John’s Blog

The Lingala language has an amazing depth of meaning and nuance.  I don’t think I’ve shared either of these stories yet (and even if I did, I’ll bet very few people remember them).

One actually happens amost every day I go to the American embassy.  I usually show up a red-faced, sweaty mess from the taxis and then the walk from the closest taxi stop to the embassy.  By the way, every piece of written information I got about Kinshasa says there is no public transportation system, but for the record, the system in place (although it is almost exclusively an unofficial and flexible system) works quite well in my opinion, although most Congolese seem disgusted with it.  It’s actually perhaps the number one development issue in the minds of the Congolese.  Maybe it is in the minds of Westerners here too…

Anyways, so there I am walking into the guards’ station at the embassy and when they ask how I am I say “malamu muke” which literally means “a little good” or “a little well” but actually means that I’ve been better (see this post on the Congolese sense of a spectrum from good to bad, and little to lots).  Then I usually say “moi makasi” which means “the sun is strong.”  It actually means that it’s hot outside.  It’s so interesting that the word for hot is the same as for sun (although there are other words for hot, as I will explain in a minute), particularly since, in a conversation with my dad the other day, I realized something.  He asked what the termperature was here because I was complaining about the heat, and when he discovered that it was between 87 and 92 he called me a wimp (or something like that).  I told him it must be the humidity or the sun, but when I thought about it I realized that acually, it’s just the sun!  Stepping into the shade, you really don’t feel too bad here, and when there’s a breeze it’s downright pleasant, but the sun is so much stronger here than at home and wakling from the shade to the sun is walking from relative comfort into downright misery.  It is particularly bad inside a car that doesn’t have A/C (which is most of them), but there’s a separate word for that kind of heat - the stuffy, compressed, sweaty bodies in a small space kind of heat.  I can never remember that word.

But there’s another word for hot, too, and that’s the one that one of the guards always uses to respond to my complaints about the sun.  She says “Africa moto, poto malili!” which means “Africa is hot, Europe is cold!”  I’ll quickly break down the words in that sentence because each of them is very rich.  “Moto,” depending on the intonation (yes, depending on the intonation) can mean “fire” “head” or “man” (as in humankind).  The “fire” version also means “hot,” usually in terms of food or beverage or something like that.  I guess you can add this to the collection of little factoids along with the (unconfirmed) anecdote about there being 12 words or something for “white” in some Inuit language (where it snows all year round) - there are definitely at least three words for “hot” in Lingala.

Then there’s the word “poto” which I think is “mpoto” in the classic Lingala (but that’s a whole other discussion…).  It means Europe, but I’ve discovered that it also means the U.S.  I haven’t probed too far into the meaning, but pretty much for the Congolese it means anywhere where the white people live.  “Malili” is related to “moi” because it means both “cool” or “cold” (as in a cold beer, which is my most frequent use of it) and also “shade.”

Wow - this took longer that I thought!  I am going to hold off on the other story for now because I think I might have already told it and I need to get moving.  I will check and maybe write it tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Congo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.