Xhosa Quotes

He did not need to be ordained, for the traditional religion of the Xhosas is characterized by a cosmic wholeness, so that there is little distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the natural and the supernatural.

How do we reclaim the use of language? Can we get to a point where in SeSotho or isiXhosa women can speak about their genitals without offense given or taken based on the experience of how such words are used & weaponized against us

Like all Xhosa children, I acquired knowledge mainly through observation. We were meant to learn through imitation and emulation, not through questions. When I first visited the homes of whites, I was often dumbfounded by the number and nature of questions that children asked of their parents—and their parents’ unfailing willingness to answer them. In my household, questions were considered a nuisance; adults imparted information as they considered necessary.

The Zulu went to war with the white man. The Xhosa played chess with the white man. For a long time neither was particularly successful, and each blamed the other for a problem neither had created.

His day is done. Is done. The news came on the wings of a wind, reluctant to carry its burden. Nelson Mandela’s day is done. The news, expected and still unwelcome, reached us in the United States, and suddenly our world became somber. Our skies were leadened. His day is done. We see you, South African people standing speechless at the slamming of that final door through which no traveller returns. Our spirits reach out to you Bantu, Zulu, Xhosa, Boer. We think of you and your son of Africa, your father, your one more wonder of the world. We send our souls to you as you reflect upon your David armed with a mere stone, facing down the mighty Goliath. Your man of strength, Gideon, emerging triumphant. Although born into the brutal embrace of Apartheid, scarred by the savage atmosphere of racism, unjustly imprisoned in the bloody maws of South African dungeons. Would the man survive? Could the man survive? His answer strengthened men and women around the world. In the Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas, on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, in Chicago’s Loop, in New Orleans Mardi Gras, in New York City’s Times Square, we watched as the hope of Africa sprang through the prison’s doors. His stupendous heart intact, his gargantuan will hale and hearty. He had not been crippled by brutes, nor was his passion for the rights of human beings diminished by twenty-seven years of imprisonment. Even here in America, we felt the cool, refreshing breeze of freedom. When Nelson Mandela took the seat of Presidency in his country where formerly he was not even allowed to vote we were enlarged by tears of pride, as we saw Nelson Mandela’s former prison guards invited, courteously, by him to watch from the front rows his inauguration. We saw him accept the world’s award in Norway with the grace and gratitude of the Solon in Ancient Roman Courts, and the confidence of African Chiefs from ancient royal stools. No sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again and bring the dawn. Yes, Mandela’s day is done, yet we, his inheritors, will open the gates wider for reconciliation, and we will respond generously to the cries of Blacks and Whites, Asians, Hispanics, the poor who live piteously on the floor of our planet. He has offered us understanding. We will not withhold forgiveness even from those who do not ask. Nelson Mandela’s day is done, we confess it in tearful voices, yet we lift our own to say thank you. Thank you our Gideon, thank you our David, our great courageous man. We will not forget you, we will not dishonor you, we will remember and be glad that you lived among us, that you taught us, and that you loved us all.

There sit our sons", he said, "young, healthy and handsome, the flower of the Xhosa tribe, the pride of our nation. We are here to promise them manhood, but it is an empty promise because we Xhosas and all black South Africans, are a conquered people.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

I discover that my skin can carry her, that I can know what she feels like without opening my legs, without closing my eyes, when I am walking down the street without touching her.

The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart hate, is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all. At the time, black South Africans outnumbered white South Africans nearly five to one, yet we were divided into different tribes with different languages: Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho, Venda, Ndebele, Tsonga, Pedi, and more. Long before apartheid existed these tribal factions clashed and warred with one another. Then white rule used that animosity to divide and conquer. All nonwhites were systematically classified into various groups and subgroups. Then these groups were given differing levels of rights and privileges in order to keep them at odds. Perhaps

guns. The Zulu were slaughtered by the thousands, but they never stopped fighting. The Xhosa, on the other hand, pride themselves on being the thinkers. My mother is Xhosa. Nelson Mandela was Xhosa. The Xhosa waged a long war against the white man as well, but after experiencing the futility of battle against a better-armed foe, many Xhosa chiefs took a more nimble approach. “These white people are here whether we like it or not,” they said. “Let’s see what tools they possess that can be useful to us. Instead of being resistant to English, let’s learn English. We’ll understand what the white man is saying, and we can force him to negotiate with us.” The

