Blog filler

Since I have not been doing very exciting things lately (discourse charting is not that thrilling an event to put on a blog), I thought I'd share a few things I like about the languages that I am working with, mostly fun words.

Zanaki: during the time I was working with texts, I noticed 2 words that made me smile, both of them borrowed from English and Zanakiized! Try saying them to yourself and see if you know what they mean, though one is pretty obvious - 'epasword' and 'rendorova'. If you are getting stuck with the second one, I should probably point out that 'r' and 'l' are pretty interchangeable in Zanaki, since they don't have 'l' but Swahili does, so they often get confused. I was amused by the first word, because it is so completely English, yet the writer has stuck a class prefix onto it, making it a class 9 word. Maybe that doesn't amuse most people, but I am being linguistically nerdy now!

Swahili: here are some fun words that are completely made up of vowels - 'aiue' and 'uoe'. The first means 'he (subjunctive) should kill it' and the second is 'you (subj) should marry'.
The next Swahili words that have the potential to confuse are kuoza and kuuza - the first has 2 meanings, 'to be rotten' and 'to (cause to) marry' as does the second 'to sell' and 'to cause to kill'. It is probably best not to confuse them!
And here are a few other fun words to leave you with - 'kipilefti' (say it as it is written) - a roundabout, 'lililolala' - it which slept (ok, the subject prefix is unlikely, but it makes a fun word!), and 'umuumamo' - you are biting him (there).

Well, I should have something more interesting to say next week, as I am off to Zanzibar tomorrow for a week :)

Photos of survey and the wedding

Conducting a group interview in Kizaru

Doing vowel testing in Kibubwa

The view from Nyerere's house, Zanaki country :)

Eliud and his wife Jennipher

Dressed up in our wedding finery; Misha, Rachel, myself and Holly

Eliud's Wedding

Straight from survey to wedding! On Saturday 2nd May, I had the priviledge of attending the wedding of my colleague Eliud in Mwanza. Rachel and I had ordered special dresses to be made for the occasion, but true to African timing, only got them about 20 minutes before we left on Saturday morning, so I didn't have a chance to try it on before the event.

All was well, though, as the dresses fit wonderfully, and we joined our other wazungu colleagues outside the church just before 3pm, the official start time for the wedding. Some of us went to see the groom and found him waiting in a room with the bride, best man and maid of honour (the best man is called 'besti' here, but I don't know the word for the lady's role as the bride's helper), a very unusual thing for us who are used to the Western tradition of keeping the bride and groom apart until the wedding! In the end, we proved that we had all forgotten about Tanzanian/African timing, and had to wait around for an hour until the wedding began at 4pm.

I was told later, that this was a very Western wedding compared to others that the person had attended, but there were a few differences that I noticed. One was the dancing. The bridesmaids task seemed to be to dance everywhere in front of the bride, or the bride and groom. Likewise, the congregation was dancing quite often, sometimes with people dancing up to the front to where the newlyweds were standing. The choir was pretty boisterous too, and one guy really got into the dance mood, even coming right up to the end of the row where I was sitting and dancing there.

Another difference was the was the bride walked into the church. She walked very slowly, and for most of the ceremony, until she walked down the aisle with Eliud at the end, she looked almost sad. I guess that this is a traditional attitude to have, perhaps sadness at leaving her family home, then happiness at joining a new home on her marriage.

Most of the differences were during the reception. This began some 2 hours after the wedding finished, and had its own timetable. First was the entry of the guests, then later the bridal party. They stopped at a ribbon tied between two posts and cut it together (like an opening ceremony for a building!) before walking through. After that, there were 'traditional' events, like the cutting of the cake, and more strange to me, the introduction of all the guests, beginning with the groom and his side of the family, and then on to the bride's side, each person/group standing and waving as they were announced. Another fun event was when we all danced up in front of the bride and groom with our drinks in one line and bumped bottles (we had sodas/water/light beer for drinks) with the people coming the other way. Embarrassingly enough, I hadn't realised that this was the aim of the line of people dancing up to the bride and groom, so I hadn't brought my drink! Oh dear...

The final event of interest was similar to the introductions as the bride and groom stood to receive the gifts from friends and family, each gift being presented in order from groom's side to bride's side. This was slightly embarrassing also, as our joint gift of a bed and mattress for the couple was still being made at the fundi's in Musoma, and wouldn't exactly be presentable on a table anyway... so really it looked like a bunch of us gave nothing, but never mind, at least the bride and groom know that isn't true!

There weren't any real speeches a far as I could tell, but since I left after the food was served at 11pm, there may have been something else. As I went to sleep (we stayed at the same hotel where the reception was held, not the brightest idea!) I could hear the party continuing, though I still don't know whether they did party til 6am as it said on the schedule, or not...

Survey

So, the survey has finished! Apologies for the delay in posting this, but hopefully you will have two at once this time as I report back on survey and on Eliud’s wedding.

