Six Words: Field, Inject, Original, Hunter, Suntan, Bomb
On our first trip to South Africa we used Ntaba Tours. Our tour director was a handsome, suntanned man named Robin Mountain. Robin chose the name Ntaba for his company because it is Xhosa for Mountain. Xhosa is one of the eleven official languages of South Africa. Robin speaks several of them. Xhosa is spelled X-h-o-s-a where the X is a click and the h is silent, so it should sound like click-osa. Try it. I’ve been practicing since I started this story Friday night.
Although Robin and his wife, Stella, live in Frankfort, Kentucky, they are originally from the Cape Town area in South Africa. He’d been in the army and I think he’d been a hunter, although when we knew him, he hunted, like me, with a camera in fields and forests.
Over dinner one day, as we got to know Robin, he dropped the bomb about what he did previously and what brought him to America. He was an expert in the artificial insemination of bees! Undoubtedly, you are wondering the same things we did. How do you get the material to inject, what kind of a needle do you use, how do you do it? He came to the U.S. to be a professor at a university in California, and eventually at a university in Kentucky. But he loved South Africa and the safari experience, and leading tours let him go back often to visit his mother. The business thrived and is still going. I still get email a couple of times a year from Robin and Stella.
If you want to hear the click sound used by a fluent speaker, do a search for Pata Pata. You’ll find a Youtube link to Miriam Makeba singing it on the Ed Sullivan show, and she does it seamlessly.