In Tokyo, ramen is a playground for the culinary imagination. As long as the dish contains thin wheat noodles, it's ramen. In fact, there's a literal ramen playground called Tokyo Ramen Street in the basement of Tokyo Station, with eight top-rated ramen shops sharing one corridor. We stopped by one evening after a day of riding around on the Shinkansen. After drooling over the photos at establishments such as Junk Garage, which serves oily, brothless noodles hidden under a towering slag heap of toppings, we settled on Ramen Honda based on its short line and the fact that its ramen seemed to be topped with a massive pile of scallions. However, anything in Tokyo that appears to be topped with scallions is actually topped with something much better. You'll meet this delectable dopplegänger soon, and in mass quantities. The Internet is littered with dozens if not hundreds of exclamation point-bedecked ramen blogs (Rameniac, GO RAMEN!, Ramen Adventures, Ramenate!) in English, Japanese, and probably Serbian, Hindi, and Xhosa. In Tokyo, you'll find hot and cold ramen; Thai green curry ramen; diet ramen and ramen with pork broth so thick you could sculpt with it; Italian-inspired tomato ramen; and Hokkaido-style miso ramen. You'll find ramen chains and fiercely individual holes-in-the-wall. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is having a meet-cute with her first bowl of ramen. As she fills up on pork and noodles and seaweed and bamboo shoots, she thinks, we were meant to be together, and she is embarrassed at her atavistic reaction to a simple bowl of soup.

As soon as I had crossed the ocean, I made sure to tell everyone about my Xhosa people, our culture, and our language isiXhosa. I was proud. I wanted everyone to know about us.

She pivoted ninety degrees away from Gareth's house, the mercantile, even the brothel and headed straight to the emerald trees. If the Xhosa women and the soldiers could go and come in those woods everyday, so could she. With Jonas asleep and bundled tightly in her sash, she could dash into forest find the rue and head back. The day's light should still be good. Before

REMEMBERING THE WORDS OF MY LATE FATHER The time is 03.16 am the UK time and I have been thinking of you lately, nyana kaBhixa, Mngwevu, Tshangisa, Zulu, Skhomo, Mhlatyana, Rudulu. I listen and hear nothing but the echoes of your words of wisdom and encouragement in my daily life. Your priceless love for me and my late sister was the most solid foundation for our lives and the most nourishment of our souls which is still the pillar of the unbeatable strength that helps me stand tall against all odds. You always told us that life is a double-edged sword, it’s beautiful and enjoyable but there are times when it stings like a bee and the best thing to do is to take a cautious approach and remember that there will always be some victories along the way. Here are some of your words that continue to give me the ability to navigate throughout the challenges of life: . Know who you are,never compromise and sell yourself short . Stay authentic and never change because authenticity stiffens your backbone. . Always stand up for the truth no matter how high is the cost . Never eat like there is no tomorrow because you will not be able to survive in the times of famine. . Never sit too close to the fire because not every place is always has that kind of comfort. . Be aware of your surroundings and make it the part of your daily routine. . Always try to pull yourself together and remember that there are places where your tears will mean nothing to certain people. . Always remember that you were created to overcome every obstacle and to rise above every challenge. And never keep silent in the presence of your adversaries. . Always remember to share the little you have with those who are in need. . Never be afraid to say no when you have to say so. I give God all the glory for the choice He made before the foundation of the earth for choosing you to be my earthly father and I’m grateful for the years He allowed us to spend together on this planet. Thank you so much Tata for being a good and faithful steward of my life and thank you for the spirit of resilience that runs through the veins of every Xhosa heart. Lala ngoxolo Tshangisa. Love you so much.

Suddenly there were no Xhosas or Zulus, no Indians or Africans, no rightists or leftists, no religious or political leaders; we were all nationalists and patriots bound together by a love of our common history our culture, our country, and our people.

Xhosa has also indirectly contributed the more familiar gnu and – a calque of umkhaya – homeboy. One

