesture outside the conversation.
⁷ He says kuchakulachakula (ECS -chagua), lit. choosing/picking this or that, garble.
⁸ This is the local form of ECS upawa.
⁹ Matafari’s elliptic remark refers to the social diversity of the population.
¹⁰ Here and later I use the name the mining company was given after its operations in the Congo were nationalized in the sixties. During most of Matafari’s career it was the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK).
¹¹ This could be "Frank," first or second name of one of the recruiting agencies that operated at that time.
¹² What Matafari tells me is not very well articulated but the gist is clear; he speaks of the effects of daily linguistic contact in a multilingual setting.
¹³ There is some confusion here. To my question whether they spoke Kabinda (i.e. Songye) at home Matafari responds with: "well, inchini," a way of ignoring rather than correcting a misunderstanding on my side. I had confused his ethnic group, the Songe of Katanga, with the Songye of the Kasai, popularly called Kabinda. In the passage that follows, my probing for the language spoken in the family left him confused until Kalundi clarified the sense of my question.
¹⁴Matafari says kya kwetu, short for kinywa kya kwetu, the language of our place. In other contexts, kikwetu is commonly used to refer to Katanga Swahili.
¹⁵ In the Swahili text Matafari makes a mistake (mi hapana kusikia, I don’t understand).
¹⁶Kaputula or kapitula is the local term for shorts. According to The Standard Dictionary it also means "influenza. (Prob. from Nyanja verb kubutula, cut off, introduced during the Great War when shorts became known in this part of East Africa, and used for influenza because it appeared simultaneously with the shorts!)."
¹⁷ Matafari was a bit confused by my question; Kalundi gets him back on track. I am not sure how to translate the designation for classes ("grades") and levels. Moyenne ("middle school") seems to refer to a level of secondary education.
¹⁸ When Matafari says orthography he does not mean just orthography (spelling) but "correct writing" (lexicon and grammar).
¹⁹ I had in mind Sarufi ya Kiswahili, Albertville: Procure des Pères Blancs, 1929, but it seems (see later) that this was not the text book used at St. Boniface.
²⁰ What was the joke? Perhaps Kalundi was saying something like "any Swahili is good compared to the one spoken here."
²¹ Ernest Natalis published his manual in two parts: La langue Swahilie. Première Partie. Cours Méthodique and (coauthored with Guy Dubois) Deuxième Partie. Exercises. Liége: Editions F.U.L.R.E.A.C. 1960. In the first part he expresses his "profound and sincere gratitude" to, among others, "MM. Jean MATAFARI, de la tribu Songe-Luba, et Léonard Ngoy, de la tribu Muluba-Shankadi." He mentions that both "parlent un excellent swahili" (1960: 9-10).
²² Here and in many other instances my translation is guesswork – a statement of the perceived meaning of an utterance rather than a transposition of its lexicon and syntax.
²³ Kalundi had worked in the colonial administration in Albertville/Kalemie.
²⁴ This was Sacleux, Charles. Dictionnaire francais-swahili. Paris: Institut d'ethnologie, 1939, still one of the best available. But why did Matafari call it (just) "a vocabulary?" The physical description (a dark binding; dark green, to be precise) fits the dictionary. Of course, he could have used vocabulaire as a synonym (see the end of this paragraph).
²⁵ Matafari used the word choyo here, greediness, selfishness – a vignette on education in colonial times.
²⁶ I am not sure what to make of the date (1952). Who were the Whites that "arrived" then? The best guess is that Kalundi refers to the tenure of Governor R. Wauthion (1951-1955); see also the following note.
²⁷ This must refer to inspections of households as part of the procedure to grant Congolese a "carte d’immatriculation," a document that, theoretically, granted them legal status equal to Europeans. See http://www.lepotentiel.com/afficher_article.php?id_edition=&id_article=26156 (where this practice is said to have started in 1952)
²⁸ I must have realized that I was on the wrong track as far as Kalundi’s little book was concerned; therefore the new start with "another question."
²⁹ An accurate description of the booklet that had also been my first guide.
³⁰ Probably from Portuguese pequeno, little one; it was widely used as a disrespectful term for very young domestic servants ("boys") but also generally for African children. Calling an adult "boy" pikenini would be a double insult.
