The allegation that, during the Rugby World Cup semi-final, the Springbok Bongi Mbonambi directed the ultimate offensive Anglo-Saxon noun at Tom Curry again highlights that South Africa has many tongues (Tom Curry accuses South Africa hooker Bongi Mbonambi of using racial slur, 22 October).
Since the recent elevation of sign language, it has 12 official languages. While English is the lingua franca, outside of formal spaces it soon becomes a veritable babel. A longstanding tradition in rugby is to use another language, especially Afrikaans, as a means of making team communications unintelligible to outsiders. Indeed, Afrikaans rugby lingo abounds with terms that, to the untutored ear, sound like the C-word. The Afrikaans word “kant” means “side”. There’s currently a non‑fiction rugby book on sale in South Africa entitled Onkant!, which means offside. It is possible that Mbonambi, in fact, said “wit kant” (the white-clothed side).
What is more, the use of the C-word is pretty rare in South Africa. The expletive that denotes the same body part in a similarly transgressive tone is the word poes, the diphthong “oe” pronounced a bit like the double-o in soot. In Dutch, innocently enough, that word denotes a cat, a frequent source of mirth to Afrikaans speakers visiting the Low Countries.
Jeanette Serdyn
Johannesburg, South Africa
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