Growing Up Speaking in Code: Shona Slang from Mufakose to Warren Park

Nobody sat me down and taught me slang. There was no textbook, no syllabus, no vocabulary test on Friday morning. The education happened on dusty streets in Mufakose, sometime in the mid-1980s, and the classroom was every corner, every game of hwishu, every whispered warning when someone's mother appeared at the gate. You either picked it up or you got left behind. That was the deal.

I must have been six or seven when I first heard the word "blazo." An older kid on our street, the kind who wore his school shirt untucked and walked like the ground owed him money, called out to his friend across the road: "Uyo ndiblaz vangu" (That dude is my older bro!) I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it meant something. It carried weight. It carried cool. I wanted to be a blazo. I wanted someone to call me that.

What was it like growing up with slang in 1980s Mufakose?

Mufakose in the 1980s was a universe unto itself. A high-density suburb in southwest Harare, it was packed with families, noise, laughter, and an unwritten social order that every kid understood instinctively. The adults spoke proper Shona at home and maybe English at work. But on the streets, between the kids and the young men, a parallel language was evolving in real time.

The earliest slang word I can pin to a memory is "blazo," sometimes shortened to "blaz" or stretched out to "blasen." It meant big brother, elder, dude. Not your literal brother (though it could be), but any older guy you respected. The origins are fuzzy. Some say it comes from "blazer," as in the senior school blazer that marked you as an upperclassman. Others claim it just sounded right. That is the thing about slang. It does not always need a neat origin story. Sometimes a word just arrives, and everyone agrees it belongs.

What fascinated me, even as a small kid who barely understood half of what the older boys were saying, was the exclusivity of it. This was not language you heard on ZBC radio. Your teacher at school did not use it. Your grandmother definitely did not use it (if she did, something had gone very wrong). It was a secret code, and knowing it meant you were in.

How did whistling become a communication system?

Before mobile phones, before WhatsApp, before even landlines in most Mufakose homes, we had whistling. And I do not mean casual, walking-down-the-road whistling. I mean a structured, neighbourhood-specific signalling system that would make a military communications officer nod in grudging respect.

Every hood in Mufakose had its own whistle code. A specific pattern of notes meant "come outside." Another meant "game on." If you were deep inside the house doing homework (or pretending to) and heard that whistle pattern float through the window, your body reacted before your brain caught up. Pencil down. Shoes on. "Amai, ndiri kubuda!" (Mom, I'm going out!)

The beauty of the whistle was its deniability. Your mother could not prove anything. "I did not hear anyone calling you," she would say. "Nobody called me," you would reply, technically honest. "I just felt like going outside." She knew. You knew she knew. But the whistle left no evidence.

Different streets had different codes, and learning the whistle for a new area was one of the first things you did if your family moved. Get the whistle wrong and you would either summon nobody or, worse, summon the wrong crew from two streets over who would want to know why you were blowing their signal.

What games did kids play, and what did they call them?

If the whistle was the call, the games were the reason. And the games had their own vocabulary that outsiders could not begin to decode.

The king of all street games in my corner of Mufakose was "hwishu." Try explaining hwishu to someone who has never seen it. It is sort of like baseball, if baseball was invented by kids who only had a football and no bat. Or maybe cricket, if cricket was stripped of all its rules and replaced with pure chaos.

Here is the basic idea: someone kicks a ball (usually a half-deflated football or a tennis ball if you were lucky), and if you miss your kick, you are out. That is the core mechanic. Everything else, the running, the fielding, the arguments about whether a kick counted, was improvised democracy. Rules were negotiated in real time, and the loudest kid usually won the legal disputes. There was no referee. God was the referee, and God was busy.

Other games had equally untranslatable names. "Dhanyamutsvairo" was a game that roughly translated to "step on the broom" and involved acrobatic jumping that would get you banned from any modern playground for safety violations. "Pada" involved flattened bottle caps and a level of hand-eye coordination that I am convinced peaked at age nine and has been declining ever since.

Every game taught you slang without you realizing it. Winning moves had names. Losing had its own vocabulary of humiliation. The social dynamics of the game, who was captain, who got picked last, who was accused of cheating, all of it was conducted in a language that existed nowhere else.

When did "bhebhi" enter the vocabulary, and what did it reveal?

Then came the girls. Or rather, then came the awareness of girls, which for boys in Mufakose arrived like a freight train sometime around age ten and derailed everything.

