Language Difficulties

One day in late September 1988, I was flying from Johannesburg into Lesotho’s King Moshoeshoe I Airport. The next morning I was riding shotgun in a Toyota Hilux pickup truck. I tried to play it cool as we forded rivers and crept along unpaved mountain roads with a rock face on one side and a sheer drop on the other, the valley below decorated with the husks of vehicles that weren’t careful or lucky enough.

My volunteer placement was for St. Theresa Junior High School, but for the first month I was to stay with a family farther up the valley. The father in this family was elderly but as a teacher he had good English.

There are some Christian sects that believe in full immersion baptism. That the baptism isn't valid and you don't receive the Holy Spirit unless you are totally submerged in water by the religious leader. I was undergoing a different kind of full immersion.

The organization that had sent me to Lesotho believed that the first few weeks in country were critical. Just like a baby bird imprints on the first creature it sees, they felt that when I arrived in the country I would make my strongest connections with the people who were immediately around me.

If I stayed in the capital city and went through orientation and language classes, the people I would be most connected to would be other expatriates and the Basutho people who worked with them. For the rest of my 3-year volunteer term, I would be emotionally drawn to foreigners and elites in the large towns and cities, rather than the people I was living with.

The solution was to throw me into language learning, much like teaching a child to swim by tossing him into the deep end of the pool. I was equipped with a small Sesotho-English dictionary and a grammar book from the 1960s. These trusty tools would help me live with the family, learn the language, and navigate my new surroundings.

It was a challenge. I had never even been camping before — proper camping, not in backyards and campgrounds — and now I was hours away from running water and electricity. This was also part of the immersion experience, to have me live as closely as possible to the way local people did.

Lesotho is unlike anywhere else in Africa. When the European settlers came and wrested land away from the various Bantu tribes who inhabited the south of the continent, they realized two things: not all of the land was good for anything, and while they wanted Africans to work for them they had no desire to care for sick, injured, or elderly people who were not white.

One of several solutions was the Kingdom of Lesotho. By giving up their farmland and keeping only the barren basalt Maluti Mountains, the Basotho people became a British protectorate in 1869. They were ostensibly free from attack by their white neighbours, but in reality cross-border skirmishes were common.

Unable to provide for their families with crops and cattle, Basotho men started to migrate to South Africa to find work, mostly in the gold and diamond mines. By the time I got there, fully half of the men were spending eleven months of the year out of their country, coming home for the month of December with money and goods.

They brought something else with them. There had always been a sharp financial, political, and social division between whites and blacks in South Africa, but in 1948 the policy of Apartheid was introduced. It became illegal for blacks to live in white areas, to have white jobs, to marry (or indeed, sleep with) white partners, and a host of other restrictions designed to ensure that black people would always be subordinate and subservient to whites.

So it was, in 1988, that I encountered people who had been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that I was a natural superior, to be obeyed and treated with deference. Aware of the historical background, this was a challenge for my 25-year-old liberal sensibilities.

The family I lived with was headed by kindly Ntate Mohoshela ("Ntate" translating as either "father" or "Mr."). He spoke better English than the other people in the village but was quite elderly and hard of hearing, and spent much of the day in bed.

When I was introduced to Ntate Mohoshela, he declared that "Graham Stratford" was entirely too difficult for his family to remember, let alone pronounce. My Mennonite country rep who had driven me up here asked Ntate Mohoshela if he could think of a better name for me. "Ntate Limpho", was the response. "‘Limpho’ means ‘gifts’, and he is bringing the gifts of his education to our children". I was known almost exclusively as Ntate Limpho for the remainder of my three years in Lesotho.

In the household there was also a relative, a young man named Fomane who spoke some English and was assigned to me as a translator and Man Friday, answering my questions and making sure I didn’t get lost or in trouble. Fomane was patient and supportive. There was one time, though…

One evening after I had been there three weeks, the Mohoshela family was gathered in the largest of their three huts. The fading daylight nudged in through the doorway, supplementing the glow from a candle near Ntate Mohoshela’s bed. The family was talking, but my rudimentary Sesotho was no match for the speed and slang of the animated conversation.

At one point, someone asked my opinion on the matter at hand. I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t even know how to say that I didn’t know how to answer. I opened up my little English-Sesotho dictionary and looked for a suitable phrase. The shortest and simplest one I found was "kea hlanya" ("kea" = "I am", "hlanya" = "to be confused").

I spoke the words and the conversation stopped dead. One of the men asked me to repeat myself. "Kea hlanya". This time, there were some giggles and snorts from the younger people.

"Say that again", urged Fomane.

"Kea hlanya".

This time there was no holding back, as the room was filled with laughter. I’m quite a perceptive person, so I was pretty sure that something was wrong with my statement. I checked the dictionary again. "Hlanya" means "to confuse".

They called a couple of neighbours into the house and asked me to say the phrase again. I didn’t want to be a bad sports, so once again, "kea hlanya". General merriment ensued.

When my month there had finished, and I was back in the capital getting my visa paperwork completed, I had a chance to consult a larger and more authoritative dictionary. So much for the white man's exalted status.

"Kea hlanya" means "I am insane".