The Xhosa People UPDATED (Cool Youtube Link)

The Xhosa people are speakers of Bantu languages living throughout the southern parts of the South Africa. Xhosa is the country's second most common first language, after Zulu, to which Xhosa is closely related. The pre-1994 apartheid  denied Xhosas South African citizenship and attempted to confine them to the nominally self-governing "homelands" of Transkei and Ciskei, now both a part of the Eastern Cape Province where most Xhosa remain and where our CSC project is situated. One of our team members, Marco, grew up in communist Germany and many people here are very interested in parallels between the German reunification and the reintegration of the Transkei and Ciskei homelands.

Toto is our local coordinator assisting with the CSC projects here in the Eastern Cape. He has a wealth of knowledge on many subjects and has himself traveled much of the world. Xhosa is his first language and he explained the clicking sound made when speaking by using the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth ... very strange to my ears and difficult to incorporate the click sound into a word.

From Wikipedia:: Xhosa is a tonal language, that is, the same sequence of consonants and vowels can have different meanings when said with a rising or falling or high or low intonation. One of the most distinctive features of the language is the prominence of click consonants; the word "Xhosa" begins with a click.
Xhosa is written using a Latin alphabet. Three letters are used to indicate the basic clicks: c for dental clicks, x for lateral clicks, and q for palatal clicks. Tones are not indicated in the written form.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZlp-croVYw

Further insights from Toto that have been very helpful in our interaction with people of the region:

• handshakes are firm and consist of three grips in succession: handshake, interlocked thumbs, followed by another handshake
• using two hands when shaking is a sign of respect
• eye-to-eye contact may be interpreted as disrespectful - it is better to look in the general area of the face or at the person as a whole
• when you get to know someone well an "A-hug" is common ... interlocking hands and touching shoulders - but not Western-style embraces and no back patting
• Most Africans in this region have English as a second language and need to translate in their minds from Xhosa. Most have both  English and African given names.

We have found in dealing with our client that in an informal setting they may address each other with a first name, such as "Navy" for the acting CEO, but in a business meeting it is more formal and he is addressed as Mr. Simukonda. The most senior person in a business meeting sits at the head of the table.

If all this seems to make for rigid encounters, it really does not. The people are very warm and engaging, and do not stand on protocol ... they make as much much effort to adapt and make us comfortable as we try to do with them.