Taxi bells… Loud music… People moving about the streets and not forgetting the corners where you will find your car wash or chicken dust then you know you have finally stepped in to a township.
Chicken dust is a place where they sell your grilled chicken more like your Nandos minus the fancy décor and tills. That aroma of a slightly burnt grilled chicken will fill the atmosphere of the streets. There is nothing fancy about a township but the memoirs of it are everlasting and priceless.
The foreseeable circumstances.
Everything that happens in the townships is somehow predictable; you will have this nosy neighbour that will be the first one you always see every morning, and when I say morning I don’t mean 10am…I mean as early as dawn.
This kind of woman is more like the journalist of the community because she always has something and someone to gossip about. She is the kind of a neighbour you’d find peeping through her windows as late as 11pm. She is always up to date with the who’s and whose and who’s doing what at what hour.
The other woman in the community will always have these secret meetings just to gang up on her and to teach her a lesson.
Then you would have the street loafers. These are the typical guys that have given up on life and what it has to give out. These guys usually avoid to bath at all times and the only thing that means the world to them is their drugs. The guys stand in the corner playing dice and probably stabbing one another in the end.
I wouldn’t imagine the ghetto without one of these guys. The streets would be awfully quite, it just wouldn’t be the same. “Ela sista do you have some spare change to spare?” one of the guys would ask. The hilarious thing about that line is that the guys are usually ten years or older than you, so how do they expect you to have money if they don’t.
The scariest fact about these men is that never get married and they never, I mean never leave home. They become one of those uncles. I know almost every household has someone like this, the black sheep of the family.
How can I forget the wicked lady next-door? This is the lady who doesn’t have any kids and has a lot of cats. She doesn’t like kids at all and it’s her mission to make every kid’s life in the neighbourhood miserable. Everytime the children would go out and play in the streets, they pray by all means that their ball doesn’t end up in her yard.
Pure vibe.
People from kasi don’t need a reason to celebrate; every day is an occasion to them. There are only two week days in the township and the rest is the weekend to them. Tuesday and Wednesday are the only quite days. The true weekend begins with Thursday rather known as Phuza Thursday (Drinking Thursday). This is a typical day especially for the guys to meet at any local shebeen. People will get so drunk that you even think that some of them aren’t supposed to get to work the morning after.
Even school children stay up late that night. They go to an extent that they drink their transport money that is supposed to take them to work.
Once you have been born and bred in a kasi, the kasi in you will forever remain in your blood. For an example you would get one of those guys who have made a breakthrough with their lives. They have made it big; they even managed to buy themselves that lovely mansion house that we all dreamt of as kids. The guy will be living a lavish life with nice big cars but the funny part you always see them roaming around the streets of the township.
You would swear the guy still lives there. So it is true after all about what they say about having all the money in the world and that it will never take out the township in you. Since the guy has made it big, he will be the one who will be buying the whole streets booze to keep them up all night. Girls on the other side will be fighting to get him simply because they want a taste of the good life.
People from the community will praise these kinds of guys because they somehow have put their township on the map. His rich business friends will also want to join him and see the place he hangs so automatically there will be more profits for those who own shebeens. Mandoza, Thembi Seete, Lebo Mathosa, Sbu Leope and even the former president himself Nelson Mandela are the examples of people who haved made it big from townships.
Bills must be paid!
I know lot of people think everything associated with a township is crime and drugs of which that’s not necessary true. Everyone’s bills must be paid and there is no way you can bills without a proper job and going to school to be a better someone.
In townships schools are not on the list of their favourites but they still strive to make it. Only three out of ten people from townships get accepted in university and only about two from that really want to pursue a decent career and go to school for it.
Feeling the buzz
Definition of Tsotsi taal.
According to a Wikipedia dictionary it means: “Tsotsitaals are a variety of mixed languages mainly spoken in the townships of Gauteng province, such as Soweto, but also in other agglomerations all over South Africa. Tsotsi is a Sesotho slang word for a "thug" or "robber" (possibly from the verb "ho tsotsa" "to sharpen" — whose meaning has been modified in modern times to include "to con"; or from the tsetse fly, as the language was first known as Flytaal, although "flaai" also means cool or street smart) and taal is the Afrikaans word for "language". A tsotsitaal is built over the grammar of one or several languages, in which terms from other languages or specific terms created by the community of speakers are added. It is a permanent work of language-mix, language-switch, and terms-coining.”
Top Five townships destinations for tourists.
· Spin City: It’s a place where they spin cars.
· Shisa nyama: It’s where you’d get your braid meat.
· Shebeen: Any local hang out where they sell booze
Ghetto lingo.
· Ekse: means hello
· Fede: How are
· Ingamla: tourist.
· Amachankura: money.
References
Very nice post. The Tsotsitaals used in the article, I doubt that even someone from a translation agency would know them.
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