³¹ I consulted Achille Mutombo about ponoo. He was not familiar with the expression but offered a guess that seems plausible in the light of this exchange (see below): it comes from French porno, meaning obscene.
³² Kalundi uses the local form of ECS uchi, which can be "a vulgar word, the sexual organs," "dick-face" would be the word in American slang.
³³ Achille Mutombo helped again when he told me that kapuni is often used as a synonym for kibengo, a complex notion that refers to behavior (including language use) that is appropriate among equals but offensive toward persons with whom one does not have what ethnologist call a "joking" relationship. A striking example (which I often observed) is verbal interaction with a mother of twins that is spiked with sexual allusions and innuendos.
³⁴ "English" here refers to Bemba, spoken mainly in Zambia, a former British colony.
³⁵ There are some bitter colonial memories packed in this example of reduced communication. Though he had never worked as a domestic servant, by choosing "Albert," his own Christian name, for the example he is about to give, Kalundi slips into a colonial role. It is safe to assume that many stories of insults and mockery Africans got away with circulated in colonial times.-- Somewhat surprising is that Matafari showed such a low opinion of Verbeken’s Petit Cours when he said it was just good enough for learning how to talk to a servant (but perhaps I had given him the clue when I threw in some typical pidgin commands as examples of White man’s Swahili). About Verbeken and the context of his work see Fabian 1991:148-57.
³⁶ About A. Mélignon and his manifesto against the promotion of a low-standard Swahili see Fabian 1991:157-162.
³⁷ Kalundi uses a verb I don’t recall hearing from another speaker, kusula, the local form of ECS kuzua, to make a hole in (with many related meanings).
³⁸Kofordegeis how people heard the Flemish swear word god verdegge, a milder form of god verdomme, God damn, nom de Dieux in French.
³⁹"Kamuchacha" Granat is also mentioned in the Vocabulaire: http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca/aps/vol4/vocabulaireshabaswahili.html
⁴⁰On the Etoile mine see the Vocabulaire.
⁴¹ Probably a reference to Verbeken’s Petit Cours.
⁴²Kalundi uses a term I hear as paruku and take to be a local expression for parquet, the native court at the prosecutor’s office. See also the Vocabulaire.
⁴³ Kalundi says utakula (the rest of the phrase is incomprehensible), you were going to eat, which sounds like a concession to my probing for corruption..
⁴⁴ I kept repeating myself because I found it strange that a Franciscan missionary would have been a Swahili expert in Elisabethville. The local missionaries were Benedictines.
⁴⁵Exchanges in which objects play a role are always difficult to transcribe and translate. This much is clear: Beer was served in capped bottles and I was waiting for an opener and a glass. That gave Kalundi (himself a teetotaler) and opportunity to treat me to some local drinking lore. No glasses were coming, we would drink from our bottles bilulu, something I had rarely observed before (in my experience even in the most modest household one would drink from glasses that were always kept filled to the brim). Again it was Achille Mutombo who explained the meaning kunywa kilulu. Not to be confused with its homonym kilulu, an insect, it probably is an onomatopoetic, mimicking the glugging sound of liquid running from a bottle.
⁴⁶Matafari used the French term for bachelor, célibataire; Kalundi mentions the local expression mbaraka (or mbalaka) of unknown origin, not to be confused with its Swahili homonym (m)baraka, blessing.
⁴⁷The historical fact that some recruits lived in bachelor quarters brought up several issues: I must have known that such quarters had a special name but could not recall it. Kalundi could not help me but offered a descriptive phrase in which being (or living) single is described as bule, a word with many (negative) connotations ranging from empty to gratuitous, useless, barren. It characterizes bachelorhood, not as a neutral contrast to a married state but as a deficiency and that explains why it can be used as an insult.
⁴⁸ Tamtam was a current term, also among expatriates. It could have been the name of a specific group of performers but I take it to refer to a kind of event (such as a fête indigène).
⁴⁹About the fashion of malinga ball-room dancing see the Vocabulaire.
