A South African Charts the Slang of his Youth

When Louis Molamu was a young boy hanging out in the doorways of the corner shops in Sophiatown, there was a word in the street argot for the kind of person he has become today. In the 1950s, Mr. Molamu and his majietas (mates) from the neighborhood would have described a senior administrator at the University of South Africa, with a wood-paneled office on the 12th floor looking out over the jacaranda-lined avenues of the capital city, as a situation.

The word situation came from "Situations Vacant," the headline in newspapers like The Golden City Post above listings for the one or two middle-class professions, such as teaching, that black people under apartheid could pursue. Situation is part of the special vernacular called tsotsitaal, named after the youthful, jazz-loving, beer-gulping, girl-gaping, nattily dressed, and utterly streetwise black men who spoke it, as Mr. Molamu explains in his book, Tsotsitaal: A Dictionary of the Language of Sophiatown. Published this year by his university's press, the book is the first to fully document the argot.

On a winter's afternoon, Mr. Molamu drives his silver BMW from Pretoria, past Sandton, South Africa's financial center, then past the gray-brown skyscrapers of downtown Johannesburg, until he hits a wide band of barren land littered with heaps of slag the size of hills, leftovers from the city's gold mines. The grass that divides the highway is yellowed by week after week of the dry, cold weather that is particular to the High Veld plateau this time of year, leaving the sky clear and blue. Only then, miles from the metropolis, does he enter the vast low-rise sprawl of Soweto, short for South Western Township, an area designated for black South Africans under apartheid.

He navigates the maze of streets, heading for a small white bungalow with a beer sign outside. Wandie's Place, one of the many bars where he spent hours writing down tsotsitaal on index cards under the table, is one of the 3,400 shebeens in Soweto. The proprietor is what makes or breaks a shebeen, Mr. Molamu says. He or she often lives alongside, or even inside, and tends the bar all hours. Over a couple of bottles of Castle Lite, sitting outside in the sun to squeeze out the last of the day's warmth, Mr. Molamu kills time the way it's done in shebeens across Soweto, by telling stories.

His grandfather came to work as a laborer in Johannesburg's mines in 1900, part of the huge wave of black people who migrated to the city in the 20th century as their traditional lands were whittled down by the state. The miner bought a small house in Sophiatown, or Little Harlem, one of the few places in Johannesburg where he was permitted to own property. His son later became principal of an American-financed missionary school.

Mr. Molamu was born in 1946. By the time he was 6 years old he was picking up tsotsitaal on the streets from the sons of the gangsters, politicians, beggars, miners, and journalists who spoke it, all living cheek by jowl. When he was a teenager, tsotsitaal was a key way to attract girls and impress friends, he says. While Sophiatown could be violent -- a Clark Gable was somebody who showed an admirable amount of aggression -- it was also the most cosmopolitan neighborhood in Johannesburg, with its Chinese, Indian, and Jewish stores, and the shebeens bustling with black intellectuals, artists, and writers.

Shebeens were one of the few places beyond the reach of apartheid legislation, where black people could relax, listen to jazz influenced by township rhythms, and keep up with the sensual dance styles like pata-pata, meaning "touch-touch." Tsotsitaal was spiced up with words borrowed from all nine African languages in South Africa, with sweet nothings from French, like cherie, pithy lines from Hollywood films like Street With No Name and Scarface, and even a word or two of Yiddish. While much of tsotsitaal was borrowed from Afrikaans, on the streets of what the guys called Softtown they played around with the meaning and order of words until they had broken most of the rules of the language.

When the cops, most of whom spoke Afrikaans, raided the shebeens looking for home-brewed liquor, they couldn't grasp the meaning of the maddeningly familiar tongue bandied back and forth over their heads. "It was a secret language, meant to exclude the state apparatus," says Mr. Molamu. Code words ranged from dompas, meaning "dumb document," the identification every black person was required to carry, to section, referring to raids by the police enforcing "influx control" -- which category of black person could live where.

