“How can you not be happy to go home? That’s where people speak Xhosa!” says the young buck, exasperated by my annoyance at the prospect of going to PE on the eve of our departure. Where I live they also speak Xhosa I think to myself. “Dude firstly, PE is not home, I grew up in Pretoria so the language factor lost its flavor a long time ago. Secondly that’s my parents home not mine, plus all we’re going to do is wake up early every morning and probably mill around, hiding from actually working in the whole thing. So yeah… going to PE is a mission for me.” The young buck surreptitiously casts looks of disappointment in my area all through his visit, where he gets introduced to Tyler, The Creator video’s and East Bound And Down. I could just imagine the thoughts going through his head. Dumbfounded by my lack of cultural spirit and in awe of my approval of rotten viewage. He’s not the first I’ve come across to hold the view and won’t be the last. I know my Xhosa isn’t where it should be and my limited understanding of both the language and cultural practices probably heightens my traitor status.
This is something I think I should explore, and has been the inspiration behind my starting this blog. Although it is the initial spark to it, the blog will not solely revolve around my identity crisis between Western and African culture and place in the greater global context, but I do believe it will be an important point of reference for the writing I will be putting up. So here we go… and do try to mind the horrible grammar that is to follow.
Having already written an article( http://www.mahala.co.za/culture/bus-stop-confessions/) as an attempt to deal with my cultural alienation; a few comments caught my attention and were very much appreciated. Expressing opinions and engaging in debate will, albeit in whatever small way make your mind expand somewhat. I’ve taken these opinions in and have tried to make a little more sense out of the dual realities I find myself living in. We begin with one of the opinions expressed on the comment boards:
gene storting says:
I’ll suggest this much – you feel alienated from your “culture” because you’ve been living in a city where the rituals and practicalities have not been spontaneously conducive to more specific cultural activities. In other words, you’re becoming globalised, because your circumstances are now very similar to urban folk the world over – commuting, electronic media, shopping malls, racial and language heterogeneity etc. Specific cultural heritages and practices have never been tailored to cope and adapt to such diversities and this is why many of them are becoming less prevalent. It’s a simple reality of life in a shrinking world.
KIF (9) KAK (1)
Here Gene expresses something that I have never been able to fully articulate to myself. Although I must add that I cannot fully accept the sentiment that He/ She has expressed. For the simple question: If I decide that continuing to hold onto “my” cultural heritage is an obsolete practice, where does that place me in the rest of the world? Whilst I agree with the point that my feelings of alienation come from the fact that I grew up in the leafy burbs of Pretoria, eating English, playing rugby, skateboarding, acting in American and Thespian plays, listening to rap music all the while sycophantically gushing at Western TV and Film (You’d be safe to assume that it would be mostly American). At the end of the day English is not the first language I learnt how to speak. I lost the other and substituted it for this one. I am at the end of the day a Xhosa man. I come from a culture that prides itself on its history and family lineage, thus I acted in accordance with this sense of loss when I finally decided at some stage in my early high school years to revert back to history. Not the kind we were being taught at school, about how Apartheid was a naughty system invented by very bad men. But actual African history that dated years before the arrival of the dawn of presupposed enlightenment. This brought about a false sense of security in identity and a radical shift in my world view at the time, a lot spent on anger which was amplified by my adolescence. And so the calmer and more level headed I became the more lax I was about my heritage and its meaning in my everyday life.
Enter my recent visit to PE. Because Xhosa culture is still predominantly a patriarchal one. My father recently traced my Grandfather’s lineage back to his lost father. This means that in essence our surname is not what it actually should be. Ndumo was the surname of my great-grandfather, but because he was absent in my grandfathers upbringing and was thus brought up by his mother and her family he inevitably took her name and clan name. So our trip to PE (where both my parents come from) was for the traditional ceremony which would cement the change in our Clan name. The clan name is used to identify family members as well as a way of stating where one comes from.
For the first time I felt like I was involved in the process of the ceremony and was being taught what to do, how and when. These shall follow in the upcoming posts. So this is why I find myself coming back and questioning identity, which like anything else is constantly shifting.
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