Ngiyanemukela!

Sanibonani nonke! Ngiyanemukela! Hi everyone, and welcome to Uhambo lo Mhambi. I leave for South Africa tomorrow (or today, I guess, since it's now after midnight), but I wanted to test out the blog before I left, and also explain the title of and reason for the blog. Here goes...

First, the title: Uhambo lo Mhambi was the title Tiyo Soga gave to his (1868) Xhosa translation of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, so I have borrowed (stolen? appropriated?) both the title and a passage from Soga's introduction. "Uhambo lo Mhambi" would translate more literally as something like "The Traveler's Trip," but pilgrim is not a bad word to describe me: not so much in the sense of "A person who makes a journey (usually of a long distance) to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion" or the more Bunyan-esque sense of "a person travelling through life, esp. one who undertakes a course of spiritual development leading towards heaven, a state of blessedness, etc.," but definitely in the sense of "A person on a journey, a person who travels from place to place; a traveller, a wanderer, an itinerant," and absolutely in the sense of "a person who makes a journey to visit a place of particular significance or interest, esp. as an act of homage, respect, etc." (Side note: it's cool to read the OED). Anyway, I'm the traveler and this blog is about my trip...

There is at least one sense in which the title doesn't fit: Soga was translating into Xhosa, but I'm going to KwaZulu-Natal, to work on my isiZulu and learn more about amasiko amaZulu [Zulu culture]. But "uhambo lo mhambi" means pretty much the same thing in Zulu, so just go ahead and ignore the fact that I have named my blog about my time in Zululand after a famous Xhosa text. And go ahead and follow Soga's instructions, too: accompany me, take rest while (or whilst, or whatever) listening to the things I am going to tell/report to you, and -- if you don't get bored between now and August -- move along with me to the end of my journey. I'll be at the University of KZN for five of the eight weeks, and then I will stay with families (a week in Mbali township and two weeks at Maqongqo, a rural village) for the other three weeks. Many thanks to UPenn for running the program, and to the U.S. govt for funding it -- your tax dollars at work! I'll try to post as often as I can, and maybe share some pictures.

A caveat: my good friend Liz has talked me into doing this blog, but this is an isiZulu immersion program, so the point is to not speak English, and it's entirely possible that I will bore you to death with lots of talk (in English) about the (Zulu) language and very little about anything else. So if you're looking for a safari, go watch Expedition Africa on the History Channel; if you want to hear all about how desperately I am struggling to improve my Zulu, then stay right here. And feel free to post your comments; you might want to tell me that this was ixoxo elihle [a good chat], but you probably wouldn't want to tell me that it was ixoxo elibi [a bad/ugly/evil chat].

So stayed tuned for my first report from South Africa, and until then, Nisale kahle [stay well]!