Dear Editor,
In 1988 while driving around a suburb in Zimbabwe I drove past a house with barking vicious dogs and a huge white lady standing next to the dogs staring menacingly at me as I drove past. On her gate it was written the following words.
“Haikona saba lo inja! Paspa lo Madam!” This is a pidgin language with a mixture of Zulu, English and Afrikaans which some illiterate blacks used to communicate with their white masters which was called Fanakalo or Chilapalapa and at times  called Kitchen Kaffir language. A loose translation is “Do not fear the dog, watch out for the madam” implying that the madam of the house was more vicious than her dogs hence imploring potential thieves not to dare try stealing from that house.
In view of the disturbing experiences I had with traffic police in South Africa I am inclined to adapt the Chilapalapa sentence above to read as follows.
“Haikona saba lo tsotsi! Pasopa lo phoyisa!” meaning “Do not fear the criminal, watch out for the police” implying that you should be more scared of the police than criminals.
My inclination to adapt the Fanakalo words which I saw in Zimbabwe is based on some unfortunate experiences I had with the police in South Africa.
I am a South African, born 57 years ago out of wedlock in Durban South Africa to South African Zulu parents (Ephraim Ndaba and Zodwa Mahamba-Sithole) who were also born in South Africa. However, several times in South Africa I have been the victim of xenophobic treatment, comments and gossip by South Africans due to my English accent which was acquired in Zimbabwe where I was raised from six years old when I was taken there by my late aunt to join my mother who had emigrated to Zimbabwe years earlier. Iam often accused of lying that I am a South African even by some Zimbabweans who cannot believe that one who speaks their Shona language so well is not a Zimbabwean.
At times I have received xenophobic treatment from South African policemen (So far not from police women). The most recent incident was a weekend in November 2014 when I was stopped at a Johannesburg Municipal Police Department police roadblock on the Main Reef road near Roodepoort. What initially excited the policeman who very enthusiastically commanded me to stop was the 1994 Mazda 323 which I was driving. This is a car I prefer to use when I carry out maintenance tasks at my rented properties and I was coming from one of my rented properties in Roodepoort.
As the car is old, traffic police tend to assume that it has got defects and often they carry out rigorous and very thorough checks and they have never found any as I service and maintain it very well. Seeing that my car was roadworthy the policeman then asked to see my driver’s licence which I handed over to him. Then he asked “Where are you from?” I told him that I was from Durban. He commanded me to get out of the car and then he said to me, “Have you ever been arrested for lying?” I said no and asked him why he was asking such a question and he said that there was no such surname as Mahamba-Sithole in South Africa.
I was wearing a T-shirt with the words SOUTH SUDAN BEVERAGES which my son brought for me from South Sudan where he was doing some consultancy work at the South Sudan Brewery he then pointed at my chest and said that it was clear from what was written on my T-shirt saying  that I was from Africa and not South Africa. The separation of South Africa from the rest of the African continent is quite common among many South Africans.
I told the policeman that I was a South African. Then I explained that Sithole is a Zulu surname to which my late maternal grandfather added his grandfather’s first name Mahamba to make it a double barrelled surname in his remembrance after he had declined his grandfather’s deathbed request to carry on his sangoma (traditional healer) profession after his death. I explained that as I was born out of wedlock I was given my maternal grandfather’s surname Mahamba-Sithole. Then the policeman said he did not believe a word of what I had told him and therefore I was under arrest pending further investigation and I should jump into the police minibus and my car would be towed to the police station.
I agreed and said that was fine he could go ahead and arrest me as I could easlily prove that I am a South African. My response seemed to surprise him as though he expected me to plead for mercy hence what he said next surprised me too. He said “I also want a T-shirt like the one you are wearing” and I told him that I did not have another one like that. Then he asked me if I had some money for “cool drink” which is a term commonly used by corrupt policemen when asking for a bribe. When I asked him what law had I broken for him to expect me to bribe him, he then asked me to leave.
In yet another incident in the year 2000 when visiting South Africa from Zimbabwe where I was then based I waved down a police car in Johannesburg city centre to ask for directions out of the city and the policemen in that car threatened to arrest me for lying that I was a South African these reasons.
1. I should know my directions in Johannesburg if indeed I was a South African.
2. I was driving a car with Zimbabwe registration numbers.
3. I was wearing a T-shirt written “RADIO PHOENIX, LUSAKA, ZAMBIA.”
I explained to them that as I did not live in South Africa I would often need directions from locals, that as I lived in Zimbabwe at that time I was legally driving a car with Zimbabwe registration numbers and I explained to them that I got the T-shirt from the owner of the radio station when he visited Stanbic Bank in Harare where I was working then. They then asked for “cool drink money” and I showed them Zimbabwean dollars and told them that was all the money I had on me. Seeing that the Zimbabwean currency was worthless in South Africa they let me go and I reminded them that I had stopped them to ask for directions out of town and so they escorted me out of town.
On this occasion I was driving a Mercedes Benz and so it seems that what prompted the police to try to solicit a bribe from me in this instance was not the perception that my car was not roadworthy but the perception that I had a lot of money as I was driving an expensive car.
What prompted me to write this article are video clips which I saw on television recently. In one of them a South African policeman was secretly filmed by a motorist asking for a R200 bribe.
 
Eric” Langalakhe Mahamba-Sithole
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