Animal House

The goats just had babies!

Before moving to Namibia, the words “African animals” brought to my mind the opening scene of The Lion King. In four months, I have seen only one giraffe, a handful of baboons, and the occasional roadside warthog. Despite my lack of exotic encounters, I have plenty of animal friends.

Some are more friendly than others. I am particularly close with my wall spiders Ofluffya and Owhiskas. The harmless wall spider is about the size of my palm, with a body that lies flat against the wall—a feature that makes it difficult to kill. My first night I threw a Chaco at Ofluffya. I nailed her, but she scurried away unscathed. So I gave up and adopted her instead. 

Ofluffya relaxing above my bed.

 A short time later I found her husband Owhiskas. Seeing that I can’t neuter a spider, I sternly warned them not to have babies. They promptly ignored me and now we have Osasha—whom I named after my late Siamese. While I am fond of this arachnid family, I will kill any more additions. I think Ofluffya and Owhiskas took this second warning more seriously: I haven’t seen them in a week.

The void left by Owhiskas and Ofluffya has unfortunately been filled by three roosters. My regular readers know that a few months ago I reluctantly slaughtered a hen. That ambivalence has evaporated in the African sun. I would gleefully strangle these roosters. Every night between three and five a.m. they take shifts crowing beneath my window. And every night I delude myself into thinking that if I ignore them, they will go away. They don’t. It always seems like too much work to leave my mosquito net, find my headlamp, and chase them away. But one day I will snap. Imagine me as Jack Nicholson from The Shining, ax in hand maniacally stalking the infernal fowl through a maze of huts. 

I hate this animal.

I might introduce my host family to Thanksgiving. There aren’t any turkeys, but the roosters will taste just fine.

Though I hate roosters, my affection for other farm animals has grown. Last week, my tate (pronounced “tah-tey,” means “dad”) surprised us with a calf. I initially named him Okamati, “little brother.” But in his first three nights he managed to wriggle out of two leashes and open three gates. My tate and brother found him tangled in the bush a kilometer away. I have since renamed him Okahoudini. Okahoudini loves me. Sometimes I love him too. This morning I opened my door to find him at my feet sleeping in a puddle of calf diarrhea. I did not love him then.

My host brother Absalom and Okahoudini.

Diarrhea aside, all the animals I have mentioned so far have been benign enough. But there is one foe lurking in the forest that I have fortunately not met: the black mamba. Before coming to Namibia, my knowledge of the black mamba was largely informed by Kill Bill. I was under the impression the venom could kill me instantly. However, my snake book says death can take anywhere between three and fifteen hours. Vague but oddly comforting—the nearest hospital is only thirty minutes away.

I have asked many people in the village about mambas, and there is a clear gender division. The tates (all men in Oshikwanyama are referred to as tate) boast tales of striking a mamba out of a tree 15 meters away using a single brick. The memes, on the other hand, say they have lived here their wholes lives and have never seen one. Call it gender bias or wishful thinking, but I trust the memes.

To be fair, Namibia is teeming with wildlife. I live about four hours away from Etosha National Park, where it’s common—I’ve heard—to see the Big Five African animals in a single afternoon. I hope to visit soon. Maybe I will load Ofluffya, Owhiskas, and Okahoudini into the pick-up truck and make it a family vacation. We can even bring the roosters: they’ll make excellent lion bait.

Oshikwan-what?

This is my desk where I spend countless hours studying Oshikwanyama.

There are many contenders for the title of most difficult language on Earth to learn. I have heard Chinese, English, even Navajo. I would like to nominate a new candidate--Oshikwanyama. This obscure African language doesn't have tones, clicks, even progressive tenses. Despite lacking the indicators of linguistics difficulty that are familiar to most Westerners, Oshikwanyama has one curveball--noun classes.

I am no linguist, but noun classes and their spawn, prefixes and concords, are the most mind boggling verbal constructions ever conceived. In English, to make a word plural, I merely add an "s" or "es" to the end. In Oshikwanyama, each noun falls into one of nine noun classes. Making the noun plural or singular depends on the noun class. For example, olukaku is shoe, but shoes is omalukaku. This is noun class two. Ear is okutwi, and ears is omakutwi. This is noun class nine. You may have noticed, as I did in my first 30 seconds of studying this language, that these words all start with O's and are around five syllables long.



This is a story from my Oshikwanyama book. It's about a cow stuck in the road.

Memorizing which class every noun belongs to is overwhelming. But Oshikwanyama is not done stomping on our minds yet. Many other parts of the language rovolve around which class the noun in question belongs to. For instance, I want to say "I saw two hyenas." "I saw" is "onda mona." "Two" is "mbali," and "hyena" is "olumbungu." But I can't say "Onda mona mbali olumbungus." No no, I must first scamper to my grammar book, look up plural prefix for noun class six (oma-). Then flip 24 pages back to find the numerical prefix for noun class six "a" to attach to my number. I can finally say "onda mona omambungu ambali." But what if I want to say "I saw two big hyenas"? Then I need to turn back to the end of my book to find the adjective prefix for noun class six (ma-) and tack it to the base word for "big," -nene. So my sentence now reads "onda mona omambungu ambali manene." I must also sprint along this scavenger hunt every time I want to use a possesive pronoun like "my" or a demonstrative pronoun like "those."

If you're exhausted, I don't blame you. I am too. So I will briefly describe the prefix's equally confusing cousin the concord. If "concord" only makes you think of supersonic jets or New Zealand, it's because English doesn't have concords. In English, to describe when an action takes place, I change the verb--I walked, I walk, I will walk, etc. To make the subject agree with the verb, I change the verb--I eat, she eats, etc. To describe the tense and to make the subject and verb agree in Oshikwanyama, I need a concord. To say "I love to eat traditional millet porridge," I say "ame (me) ondi (I in the present) hole (love) okulya (to eat) oshifima (traditional millet porridge)." In this sentence, "ondi" is the concord. This doesn't seem too confusing on the surface. But our friend the noun class also has its teeth in concords. Every noun class has six concords, one each for the past, present and future--for all active verbs--like "run" and "break." And three more concords for stative verbs, verbs like "be" or "feel." That brings us to a total of 54 possible concords all of which start with "O."


This a concord chart for noun class one. Yep, just one noun class.

Despite being daunting, I love Oshikwanyama. It occasionally surprises me with bursts of simplicity. "Now" is "paife." "Right now" is "paife paife." More than I love demanding my students study their pronouns now-now, I love the response of my neighbors and colleauges whenever I attempt to speak. Regardless of how much I butcher their lanuage, they cheer and clap like I recited the whole of Hamlet while standing on my head,

There are fewer speakers of Oshikwanyama worldwide than there are Mandarin speakers in one Chinese province. Why bother learning a language spoken by so few? Because if I can master noun classes, I can talk with my neighbors. I can ask them about their goats and how many cows they plan to slaughter their daughter's wedding. In short, I can be a real Oshikwanyaman. Provided I can evade the two big hyenas for the next two years.


My Oshikwanyama book. This is the one they give to first graders. Also still can't figure out how to rotate pictures, sorry.