A Culture That Clicks

Some languages are more easily learned than others.  I do not think I could ever master the language of the Xhosas.  The name of the language is only an approximation of the sound, since the spoken language has three different "click" sounds. Westerners can approximate the sounds by clicking with the tongue in different positions, but those who grow up speaking it make the sound in their throats somehow.  We visited a traditional village, not a reproduction of a village, but an actual village where we could see daily life.  The roads to and in the area are only minimally maintained, although we did meet a grader as we were leaving the village.

Older, more traditional houses are round, made of sticks covered with mud with thatched roofs.  The next adaptation was a hexagonal shape with a metal roof. The newest structures, including the schools and clinic, are rectangular.  There is electricity but no running water.  The tin roofs are essential in collecting rainwater, so each building has a large rain barrel. 







Communal spigots providing water are available for drinking and cooking, but the rain barrel provides water for washing.  Each home has its own outhouse and a corral for the cattle and/or goats. Corn is the staple food, and corn fields surround each village.





















The woman who greeted us in the Xhosas language and then in accented English is a primary school teacher.  She explained the you can tell the status of a woman by her dress.  If she wears a wrap skirt, she is unmarried.  If the skirt is sewed shut, she is married and "unavailable" to other men.  The position of a shawl and the hat also depends on whether she is single, newly married or married over 5 years.  She herself was not married, but since she was a bit older, she did not have the same dress restrictions as younger women.  The designs on her face had no special meaning, they were just designs.  It was all very complicated.

We did not see many men, and she did not explain anything about how they had to dress.  From the two men we saw, it was pretty much however they felt like dressing, but mainly in jeans and any type of shirt.  To me the weather was fine, but they seemed to think it was cold, as the men we saw wrapped themselves in blankets, even when they were dancing.  I suspect that the able bodied men were working, either in the corn fields or in the city.  The children we saw were in school uniforms, depending on which school they attended.  Even though there were schools up through high school in the village, some of the older children were bused to different villages where there were better teachers for certain subjects.



Our lunch included chicken, squash, bread made from corn and corn meal mixed with some kind of greens.  They served drink boxes, since we did not want to drink the local water.  All the corn for cooking is ground daily using a stone and stone trough.  The women worked so fast that it was hard to take a picture which did not show her hands as a blur.  The other way dried corn was prepared was to pound it into a coarse meal, then pour the meal from one bowl into another to let the wind blow away the chaff.



Wealth is determined by the number of cattle, goats or sheep a person owns.  At night these are kept in a brush corral, but driven to nearby fields to graze during the day.  The corral is only entered by men.  It not only protects the livestock, but is the burial site of the man who heads the household and the location of all marriage negotiations.  We were allowed to gather outside the corral to learn these traditions and to sample the local drinks.  Beer is made with corn meal in water following a recipe of soaking, cooking and fermentation for 5 days.  The resulting drink is a cloudy white liquid which tasted like yeast to me.  Before you drink the beer, you have a shot of whiskey.  The men who were there had more than a shot.





Some of the village women and children entertained us with dances and songs.  When they danced the energetic":solos" or "duets" everyone else in the group sang and danced in the background.  There was a lot of energy, joy and enthusiasm in the music.





On the way, we stopped at a National Seashore where the oldest sign of human life was found --a child's footprint in the sand which had hardened into stone by some process.  The museum building was in the shape of the footprint.  The sand is trying very hard to cover all signs of human development.

The city of Port Elizabeth is visible in the background.

This area was originally settled by the Germans, hence this statue to them.






Darrell went on the city tour that included the East London Museum, a natural history museum which included information about African sea and land creatures and geologic information on earth and the planets.