READING the book Futi Chilapalapa by a racist Rhodie, the then news anchor of the Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation (RBC), Wrex Tarr and how he poured scorn on the Shona, Ndebele and Manyika languages during the liberation war shows that the first casualty in a war is the truth.
The second victim is the language.
The Patriot edition of November 21 2014 had an interesting article on Chilapalapa by Maidei Jenny Magirosa on how the colonialists used the language to denigrate our own people especially in farming and mining areas.
The article illustrated how this demeaning ‘language’ white Rhodesians called Chilapalapa insulted blacks and made them feel inferior and uneducated despite the fact the very whites were segregating blacks and blocking them from attending school so that they remain illiterate.
Last week in the Legion Club in Bulawayo (a pub patronised by former Rhodesian soldiers) elderly whites and their coloured friends, I came face to face with Chilapalapa when one elderly coloured used the demeaning language talking to black patrons using derogatory terms like ‘yini wena funa lapo bar kama kiwa’.
This was oblivious of the fact that Zimbabwe has one of the highest literacy rates standing at 97 percent, and almost everyone can speak in English.
However, this incident brought memories that even before the war, white Rhodesians and their coloured counterparts had their own peculiar dialect which drew its inspiration from the indigenous languages.
Afrikaans was also drafted into the language .
The Afrikaans word ‘houtie’ (from the Afrikaans expression meaning ‘wooden head’) became the most common term of abuse for blacks in Rhodesia.
White Rhodesians were also rude to blacks.
An undocumented example is when one European farmer in the Fort Victoria area a colonial name for Masvingo described blacks as ‘oxygen wasters’ and coloureds as ‘sun kissed puff-adders’ and ‘wasters’.
With the onset of the war, military slang and abuse flooded the vernacular; the most common was ‘gook’ for guerillas (freedom fighters).
But it was the Rhodesian coloureds who indulged in the most prolific spate of phrase mongering.
The coloureds had traditionally defended their small community by erecting a linguistic barrier to keep the ‘white honkie’ out of their conversation.
As they created a sub-culture, their defence mechanism was transformed into a poor man’s poetry.
‘What is the time’ became ‘bowl me the ages’ .
‘Let’s go’ was translated as ‘agitate the gravel’.
A garage attendant was always left surprised when asked to ‘throw some sky into my rounds’ (put air into my tyres).
If a coloured dropped a bottle of beer he might say: “Man my beer has been slain by gravity.”
If he wanted a lift into town he might ask: “Man may I have a charity glide into society?”
When a group of coloured Rhodesian soldiers, pinned down on a hill by liberation war fighters, and were taking heavy casualties, the radio operator calmly said to his white counterpart on the other end of the radio-phone: “You honkies had better start getting it together with houtie chicks otherwise we ‘re gonna get extincted here.”
Slang also abounded in the various Rhodesian army units; each had a nickname for each other.
The Police Special Reserves- middle aged volunteers who patrolled urban areas –were spitefully called ‘wombles’.
The wombles then were a group of musicians who specialised in music for kids.
When the 38 to 50-year olds were called up, they became known as ‘Salusa Scouts’ (after the name of the local tonic pills for the elderly which was called Salusa 45 and recalling the image of the Selous Scouts who themselves jokingly referred to as ‘walking armpits’)
When the Rhodesian government scraped the last dregs of the manpower barrel and called up the 51 to 60-year- olds, these men disparagingly termed ‘Mashford’s Militia’ (Mashford’s was the name of a Salisbury firm of funeral directors).
The Rhodesian government also played a role in the creation of catchy jargon by its propaganda campaigns.
In 1977 for example, the Harmony campaign was launched.
It misfired badly; the catch phrase became ‘harmony terrs have you slotted (killed) today?”
Bullets became known as ‘harmony pills’.
A Rhodesian company the Beverly Building Society jumped on the bandwagon with its daily radio ‘language clinics’ to help the whites to speak Shona and Ndebele.
Curiously, the initial lessons were about instructions to gardeners and cooks. Perhaps the whites would shout more loudly at their servants in vernacular.
Because the war was on everyone’s doorstep and the Rhodesian soldiers particularly the larger numbers of irregulars came home frequently, their wives took their new fangled slang to the supermarket and the white kids threw around the swinging slang in the schools.
However, this cross-fertilisation of language between the races and between the Rhodesian military and civilian life was not durable with the attainment of independence in 1980 when the Rhodesians were defeated.
With the installation of the Zimbabwe Government that contained many guerillas from the liberation war the term ‘terrs’ went out of fashion, others like ‘kaffir’ also went out of fashion.
Although linguistics argue that war is innovative for the language, and language is always in a state of change and war brings rapid change, the liberation war was not healthy for the language and the situation for outsiders where it comes to translating the confusing semantics of the Rhodesian war.