In 1958, eight years after the government passed the Group Areas Act, Mr. Molamu's grandmother's house in Sophiatown was confiscated. By 1962, the residents of a bordering neighborhood, Die Kas, including Mr. Molamu and his family, were forced to move en masse to a specific, preordained section of Soweto called Moroka. Methodically, Sophiatown was demolished and replaced by a new whites-only suburb called Triomf, or "triumph."

Arriving in Soweto, the 16-year-old realized he wanted to become one better than his principal father, and teach at a college. It was an elusive dream for a young black man in South Africa. Exile beckoned. After a degree in sociology at the University of Fort Hare, where Nelson Mandela was educated before him, Mr. Molamu received a scholarship to study at the University of Bradford, in England. Three years after he left, in June 1976, the police shot 600 people, including schoolchildren, in Soweto for protesting against being taught in Afrikaans. A new generation of politicized youth, called the black-consciousness movement, discarded tsotsitaal because of its roots in "the language of the oppressors."

In 1980, Mr. Molamu returned to Africa, teaching sociology at the University of Botswana to be closer to home. South Africa was a short drive across the border. He was nostalgic, for Sophiatown, for tsotsitaal, but there was nothing to go back to. Younger exiles, who crossed the border to train as guerrilla fighters, told him the government had declared martial law and that Soweto reeked of burning tires. In 1989, he visited a friend living in upstate New York, Hugh Masekela, a jazz trumpeter who had cut his teeth in the nightclubs of Sophiatown, and an old hand at tsotsitaal. Awash with memories of a place now gone, the trumpeter suggested Mr. Molamu begin the dictionary.

Over the years, the dictionary grew beyond a linguistic exercise to become a social document of black urban life from the '40s to the '60s, a natural project for a sociologist. Scouring yellowing magazines and his own memory, Mr. Molamu included not only the vocabulary of tsotsitaal but proper nouns that have since disappeared: Names of soccer clubs like the Hungry Lions, shebeens like Back o' the Moon, gang names like the Nylon Club, legendary nicknames like Kortboy, a famous gangster, and the Shark, a school principal, as well as the names of jazz bands, pinups, clothing brands, buildings, restaurants, and Hollywood film stars.

When Mr. Molamu returned from exile in 1996, two years after the first democratic elections, to teach sociology at the University of South Africa, his work-in-progress on tsotsitaal was far more satisfying to him than the financial compensation finally issued by the government for his family's demolished home in Sophiatown. "I spent most of it on beer," he jokes. Since his return, Mr. Molamu has moved up from department chair to dean in charge of 140,000 distance-education students. He stole time away from his overflowing desk to hang out with his majietas at weddings, parties, and funerals -- gathering up the language of his vanishing youth. The book took 14 years to complete.

His beer glass empty, Mr. Molamu heads to his old neighborhood in Soweto. A short distance from Wandie's Place he points out the memorial to the schoolchildren shot in 1976. Then the house of a legendary gangster's moll, now dead, who could speak tsotsitaal fluently. It heartens him that Soweto's youth are now creating their own vibrant argot, called s'camto.

By the end of the afternoon, Mr. Molamu is ensconced with some of his bleary-eyed informants in cloth caps, who defer to him, as is obligatory in the strict hierarchy of tsotsitaal, by calling him Boss Louis. The shebeen owner, Moshe Kalana, has known Mr. Molamu since boyhood and calls him Bra'Louis, or "brother."

Under the long, green table dividing the room, a gaggle of flat-soled sneakers is punctuated by the smart shoes of the situation, Mr. Molamu. Compiling the dictionary has been his way to rediscover his home after 23 years of exile, and a good excuse to track down old friends. Mr. Kalana adds a fresh round of drinks to the forest of bottles, and their conversation steers, naturally, toward girls. Above the clink of glass on glass, and the jazz on the radio, Mr. Molamu distinctly says good afternoons, the tsotsitaal phrase for the pert buttocks of the Sophiatown cheries still crowding their memory.