Indigenous Representations of Disability

What’s in a name?

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. When it comes to disability and the languages we speak, names carry the weight of history. They tell us who we think we are and how we see others.

For many Africans, our relationship with vernacular languages is complicated. How many of us go by English, French, or Portuguese names instead of our own? Sometimes it’s colonial legacy, sometimes religion or class, and sometimes it’s just habit. But language is never neutral. It holds memory, identity, and power — and sometimes, pain.

When it comes to disability, I often think that using European languages can be… not kinder, because there are certainly issues in many European languages too, but English, and perhaps I should say some countries more than others, has made better strides than others in making it easier to talk about disability.

My moody mother tongue

My relationship with isiXhosa is, let’s say, moody. The will is there, but the fluency comes and goes. My mother tongue is like the friend who only gets the joke after everyone has stopped laughing — and then needs the punchline explained.

But I know enough to know this: our words for disability need work.

I speak here not as a linguist but as a person with disabilities and as a Xhosa woman who listens to how we talk about difference. This is personal. Deeply so. This is about my personal experience and understanding of isiXhosa as I use it and encounter it. I’m highly aware of the difference in dictionary definitions of terms and social, casual use of terms, and I would ask that we bear that in mind.

Words that wound

The isiXhosa word for disability is ukukhubazeka. It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but more importantly, it carries the sense of being broken or hurt. From the start, the language frames people with disabilities as damaged.

Years ago, a manager once called me isithulu — “deaf” — after I asked her to repeat something. When I didn’t laugh, I was told I was being too sensitive. She repeated the “joke” again later, this time at an airport, calling my name from behind me, knowing I wouldn’t hear.

It’s been years, and I’m still not laughing.

There are layers here. Isithulu means “deaf”, yes, but it also carries a dismissive undertone. It can easily shift from description to insult. To say akeva (“she cannot hear”) is factual. To say usisithulu (“she is deaf”) feels final — like a label rather than a condition.

Moments like that remind me how easily language can become a weapon, even when wrapped as a joke.

I am, I will wholeheartedly admit, sensitive about the naming of my hearing condition. I’m in a twilight zone of severe impairment but not total deafness. Waiting and dreading the coming silence. Fighting to make peace with it and yet refusing to make peace with it.

The weight of a noun

I’ve noticed that words like ‘isithulu’ (deaf) and ‘imfama’ (blind) are nouns, not adjectives. They describe a whole person by their impairment, not by their humanity. “She is deaf” becomes who she is, not what she experiences.

It’s subtle, but it matters.

We could say akaboni (“she cannot see”) or banengxaki yokubona (“they have trouble seeing”), but we don’t. Everyday speech reduces people to categories. It’s not conscious.

Often it’s not even malicious. “It’s just the way it is.”

The same happens with psychosocial disabilities: unamafufunyane (they are possessed, hysterical) or uyaphambana (they are mad).

The range of meaning is broad; it moves fluidly from sarcasm to stigma to label in a heartbeat.

“Sukutyhafa, maan” — don’t be weak

“I live with chronic fatigue, and my favourite isiXhosa word—I say this with deep sarcasm—’ukutyhafa’—both describes and mocks me. It means “tired” or “fatigued”, but carries a hint of indulgence, as though one is simply giving in.

“Sukutyhafa, maan!” (“Don’t be weak!”) is a phrase I’ve heard often, as though my fatigue were a choice.

Ukudinwa, on the other hand, means fatigue after effort. It acknowledges that work was done. ‘Ukutyhafa’ implies that something is wrong with you.

These small distinctions shape how we think about people with disabilities — whether we see them as working against barriers or simply failing to rise above them.

When English “comes to the rescue”

In some ways, English provides a relief. It gives us words that didn’t exist in our indigenous vocabularies, and it offers nuance where there was none.

We can now say “schizophrenia” instead of amafufunyane. We can say “learning disability” instead of “usisidenge” — “stupid”. English gives names to experiences that once existed only as shame or superstition.

Even more powerfully, it lets us reread our own histories. We can look back at family members or community elders who may have lived with disabilities and finally understand them with compassion. Perhaps they weren’t “lazy”, “bewitched”, or “mad”. They were living with conditions that we had no words for.

That recognition changes how we remember them — and ourselves.

Language, power, and empathy

Still, English isn’t the ultimate saviour. It’s a borrowed language layered with its own biases. But it reminds us that words evolve. We have the power to grow our languages, too.

Most indigenous South African languages are well documented, with many doctoral dissertations written in indigenous languages. This allows us to stretch them. To create new terms that carry respect, precision, and empathy. To make space for disability in our own languages, not as a curse or an afterthought, but as part of the human story. In doing so, we also come to terms with what disabilities are and how they work.

Because every time we describe someone as isithulu or imfama, we are not just describing them; we are shaping the space they occupy in our collective imagination. To name a thing is to understand it.

And when we understand, we soften.

Rewriting the vocabulary of care

The challenge before us is not translation, but transformation.

We need words that dignify, not diminish. Words that can describe differences without making it a defect. Words that allow us to see disability not as ukukhubazeka, brokenness, but as another way of moving through the world.

Maybe one day, ukukhubazeka will simply mean “difference”.

And maybe then, we’ll all understand the punchline at the same time.