⁵⁰ I had thought of Baba Gaston as belonging to 1940s music scene [but see http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=Baba+Gaston&meta=]
⁵¹The term I use, bitali, is an example of phonological and morphological assimilation of loan words in Katanga Swahili: the gui- in French guitare is interpreted as the singular prefix ki-, plur. bi-. Such forms are becoming obsolete or sound old-fashioned (see the beginning of the following paragraph). When Kalundi places nzenze, a lamellophone (also known as sanza, likembe, mbira) in the same class as guitars he casually formulates a musicological insight into the role of guitars and the origin of guitar styles in modern Congolese music.
⁵²Kalundi says kutupée, a French past participle of the Swahili verb kutupa, throw away. I have heard other examples (fungulateur, from kufungula, to open, was a current word for bottle-opener in Lubumbashi).
⁵³Kalundi laconically says uhuru, a term seldom used in Katanga Swahili and without the resonance it has in East Africa. In the Congo the current term has been French indépendance, with local variants such as dépendant, (without the in, an unintended irony) or bantu-ized dipenda.
⁵⁴ I now regret that I did not pursue this. Kalundi makes an important point about the ambivalent situation of domestic servants who often did demeaning work and lived in shabby quarters but also had advantages from being close to Europeans and away from the noisy and unsafe townships.
⁵⁵This exchange did not go too well and I changed its direction. What had gone wrong? When I gave signs of not understanding, Kalundi thought that I had problems with the word mpishi (not likely; almost every expatriate employed one and most knew the Swahili term). What I did not understand at the time was the phrase nyama ililungula, the meat was scorched, nor why this should be an example of less refined Swahili, as Kalundi implied when he chose to quote from the song. The Standard Dictionary has "nyumba imeungua moto, the house has been (more or less) burned," which may give us an of idea what he had in mind and why he had reservations about Jean-Bosco Mwenda’s Swahili.
⁵⁶ I am quoting from one of Mwenda’s most famous songs, lit. rejoicing over another’s misfortune is a bad thing, friendship is forever.
⁵⁷ For a moment this sounded as if Kalundi was addressing me. In the sixties people from the Jamaa called me Baba Jean but he would not have called me by my first name. What happened was that the topic I brought up made him turn to Matafari whose Christian name was Jean.
⁵⁸ The phrase is partly incomprehensible on the recording. What I had in mind was that I occasionally did use some local Swahili in teaching (giving explanations or discussing matters with students).
⁵⁹The semantic detour we took here needs explaining. Memory and context let me hear mbulumbulu as a pejorative reduplication of mbulu, which I knew as an old-fashioned (and, as it seems, obsolete) term for Whites, derived from Afrikaans boer (probably used in Kikabanga/Fanagalo). This was a misunderstanding, caused by the fact that until now, when I searched the Standard Dictionary, I did not know the word mbulu, "a person who says meaningless things because of madness or weak intellect." Kalundi tried to clear this up with the help of a synonym, ovyoovyo, rubbish, valueless, and similar-sounding bulebule, a reduplication of bule (ECS bure), useless.
⁶⁰Kalundi says d’ailleurs, by the way, but means autrement, differently (giving an example of Zairean usage?). Perhaps he had ailleurs, elsewhere, in mind – French is spoken differently in different places.
⁶¹ During the first meeting of Zairean linguists at the National University of Zaire in Lubmbashi, May 22-26, 1974, a delegation from Kinshasa attempted a kind of coup by proposing a resolution for Lingala as the national language but failed to get it adopted. (I was a participant in the panel the delegation had chosen as a forum and criticized the "linguistic" arguments that supposedly showed why such a development was inevitable.) Kalundi, at that time the administrator of the faculty of social sciences, knew what hat happened.
⁶² I don’t know what Kalundi’s phrase means. I am throwing in a few bits of Lingala. Bolingo na ngai probably occurs in most love songs (and most songs seem to be love songs). Mobali (tones not noted) means husband.
⁶³ Kalundi does not say Lingala but kiMangala, a form that could be slightly pejorative.
⁶⁴ Another elliptic statement. I think Matafari wanted to point out that, although some Lingala was spoken in Katanga, there was not litereracy in that language.

[Introduction]

[Text One]

[Text Two]

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