Mogwana Dance Troupe

Apart from offering our services, we aim to provide information about traditional Botswana culture and snapshots of our performance. If you have any comments or questions, please don't hesitate to contact us by sending email to "mogwana@com{DOT}to". Sorry, we have to mask our email addresses as a spam countermeasure. Please substitute {DOT} with "." (without the quotes). (This page was last updated on )


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People and Language

[Information below is obtained from The Roots of Black South Africa by David Hammond-Tooke, published by Jonathan Ball Publishers 1993, ISBN 1 86842 0027.]

There are four major groupings into which present-day Bantu-speaking populations are divided, Nguni, Sotho, Tsonga and Venda, can be squarely located in four major geographical and ecological regions. The Sotho and Venda are associated with western central plateau and lowveld, and the Nguni and Tsonga with the eastern area between the Drakensberg escarpment and the Indian Ocean.

The major cultural groups in Southern Africa of the nineteenth century consisted of:

Nguni

Sotho

Venda

Tsonga

Of these groups the Nguni and Sotho were by far the most numerous. The Venda were always confined to their mountains in the far north (of present-day Republic of South Africa, RSA) and the Tsonga, settled for centuries in Mozambique.

In terms of Southern African language and political groupings circa 1900-1950, the distribution can be roughly divided as follows:

South Nguni - from East London to Umtata along the coast, and up north to the border between RSA and Lesotho
North Nguni - from Umzimvubu River to Mfolozi River and border between RSA and Swaziland
Swazi - Swaziland
Tsonga - Mozambique
Venda - northern-most part of RSA bordering to Zimbabwe
North Sotho - north-east province of RSA
Tswana (West Sotho) - south-east of Botswana and north-west of RSA
South Sotho - Lesotho
Ndebele (Zimbabwe) - an area surrounding Bulawayo
Shona - all of Zimbabwe except the Ndebele area
Konde - north of Zambezi River in Mozambique
Ndebele (Transvaal) - 2 scattered areas in north Transvaal

The Bantu-speaking groups all belong to the vast language family that stretches south from a line drawn across the continent from about Gabon, in the west, to Kenya, in the east., characterised by a unique grammatical feature called the 'alliterative concord' which governs the form of all elements in the sentence according to the prefix of the main noun, thus imparting an alliterative beauty to expression, and a precision that equals that of Latin or Greek. Some examples in Zulu:

Izinkomo zikabhabha zonke zaluka entabeni
Cattle of my father all graze on the mountain

Abantwana bakaabhabha bonke badlala entabeni
Children of my father all play on the mountain

There are slight differences in grammatical structure between the main language families but many differences in vocabulary are due to phonetic variations that go far back into the past and are governed by sound shifts of a type similar to that occurring in Germanic languages according to the rules of the so-called Grimm's Law (whereby, for instance, th becomes d, as in English 'thank' becoming German 'dank'). The main sound shifts between Nguni and Sotho are as follows:
Nguni nk becomes Sotho kg
th   r
nd   t
ng   k

Applying these rules (Meinhof's Law) it is possible to explain why the Zulu word thenga (to buy) becomes reka in Sotho, thanda (to love) becomes rata and inkosi (chief) becomes kgosi. It is often possible to guess at the meaning of a word by applying the rule changes: doing so can also reveal otherwise unsuspected connections, as that between the name for boy's initiation school among Sotho (bogwera) and the rather different Xhosa circumcision rite (ubukhwetha). They are identical terms, despite their seeming difference. Even the clicks in Nguni (especially in Xhosa) are fairly superficial substitutions of Khoi consonants for normal Bantu ones, although a number of terms, especially those to do with divining and ritual, were taken over by the Xhosa-speakers from San. Venda is the odd man out here, as in many other respects. In grammar it is related to Shona of Zimbabwe but its vocabulary is strongly influenced by Sotho, relecting the Shona domination of the original Sotho stratum.

 

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