The Siswati language

There are two languages that you use.  One which you used as a child, the one you say your prayers in, make love in, the intimate language of the heart, and that has to be the real language.  The other is the language of officialdom.  Swazi is not the correct name as the letter Z does not exist in Swazi, this is what the Zulu called the language and the people.  The language is called Siswati.  People did not refer to their country as Swaziland, they called it Lakangwane, the name of the founder of the nation.

There was a need to establish the Siswati as the principle language of the country.  There was a small local newspaper mainly in English with a page or two in Zulu but nothing in Siswati.  They agreed to print anything we could produce in Siswati.  We invited contributions – folk tales, autobiographical pieces, anything.  There was a sizeable response, even though very few had ever seen written Siswati before.

Siswati is similar to Zulu but there are important differences.  For example the letter ‘z’ is replaced by a ‘t’.  The vocabulary is perhaps 15 per cent different.

One set of contributions was outstanding.  Whoever wrote them was an artist with words. Some of the articles were descriptive, some folk tales.  One was about a thunderstorm.  “Great black clouds filled the sky; the rain came down and then the hail.  The herd-boys’ willies shrivelled up and they pulled their skin cloaks over themselves.”  It was brilliant writing.  I said to Jack, “Let’s go and dig this man out.”  He had written from a little school on the top of the mountains in Usuthu Forests, perhaps 20 miles away.  We went off on a Sunday afternoon to find him.

 Simon Nxumalo was a teacher in his mid-thirties and excited by our visit.  He pulled out a tin trunk from under his bed full of Siswati manuscripts.  He hadn’t been able to find anyone interested in reading them.  We picked out the best and printed them week by week.  There was a centre in Johannesburg promoting Southern African languages.  They offered to take Simon Nxumalo and train him to lead a Siswati team and to write the necessary materials.  In due course he came back, published the first literary books in Siswati and launched a literacy campaign on a national scale.

Siswati is now the official language of the country. The prayer-book and the New Testament have both been published in Siswati.

I learned much from the people of Swaziland and the team with whom I worked for ten years and was sorry to leave for Malawi in November 1961.