Survey began on Friday 24th April with a short journey out to the Zanaki villages. Zanaki-land is not far from Musoma really, at least in comparison to some of the other language areas, so we didn’t have to go too far for any of the locations which was a blessing to the survey budget in terms of fuel! So, we began on the first day by meeting with some leaders in the wards etc. The Zanaki area is divided up into 6 wards, each with its own ward leader, and then there is a leader over all of them (‘katibu wa tarafa’ in Swahili, something like ‘district secretary’ in English) to whom we also paid a visit. Setting up a survey in a village means that we have to go to 3 people essentially, the katibu wa tarafa, the mtendaji wa kata (ward leader) then the mtendaji wa kijiji (village leader). The Zanaki leaders were pretty official about their business, so at each office we received a letter of introduction to the next guy down, and so on. Thankfully, quite often we were doing two villages in a ward, so we only had to see the ward leader once for both of these villages. In the end, we saw the katibu, 5 ward leaders or someone able to represent them, and about 6 village leaders! Tracking down the leaders was sometimes a job, if they were called away from the office, or had an appointment or something. One of the leaders we chased all the way to a school where he had a meeting, only to find we had passed him on the way, and actually we ended up meeting him in another village.

During this village meeting we had 2 curious incidents. The first was an experience of village politics as we sat around waiting for the mtendaji to arrive. As far as I can gather, a woman had been travelling on a daladala (public transport) for a few days, and had not yet paid, so the ticket collector guy took her kitenge (rectangle of fabric usually worn by women as an extra wrapping around head/whole body/as a skirt) until she could pay up. When she came to pay and collect her kitenge, she found that the kitenge had been ripped, so we got to listen to the argument between her and the ticket collector, in front of the village leader, as to who should pay or not. Another incident happened when an old man came into the village leader’s office, and started to accuse one of the survey team members (who is from Austria) of being a South African colonist come to steal the wealth of hard-working Tanzanians! Thankfully the others in the office were on our side and sent him out of the office, telling him that he should be more respectful.

The next day, we went back to do the survey in one of the first villages we had set up. This was slightly delayed as we found that no-one had been collected to work with us, so we waited around while the ward leader helped collect people. During the waiting period we were approached by a drunk young man, who then proceded to offer that I become his wife as he followed us wherever we went. Eventually the village leader who was with us sent him away to make himself more presentable before he proposed marriage (he only had trousers on), and when he didn’t go she literally had to push him out of the door.

The work itself was variable. 4 of the 8 villages were what we called ‘primary locations’ which involved an extra wordlist 300 words long, and so this took about 4 hours. The other villages were ‘secondary locations’ and often only took 2 ½ to 3 hours. Some days we managed to fit 2 locations in, and other days we did just the one and spent the rest of the time tracking the villages leaders down in order to set up the locations. Our biggest problem with the work was often getting too few people, or sometimes too many of one sex. We wanted an even mix of men and women, young and old, but often we were only able to get men, and usually then only the older men too. Still, it worked out at most locations and the longest we had to wait was 1 ½ hours as people slowly collected in the village. One day, however, we were the ones making the village wait. This was Wednesday, a day when we had spent some time in the morning setting up locations, and since we ended up back near our accommodation, we stayed there for lunch. We decided to set out again quite early in order to have plenty of time, and were just driving out of Butiama when we had to slow down in order to let people clear out of the way as they got off a daladala into the road. We were looking to the right to have a look at the weekly market that had gathered on the field next to the road, when a daladala rammed right into us from behind. Thankfully our vehicle wasn’t too badly damaged, the spare wheel taking most of the impact and denting the daladala quite impressively, but the main problem was then that they were accusing us of causing the accident and demanding that we pay. Somebody went off to get the police, and we sat in the car for about an hour, waiting for the whole thing to be settled. We were very grateful that Shem was there with us (our Zanaki translator who was helping us with the survey) as he was our defendent in the case, and we were also grateful that the police officer happened to be one of the night guards at our accommodation and so knew our car and was probably slightly more likely to take our side. In the end, no-one had to pay, though details were exchanged, and the survey vehicle now just has another few dents with a history behind how they came to be there.

Speaking of our accommodation, that is another thing that was pretty exciting about survey. When we originally got to Butiama, we aimed to find something inexpensive, but with guards and preferably a wall, so we could park the car safely at night. The Muslim guest house would have been perfect, but didn’t have enough rooms, so we went on to another one which was having problems with water, and then to the final one which was the one we eventually stayed at. This happened to be the guest house belonging to the J K Nyerere ‘estate’ (he was the first President of Tanzania and beloved by all Tanzanians for bringing Tanzania to independence in 1964), so we had a great time on our day off on Sunday being toured around his home, and visiting his museum, compliments of the manager, Nyerere’s son!

Sunday was also interesting as I went to a Catholic Sunday service for the first time in my life. The priest guy was a Westerner, which surprised me, but everything else was pretty Tanzanian. The choir was definitely the best I have ever heard since coming here, but I can’t say that I particularly like the whole incense thing and the very rigid service structure, though the sermon was good.

This blog post is getting pretty long now so I’ll just wrap up with a comment about the vowel testing I was doing on survey. This was a test where I asked about 4 to 6 people in each location about 10 pairs of words, whether they could tell the difference in the pronunciation, or whether the difference only could be told when it was said in a certain context. This proved more difficult to explain than I expected, and I realised just how used to all the language jargon I have become, and how difficult it must be for someone, who has never thought about vowels before, to tell me if the sounds in the word okuzuba and okuzoba are really different, or if they can’t hear the difference. Trying to explain, again and again, that I didn’t want them to explain the difference in use (one means to weed, the other to tiptoe) but the difference in the sounds, very nearly drove me to distraction every time I did it, but at least I could practically feel my patience growing as I tried to be patient and explain it just one more time!