adminRECENTLY we drove from Plumtree to Bulawayo. When we got to Bellevue at the intersection of Wellington and Plumtree roads I observed two different spellings of the same word — Masiyephambili in a bold and screaming print and Siye.Pambili. The latter is City Council’s rendition while the former is a version of Group Five, a road construction company which was responsible for the construction of the road from Plumtree to Bulawayo.
West of the intersection Wellington Road becomes Siye.Pambili and proceeds beyond Tshabalala Township and ultimately connects with the Victoria Falls Road. I began to ask myself which was which between the two renditions of the same word? My mind began wandering and wondered just when our City Council will decolonise the names of some roads and institutions in Bulawayo.
My mind flashed back to the name that we all came across in history books, that of Gundwane Ndiweni. The man is said to have led a group that, following defeat of the Ndebele by Afrikaners in 1837, struck a more easterly route and finally settled in the Insiza-Mzingwane-Ncema areas. I remember too Chief Khayisa Ndiweni just wondering and puzzled who the descendants of this Gundwane man were. Indeed, it was not easy for the Ntabazinduna chief to know that as the Ndebele never had a man going by that name. It was all some orthographical distortion, a distortion that is very much with us today. It was the distortion to the name that got the chief puzzled.
Before we even go further the name Ntabazinduna itself is distorted. In SiNdebele it would be Intabayezinduna. The locative form would Entabeniyezinduna. Over time wrong things seemingly become right. This is what has happened with some names in our beautiful city. We have Nyamandlovu as a name of a place west of Bulawayo. In SiNdebele there is no such thing. It ought to be Inyamayendlovu where Mkhokhi Masuku was chief, but as we said, names of places are rendered in the locative — Enyamayendlovu.The question then is, what do we say about Bulawayo, is this a SiNdebele name? Certainly, it is not. The name Bulawayo is an English rendition of a SiNdebele name-Obulawayo which, on account of the locative form, becomes Kobulawayo. But how was the name Kobulawayo spelt in those early days?
What we find in historical accounts, obviously written by whites, is the name GuBuluwayo. SiNdebele orthography then had the “K” and “G” sounds represented by “G”. This is what led to the invention of Gundwane when as we now know the man was Khondwane, a brother to King Mzilikazi’s mother Cikose. That explains why the man was chosen by his nephew King Mzilikazi to lead the princes, queens and princesses. If the man had been called Khondwane, Chief Khayisa Ndiweni would have known that that was the man whose sons became chiefs at Ezinaleni/Ezisongweni (Mabuyane the father of Faku and grandfather of Nyangazonke) and Kwezimnyama.
Orthography changes over time and affords a language to be more precise and to differentiate words or names. The colonial period distorted not only our culture but our names too. In those early days Siye Pambili would have been spelt as given above. There was no differentiation between explosive “pha” and implosive “pa”. The context dictated whether it was “pha” or “pa”. When I did primary school education in the 60s the difference had been brought out through an improvement in orthography.
There are names that have been retained from the colonial era without some good reason. One such name is Matsheumhlope, a low density suburb. The Ndebele name would be something like Amatsh’amhlophe. We do not have vowels coming one after another. That still would not be correct as we render names of places in the locative form. We can’t say Ematsh’amhlophe either. That has no meaning in SiNdebele. Something like Ematshen’amhlophe is nearer the mark.
We know that King Lobengula had a number of satellite settlements to which he retreated when not on official duty: Emganwini, Umvutshwa (note that the locative is not Emvutshwa just as we should not say Emawaba) and Amatsh’amhlophe). We need care with names of places and their locative rendition. What is wrong seems normal with passage of time.
When you come from Kezi (itself spelt wrongly) you cross a river signposted Umganin. This is a corruption of Emganwini. The tree is umganu (morula in Setswana) but the place where the marula tree is found is called, in the locative form, Emganwini. Indeed, that is the correct rendition for the township which gets its name from one of King Lobengula’s private satellite settlements. We know that it was where Queen Xhwalile, King Lobengula’s senior Gaza queen lived. A Doctor Crick has left an elaborate account of the activities in that settlement, amongst which was a thriving skin tanning industry. His account is held in Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford which I have had the opportunity to visit and observe just how many of the Ndebele artifacts are held in that museum. As I will point out in my “Cultural Heritage” column, at Umvutshwa there was a thriving iron smelting and smithing industry that made use of the iron ore found to the east of the settlement.
In Bulawayo there is a psychiatric institution that still goes by a name that bears a colonial hangover. The institution is called Ingutsheni. Where the institution stands there used to be an Ndebele settlement called Ingubo, but as we have already seen above, the locative form was used and thus we ended up with Engutsheni where Fusi (the name is applied to one who is born after twins, the word will also mean an old crop field that has since been abandoned) Khanye was chief. While we celebrate the retention of names from the heyday of the erstwhile Ndebele State, we need to get the names right in honour of our language and a purified legacy.
The challenge, onus and burden are on our city fathers and mothers who ought to be alert to the corrupted names and do something about it. No one from some extra-territorial abode will come to do it for us. It is our language, our heritage and our responsibility. I have merely given a few examples and I imagine there are more names that need scrutiny and appropriate re-alignment to the current SiNdebele orthography and usages.
Online Reporter