A little video of me and my bestest, oldest friend. =)

"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa have a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagle of the Ngong Hills look out for me?" - Karen Dinneson, author of 'Out of Africa'

My father was born in 1967 in Durban, South Africa, the third of four children. When he was very young, my grandparents moved to Mhlambanyatsi, which was, at the time, a small village located in Swaziland. Swaziland is a tiny country within South Africa, bordered by it on all sides except one, the East, where Mozambique begins. If you find Mbabane on a map, and let your finger weave lazily down over the Lusushiwana River, stopping above the much bigger Lusuthu River you will find, nestled between these two bodies of water, my father's boyhood home.

Along with English, those native to the country speak siSwati; growing up we (all of us children) were told fondly of the maid Beauty, a woman who was black-black and had a pretty, kind face, that became like a member of the family. Beauty spoke siSwati, and though my father never learned it fluently and only remembered a handful of words by the time we came along (yebo, cha - yes, and no), our Uncle Michael was proficient in it. He was the youngest of my grandparent's kids, the baby, and he would follow Beauty around, replying to her Swati with English. When we were young and visited Gran and Grampa, he would stumble up from his room where he had been having a lie-in and, sleepily eying us with some confusion, would say, "Wentani?"

We would answer. "We're playing table tennis." "Watching a movie." "Drawing." It never occured to us to think of such a shift in dialect as an intrusion - it simply was, just as the pseudo-British, Afrikaans habits of our grandparents were.

My father was the only one of the kids to actively try to lose his accent when they emigrated to Canada; he was thirteen or fourteen, and didn't like being different from the other kids. His older siblings, Sheralee and Kent, were the exact opposite - they did everything they could do assert their foreignness and to this day they have the clipped, slightly lilting voices of ex-pat Kwa-Zulu Natalers. Neither my brother nor I think my father has an accent, and yet on a regular basis I have people (mostly women - my father is a very handsome man) coming up to me and saying, "Your father has such an interesting accent! Is he from..." I've heard all sorts of guesses; Australia, New Zealand, London and once, inexplicably, Denmark.


When it comes down to it, I am not sure why I so often feel the need to write about this strange country. Some genetic connection, a childhood curiousity, sure, but underneath that there is something else, something deeper. I know, in some strange way, that I belong there.

Are you there too, Mr. Darcy? Are you waiting? Moenie worrie - wag, asseblief, Ek is kom.

Totsiens,

~K~