amaXhosa came to an end, and their numbers were made up from among

Dear Black Man (Poem) ***** I love you because you make me feel things that I have never felt before. You erase my pain and you bring me so much gain. You embrace me and hide me in your well built African and manly body. You make me want to never look at other bodies. I love how you cut your hair. I love to feel your love in the air. The texture of your hair, so beautiful, so artistic. Your beautiful smile, so amazing; it reminds me of hiding places. You walk like you own the world; at least, I assure you that you own mine and the rest of my words. Black Man, you are beautiful. Your skin tone is so dark, it makes me want to bark. Please allow me to run my hands on the hills of that skin. You are handsome, my amazing king. The way you speak your language. The way you speak your Xhosa. Your Hausa. Your Zulu. Your Kituba. Your Tswana. Your Lingala. Your Venda. Your Gadomba. Your Tsonga. Your Shona. Your Bateke. Your Ga. Your Sotho. Your Igbo. Your eyes. Black Man, your eyes tell me a story never heard before. You teach me; from your wisdom, I learn. From your strength, I know 'I can'. Black Man, they enslaved you because they found you intimidating. But today, they look for you to be their mate in dating. You look at my stretchmarks with an eye of an artist. You appreciate my big behind with no judgement. You kiss my big lips with love. And in my big thighs, you hide. You love me when I have no hair. You love me when I have fake hair. Black Man, I thought of you and I wrote to you. All hail the Black king! From your Black Woman, (with African curves) .

It’s a common thing for Xhosa parents to say to their kids. Any time I heard it I knew it meant the conversation was over, and if I uttered another word I was in for a hiding—what we call a spanking. At the time, I attended a private Catholic school called Maryvale College. I was the champion of the Maryvale sports day every single year, and my mother won the moms’ trophy every single year. Why? Because she was always chasing me to kick my ass, and I was always running not to get my ass kicked. Nobody ran like me and my mom. She wasn’t one of those “Come over here and get your hiding” type moms. She’d deliver it to you free of charge. She was a thrower, too. Whatever was next to her was coming at you. If it was something breakable, I had to catch it and put it down. If it broke, that would be my fault, too, and the ass-kicking would be that much worse. If she threw a vase at me, I’d have to catch it, put it down, and then run. In a split second, I’d have to think, Is it valuable? Yes. Is it breakable? Yes. Catch it, put it down, now run. We had a very Tom and Jerry relationship, me and my mom. She was the strict disciplinarian; I was naughty as shit. She would send me out to buy groceries, and I wouldn’t come right home because I’d be using the change from the milk and bread to play arcade games at the supermarket.

the fact that there was a thing called apartheid and it was ending and that was a big deal, but I didn’t understand the intricacies of it. What I do remember, what I will never forget, is the violence that followed. The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets. As the apartheid regime fell, we knew that the black man was now going to rule. The question was, which black man? Spates of violence broke out between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC, the African National Congress, as they jockeyed for power. The political dynamic between these two groups was very complicated, but the simplest way to understand it is as a proxy war between Zulu and Xhosa. The Inkatha was predominantly Zulu, very militant and very nationalistic. The ANC was a broad coalition encompassing many different tribes, but its leaders at the time were primarily Xhosa. Instead of uniting for peace they turned on one another, committing acts of unbelievable savagery.

The stereotypes of Zulu and Xhosa women were as ingrained as those of the men. Zulu women were well-behaved and dutiful. Xhosa women were promiscuous and unfaithful. And here was my mother, his tribal enemy, a Xhosa woman alone with two small children—one of them a mixed child, no less. Not just a whore but a whore who sleeps with white men. “Oh, you’re a Xhosa,” he said. “That explains it. Climbing into strange men’s cars. Disgusting woman.

more and more menacing until finally he said, “That’s the problem with you Xhosa women. You’re all sluts—and tonight you’re going to learn your lesson.” He sped off. He was driving fast, and he wasn’t stopping, only slowing down to check for traffic at the intersections before speeding through. Death was never far away from anybody back then. At that point my mother could be raped. We could be killed. These were all viable options. I didn’t fully comprehend the danger we were in at the moment; I was so tired that I just wanted to sleep. Plus my mom stayed very calm. She didn’t panic, so I didn’t know to panic. She just kept trying to reason with him.

El principal orador del día fue el jefe Meligqili, hijo de Dalindyebo. Tras escucharle, el brillante colorido de mis sueños se enturbió de repente. Empezó su intervención de forma convencional, comentando lo magnífico que era preservar una tradición que se remontaba hasta más allá de lo que nadie podía recordar. Entonces se volvió hacia nosotros y su tono cambió súbitamente: “He ahí a nuestros hijos”, dijo. “Jóvenes, sanos y hermosos, la flor y nata de la tribu xhosa, el orgullo de nuestra nación. Acabamos de circuncidarles siguiendo

