S. Africa’s New Motto Leaves Some Flush With Chagrin

It’s impossible to read. Forget about trying to pronounce it. And the meaning? Well, it’s best not to ask.

South Africa’s new national motto looks like an Internet address gone dotty, but that’s the least of its troubles. Experts say even its wacky spelling isn’t quite right. And critics suggest that it conjures up images of the toilet.

The inscription, as it appears on South Africa’s newly redesigned coat of arms, reads: !ke e: /xarra //ke. The phrase comes from /Xam, an extinct language once spoken by many of the original inhabitants of southern Africa, known as the Khoisan. The lettering is the work of a German linguist who committed the vanishing tongue with its clicking sounds to paper more than a century ago.

But as an unfortunate coincidence would have it, the commonly used word /kham--pronounced identically to /Xam, the name of the language--means in many Khoisan dialects “to relieve oneself,” or more literally, “to take a leak.”

No one in the South African government recognized the problem until it was much too late. The motto and coat of arms are cast in bronze and early this month were mounted here outside President Thabo Mbeki’s office. Plaques are being shipped to embassies around the world. Before long, the coat of arms also will be minted on South African coins.

“It is already on the presidential stationery,” said Mbeki’s spokeswoman, Tasneem Carrim.

Defenders of the new national symbol hasten to note that the inelegant Khoisan term does not actually appear in the motto. Rather, it happens to sound like the name of the /Xam language featured in the motto. And there is no dispute that the motto conveys the intended meaning of “Unity Through Diversity.”

But to critics, that is small comfort. How could the country’s credo be recorded in a language whose name is most commonly associated with going to the toilet, they ask. Would Americans be happy if “In God We Trust” were written, not in English, but in a language called Pee?

Although many Khoisan people say they are not bothered by the double-entendre, Petrus Vaalbooi, an outspoken Khoisan leader in the Eastern Cape province, has questioned the wisdom of the choice. The country’s main opposition party is calling for an urgent parliamentary debate on the mix-up.

“We now have a coat of arms and motto thrust upon the country that not everyone is happy with,” said Lauren Winchester, spokeswoman for the opposition Democratic Party. “If there had been more discussion, you might have a product at the end of the day that was less controversial.”

It’s not that the new emblem passed muster without scrutiny. Tampering with national symbols has always been a delicate undertaking in South Africa. Virtually every inch of the coat of arms, six years in coming, was dictated by a Cabinet-level committee.

Iaan Bekker, the commercial artist who created the design, was instructed how wide to make the rays of sunshine, which bird to depict and how tall to draw the elephant tusks. He was even required to render sexless the Khoisan men at the center of the emblem.

Khoisan rock art, Bekker’s inspiration, features private parts rather prominently, but officials didn’t want to offend modern sensibilities. They also didn’t want to be dragged into a debate about whether men or women were being favored, even though the particular rock art in question does not portray female figures.

“We had to edit some of the anatomy,” Bekker said. “They should be seen not only as representing male figures but depicting humanity.”

Ben Smith, the British director of the Rock Art Research Institute in Johannesburg, who wrote the /Xam verse for the emblem, said complaints about the motto are “nonsense and disgusting.” He accused the Democratic Party and others of trivializing an important moment in South Africa’s democratic development so they can score political points.

“I have been depressed watching this develop,” Smith said. “The motto was meant to be a noble reflection of the importance of the [Khoisan] people; instead, it has been held up to ridicule. It is very hurtful.”

Old South African hands are less afflicted. They say such brouhahas are precisely why it has taken six years for the new black-majority government to replace the white regime’s motto and coat of arms. Change has always come noisily in South Africa.

When the apartheid-era flag was scrapped in 1994, the government sifted through more than 7,000 submissions for its replacement. There was so much rancor that officials turned in desperation to the state herald, Fred Brownell, whose office is custodian of the country’s official emblems.

Brownell reached into his desk drawer, where he had stashed an old sketch he had doodled on the back of a program during a conference in Switzerland. The colorful design neither overly offended nor overly excited; within months, it was hoisted up flagpoles across the country.

“We have always trod a little gently when it comes to symbols in this country because it is easy to put your head in a hornet’s nest,” Brownell said. “In 1910, it was only 10 years after the Anglo-Boer War, and there were strong feelings between the English- and Afrikaans-speaking peoples. The only solution at that time was to choose a national motto in Latin.”

The new /Xam theme of “Unity Through Diversity” was selected by Mbeki to replace the 1910 “Unity Is Strength.” Like many things in South Africa, the old motto had racial overtones; it referred to white settlers joining forces against a hostile black continent.

But the English-Afrikaans sensitivities of 90 years ago pale in comparison with South Africa’s present-day cultural mosaic. Given the 11 official languages, deep ethnic divisions and a long history of oppression, government officials searched for a language that would offend no one. In the end, they settled on a dead one: All but a handful of the last /Xam speakers were killed in clashes with white settlers in the 19th century. The rest are believed to have died in the early 1900s.

“We thought it was safe,” said Rob Adam, director-general of the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, which oversees revisions to national symbols and includes the state herald’s office.

Linguists concur that the motto’s meaning comes close to Mbeki’s desired “Unity Through Diversity,” but the verse is creating chatter in academic circles for reasons beyond the sensational.

Khoisan historians and language experts believe that no phrase resembling the motto was ever uttered by a /Xam speaker. The motto’s construction is “not authentic” in linguistic terms, said Thomas Gueldemann, a lecturer in southern African languages at the University of Leipzig in Germany.

“There is also the possibility that it would not have been acceptable for some semantic or grammatical reason,” Gueldemann said.

It seems the /Xam people were so fearful of diversity--which mostly meant marauding outsiders destroying their way of life--that they would have been horrified by the essence of the new credo, the Khoisan experts say. The /Xam language, moreover, made no allowances for the philosophical concepts expressed in the motto, which were chosen by Mbeki for their centrality to South Africa’s current identity as a rainbow nation.

“You and I, having more than enough food to eat, clothes on our back and roofs over our heads, can bother about philosophy,” said Brownell, the state herald. “Those people lived hand to mouth.”

Smith, the rock art director, acknowledged that the motto is a modern concoction. But, he said, it was carefully pieced together from the /Xam dictionary and other writings of Wilhelm Bleek, the German linguist who recorded the language after extensive conversations with many of the last /Xam speakers in the 1860s and ‘70s.

According to the dictionary and texts, the first part of the motto--!ke e: /xarra--means “people who are different” and the second part--//ke--means “come together.”

“We have 12,000 pages of /Xam narration actually as they spoke it,” Smith said. “We looked at all the different situations in which these words were used, and there is no ambiguity: We have no doubt this phrase is not open to misinterpretation.”

But purists also point out that the spelling used in the motto is not precise. In working with the /Xam, Bleek devised a phonetic alphabet, using forms of punctuation to identify click sounds common in the language. The /, for example, represents a dental click, while !, // and : signify other types of clicks and vowel sounds.

In fact, however, the slanting slashes should be vertical slashes, except when the text is in italics. The motto as written on the coat of arms is not in italics, yet the slashes slant.

Government officials say use of the / is one of several concessions in the coat of arms to the dot-com age. Many computer keyboards do not have a vertical slash key; moreover, the upright slash can easily be confused with a lowercase L or an uppercase I. (For the same reason, The Times has used the / in the language name /Xam, though it should be a vertical slash.)

Patti McDonald, who heads the design and print department for the government communications agency, said the / also is considered a bridge between the past and present because of its link with the Internet.

“It is an ancient thing,” she said, “that has come full circle.”