It’s time for a little history lesson on the origins of the township where I live. During apartheid one of the government’s strategies for maintaining power was dividing people along tribal lines. If Africans united against them, they would lose their power, so they did all they could to ensure that did not happen. One of the ways they did this was by relocating Africans to certain areas according to tribe. They called each area a Bantustan. The area around Soshanguve was to be a Bantustan called Boputatswana, where all the Setswana people would live.
The problem came when people of other tribes were relocating for various reasons to the area around Pretoria. The government tried to force them to go to Boputatswana, but people of other tribes did not want to have to speak another language. So, people of many different tribes built their houses outside the approved areas in informal settlements that eventually became the township of Soshanguve. The name Soshanguve reflects this diversity: So for the Sotho people, Sha for the Shangaan, Ngu for the people, and Ve for the Venda.
So the language that is spoken here in Soshanguve is a mix of all those (and other) languages. I am taking classes in Setswana, but our teacher frequently tells us, “the Setswana word is ________, but here in Sosh we say __________.” Or, “the Setswana word is _____________, but most people say _______________ which is Sepedi.” It makes language learning quite complicated, because any textbook or program we might buy will leave us speaking pure Setswana, which nobody around us speaks. As a matter of fact, because children in the township grow up speaking Sosha language, they are often not fully fluent in any one language, but understand them all.
