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English missionary Henry Hare Dugmore helped translate the Bible into Xhosa in 1859 Nelson Mandela was a Xhosa and was a member of the royal family of the Thembu tribe. Xhosa-speaking people have inhabited coastal regions of southeastern Africa since before the 16th century. They refer to themselves as the amaXhosa and their language as isiXhosa.
Indodana" is a traditional isiXhosa song which has been arranged for choral performance by South African composers Michael Barrett and Ralf Schmitt. [1] [2] [3] The lyrics, translated into English, are: "The Lord has taken his son who lived amongst us / The Son of the Lord God was crucified / Father Jehovah". [4]
To this day, the descendants of the amaMfengu are part of the Xhosa people and they speak isiXhosa and practice the Xhosa culture. [ citation needed ] Xhosa unity and ability to fight off colonial encroachment was to be weakened by the famines and political divisions that followed the cattle-killing movement of 1856–1858 .
The traditional isiXhosa names for months of the year poetically come from names of stars, plants, and flowers that grow or seasonal changes that happen at a given time of year in Southern Africa. The Xhosa year traditionally begins in June and ends in May when the brightest star visible in the Southern Hemisphere, Canopus, signals the time for ...
Literal English translation will align it with "-ness" (a.i. hardness, stubbornness). An example is: "hardegat-geit" (lit. hard-arsed and cocky). gham – A word to describe someone that acts out in an uncivilzed manner, or refer to lower class person. (other words would be "tappit", :kommen: or when someone is gham it portrays them as being ...
South Africa's English Language policy refers to the eleven official languages of South Africa (i.e., Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu and English), as specified in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.
More information on the song can be found in Makeba's book The World of African Song (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), including the following translation: "The doctor of the road is the beetle / He climbed past this way / They say it is the beetle / Oh! It is the beetle."
Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi (S. E. K. Mqhayi, 1 December 1875 – 29 July 1945) was a Xhosa dramatist, essayist, critic, novelist, historian, biographer, translator and poet whose works are regarded as instrumental in standardising the grammar of isiXhosa and preserving the language in the 20th century.