ritual que les promete la hombría, pero estoy aquí para decirles que no es más que una promesa vacía e ilusoria. Es una promesa que jamás podrá ser cumplida, porque nosotros los xhosas, y todos los sudafricanos negros, somos un pueblo conquistado. Somos esclavos en nuestro propio país. Somos arrendatarios de nuestra propia tierra. Carecemos de fuerza, de poder, de control sobre nuestro propio destino en la tierra que nos vio nacer. Se irán a ciudades donde vivirán en chamizos y beberán alcohol barato, y todo porque carecemos de tierras que ofrecerles donde puedan prosperar y multiplicarse. Toserán hasta escupir los pulmones en las entrañas de las minas del hombre blanco, destruyendo su salud, sin ver jamás el sol, para que el blanco pueda vivir una vida de prosperidad sin precedentes. Entre estos jóvenes hay jefes que jamás gobernarán, porque carecemos de poder para gobernarnos a nosotros mismos; soldados que jamás combatirán, porque carecemos de armas con las que luchar; maestros que jamás enseñarán porque no tenemos

I told Khwezi that I didn’t tell my family about uChris. Because I didn’t know if I was lying to myself. Because why must you cause more pain to others over a loss you can’t remember? How does anyone begin to explain how “nothing” looks?

Under apartheid, the government labeled everything on your birth certificate: race, tribe, nationality. Everything had to be categorized. My mother lied and said I was born in Ka-Ngwane, the semisovereign homeland for Swazi people living in South Africa. So my birth certificate doesn’t say that I’m Xhosa, which technically I am. And it doesn’t say that I’m Swiss, which the government wouldn’t allow. It just says that I’m from another country.

When Dutch colonists landed at the southern tip of Africa over three hundred years ago, they encountered an indigenous people known as the Khoisan. The Khoisan are the Native Americans of South Africa, a lost tribe of bushmen, nomadic hunter-gatherers distinct from the darker, Bantu-speaking peoples who later migrated south to become the Zulu, Xhosa, and Sotho tribes of modern South Africa. While settling in Cape Town and the surrounding frontier, the white colonists had their way with the Khoisan women, and the first mixed people of South Africa were born.

Another successful project was to create homelands for the various ethnic groups—one country for each sort, except the Xhosa, because there were so many of them that they got two. All they had to do was gather up a certain type of darky, bus them all to a designated homeland, strip them of their South African citizenship, and give them a new one in the name of the homeland. A person who is no longer South African can’t claim to have the rights of a South African. Simple mathematics.

Nombeko walked up to the man and said that she had a question. But it would have to be in English, because she didn’t speak any Swedish. Unless by chance the man spoke Xhosa or Wu Chinese? He had never head of the other languages.

It’s a common thing for Xhosa parents

The Xhosa are a southeast African tribe whose economy and culture were traditionally based on cattle-herding. In the spring of 1856, Nongqawuse, a fifteen-year-old girl, a sort of Xhosan Joan of Arc, heard the voices of her ancestors telling her that the Xhosa must kill all their cattle and destroy their hoes, pots, and stores of grain. [125]  Once that had been done, the very ground would burst forth with plenty, the dead would be resurrected, and the interloping Boers would be driven from their lands. Surprisingly enough, the beliefs found fertile ground among the Xhosa and spread like wildfire, within months receiving the imprimatur of the king. The cattle were slaughtered. By the end of 1857 over 400,000 cattle had been killed. The Xhosa had refrained from planting for the 1856-57 growing season; there was no harvest. It is estimated that 40,000 Xhosans starved to death; that many again fled the country in search of food. By the end of 1858, three quarters of the Xhosa were gone.

...White traders came to the Transkei, hot on the heels of the missionaries, to provide all the new needs that the missionaries demanded and to satisfy the new tastes that had been introduced... They were a hardy breed of men and women, these traders, isolated, lonely, and hard working. In order to survive in this sea of black people, they had to learn how to live with people. Very few of them slept with revolvers under their pillows or locked their doors. They knew they were safe among their neighbours. They had learnt who was who in the areas where they lived, ingratiated themselves with the most influential families, and kept friends with the majority of the people. They learnt the language of the people and made sure their children learnt it too. Some of them born in these parts knew Xhosa before they knew English. When Britain began replacing the civil service personnel in South Africa with locally born whites, most of their recruits came from this class of whites, who knew the Native and spoke his language. Recruits for missionary work too came from this class. Those of them who went on to universities became experts in the areas pertaining to Africans- Anthropology, African languages, Native Administration and Native Law. But though living among Africans, like all white SouthAfricans they never forgot that they were white.

Ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu." – A person becomes a person through other people. Popular Xhosa Quote

learn to experience and learn to respect ,i love my culture and i respect it i m proud to be Xhosa

Ndiwelimilambo enamagama.