Xhosa

Batho Pele.

Sorry, I'm Xhosa.

Sorry.

[laughs] Yes.

So I, I just wanted to say that because this concert we are going to have, um, he didn't just write "Lizalis'idinga Lakho." He's a composer.

We are talking to, to his ideas tonight, but he's a musician, but proper.

He seeks to com- to translate the Xhosa Bible i- to, from English to Xhosa, which is a, a huge intellectual labor.

Mm.

How many languages do they have there?

South Africa officially recognizes 12 official languages, including Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, English, and even South African Sign Language, which was added in 2023.

12 official languages in one country.

That is incredible.

Now, now, there's o- o- o- this o- o- o- one last thing I want to say to you.

Please teach your children isiXhosa and Sepedi because their mother is umPedi weyena uNdebele.

And then that is not here.

It is a disadvantage for your children not to know one of the, uh, Black African language.

[laughs]

No.

You, you said you know what? You once said, "I, my children, they are missing Siswati, Sepedi, isiXhosa and English." I said, "No, this man is not teaching his children to speak the language."

Well, I mean, if you had listened to the conversation a little bit more, you would have come to understand that part of what I have committed to do is to have a place in an area where Sepedi and isiNdebele are, isiNdebele are equally spoken so that my children can go there.

And I think that I love asking questions.

So if I see a term trending online and it's in a different language, I'll say, guys, what does this Xhosa word mean? What is the thing? Tell me, educate me.

And I think this is the thing with South Africa.

I think we've all been programmed to be scared to ask a question in fear of offense.

Tell us about the Nediki.

The Xhosa and the Zulu people know it as the Unede.

And then the first contact with the white folk were the Boer settlers in the Eastern Cape who were moving further away from the Cape.

So they sort of made it more into Dutch and added the diminutive, a nede tjie.

But it comes at a cost because there is a subtle shift that Jung makes, which goes something like this.

The Xhosa student would say, but for Jung, the bee is a symbol of the ancestors in the minds of Xhosa people.

Because we all really, in quotes, know what a bee is, which is that it's a funny little bug that makes honey and can sting.

And objectively, you can read about bees in biology books.

And those relationships with each of those parents as a structural relationship between child and parent tumbles down in the culture through the generations.

And a lot of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the object relations tradition is about finding a right relationship, a livable relationship with our parents, internal objects or if you like with our ancestors in a way that honors their presence in our lives and wants to have an honorable relationship but also a mutually respectful one in which we can feel supported but also free to be ourselves.

And from that point of view, his Xhosa tradition and the practice of object relations tradition are so similar.

But what I think Jung can offer and phenomenologists can offer is that we need to blow that whole model of mind wide open.

We're going to scale from here and we're going to like see how everybody else adopts here.

Maybe we are going to get two or three from Zambia later, but this dude right here has got the biggest audience, has got the biggest reach, and he speaks a language that 80% of Africans speak, which is Xhosa, fun fact, the same language that was put in Black Panther.

That's the same language that most people in Africa speak.

So he speaks that, he dances to that, his audience does that, so we're going to use his face.