Umlungu - or why we stick together

So this is it, my foray into the brave, worn, world of the blogsphere, to share forgettable thoughts. If you´ve read past that first sentence, welcome! I hope you find your time well spent and you share your thoughts as well. 

Why Umlungu? Because of the connotations, misunderstandings and general coolness of such an exotic word - universally applicable.

Umlungu: "A Zulu word used in South Africa meaning 'white person'. Originally it comes from the white foam that collects along the shore of the beach."

How cool is that notion? Not only do we all start by washing up ashore some proverbial beach, but the connection between nature and peoples begs to be considered - in its historically ongoing perspective and interpretation. A beloved friend of times gone by, recently addressed me as Umlungu. A quick google, some wikipedia reading, and I was captured by the images behind that word. And a Zulu word at that. The all conquering Zulus that even gave soldiers of the then world´s greatest empire, a run for its money. Now surely it can´t get cooler than that?

But consider this: the "otherness" in Umlungu is not just a Zulu feature. We all have our "Umlungus" in our minds. Why? My guess is that needing to survive long enough to procreate and rear the young has always been a primary task, after eating and fighting. But then again, why? Well, apart from the humdrum DNA´s overriding urge to get replicated, another guess is that as humans or hominids we were never really too many, so staying together meant a better chance at surviving and getting on with life as we knew it. And that was at least as recent as 30 000 years ago, when our nearest cousins, the Neanderthals, took that long trip with a one way ticket to extinction, leaving our species to play by ourselves. And even then, we were not exactly a homogenous group of humans, as large swathes of earth separated our lonely clans from one another, for a long time. The migration of humans from Africa seems to have occurred about 60.000 years ago. And all that time, we apparently broke off into groups, adapted to local climates, interbred, dispersed and interbred again. But the nucleus, the core, of survival was probably around clans.

These clans were probably no more than 100 - 150 people moving and living together, which is actually a huge number, considering that it was probably pretty much "every man and his close kin for themselves". Live and learn, as an adage, probability got started there, as the ones ultimately surviving longer or better were the ones that teamed up and helped each other (which I am sure somewhere a management training coach is using as evidence of "teamworking"). But the more individuals collaborated, the stronger and more successful the clans became.

This bonding and cohesion would have been far easier between people who recognized in each other the give and take of mutual, complementing needs and wants. And if your clans person was the same skin color as you, or communicated in the same way you did, then you were bound to each other tighter than warm gloves on cold fingers. This probably did bring up the uneasy question about what to do with good old cousin Neanderthal. A big, strong person with not exactly the same attitude towards abstract concepts like settlement planning or dependency creating philanthropy. And so racism, or better, specie-ism, got jump started. Hell if we could wipe out entire herds of massive Mammoths, whacking cousins Homo erectus and Neanderthal would have been just off-season practice. And all thanks to the "team player" mentality firmly in place.

So there you are.

The person that comes ashore into a foreign continent, wipes out, allies with, gets suppressed by, and finally assimilated into, sort of, that foreign continent. Just another day in the gardens of biological evolution. And far from home, and even not knowing what home is anymore, I hold gratefully to that endearing, universal, all too human term: Umlungu.