The word was "bhebhi." Say it out loud. You can hear the English "baby" or "babe" buried in there, Shona-fied with that characteristic "bh" sound and the "i" ending that made it roll naturally off the tongue. A bhebhi was a girl, a girlfriend, or simply an attractive girl you had noticed across the schoolyard and were too terrified to speak to.

What I find interesting looking back is how the borrowing worked. English "baby" became Shona "bhebhi," but in the process it picked up a different energy. In English, calling someone "baby" can be patronizing. In Mufakose street talk, "bhebhi" was almost respectful, a term of admiration. "Bhebhi iro rakanaka" (that girl is beautiful) was about as poetic as a twelve-year-old boy got. It was not Shakespeare. But it was not nothing, either.

The word revealed something about how slang functions as a safety net for feelings. At that age, talking about girls in straight Shona felt too serious, too adult. But wrapping it in slang made it manageable. You could say "bhebhi" and laugh it off if your friends teased you. The slang gave you plausible deniability for your own emotions. Encryption for the heart.

What happens to English words when the ghetto gets hold of them?

"Bhebhi" was just one example of something much bigger. English words did not survive the trip into Shona slang unscathed. They got remixed, chopped up, restructured, and came out the other side sounding like entirely new creations.

Years later, I stumbled across an academic paper by Aquilina Mawadza from the University of Zimbabwe that basically described what I had been hearing my whole life. Published in 2000 in the journal Zambezia, her study called the process "nativisation": the reshaping of borrowed words to fit Shona's sound system. Reading it felt like someone had finally written the manual for a language I had been speaking since childhood.

Here is the pattern. Shona prefers syllables that follow a consonant-vowel (CV) shape. English does not care about any of that. English will end words on consonants, stack consonants together, and generally do whatever it wants phonologically. So when English words enter Shona slang, the first thing that happens is they get restructured. Consonant clusters get broken apart with vowels. Words that end abruptly on consonants get a vowel or a "-z" tacked on.

That "-z" suffix became a kind of slang signature. Once you noticed it, you could not stop hearing it:

• "Town" became tonaz
• "Morning" became monaz
• "Cool" became kulazi (or coldaz when winter hit)
• "Funeral" became finaz
• "Girl" became geliza
• "Boy" stayed short: boyz
• "Big" became bigaz (also used as a term of respect, like "boss")
• "Chill" became chilaz
• "Time" became taimi

Some words got the full makeover. "Dollar" became dhombi. "Refrigerator" got compressed into filaz. "Down" became dhawezi. Even "Harare" itself, the whole capital city, got reworked into Halemu.

And it was not just English feeding the system. Ndebele, spoken mainly in the southwest of Zimbabwe, contributed kugula (to be sick, from the Ndebele ukugula). Chewa, from neighbouring Malawi and Mozambique, gave us kumala (to die, from Chewa kumala). Afrikaans left its mark too: vhati (water, from Afrikaans vaat). The slang was a linguistic meeting point for every language that touched Harare's streets, and every contribution got reshaped to sound like it had always been Shona.

What fascinated me most was the shortening pattern. Shona slang loves to chop words down and rebuild them with a different energy. Formal words that your grandmother used every day would get trimmed, have their "r" sounds swapped to "l", and get that trademark "-z" or "-ez" ending:

• Sekuru (grandfather) became kulez
• Amaiguru (mother's elder sister) became gulez
• Masikati (afternoon) became sikateni
• Manheru (evening) became nhelaz
• Kudhara (long ago) became kudhambi
• Bhawa (bar) became bhaleki

The shortened forms carry a completely different energy from the originals. Saying "kulez" instead of "sekuru" does not change who you are talking about, but it changes the entire tone of the conversation. It is casual, warm, stripped of formality. The slang version says: I know you, we are close, we do not need the full word between us.

What changed when you moved to Warren Park?

In the early 1990s, my family moved from Mufakose to Warren Park, another high-density suburb in Harare but with its own distinct personality. If Mufakose was the neighbourhood that raised me, Warren Park was the neighbourhood that made me bilingual in slang.

The first thing I noticed was that the vocabulary was different. Not completely different, but different enough that you felt like a foreigner for the first few weeks. Words I had used confidently in Mufakose drew blank stares in Warren Park. New terms came at me fast, and the only way to learn was to shut up, listen, and absorb. It was like changing schools but for your entire social language.

The adaptation happened quickly because the underlying grammar of slang was the same. Borrow from English, flip words around, shorten everything, make it punchy. Once you understood the system, picking up new words was easy. The hard part was the confidence to use them. Drop a new word too early and you sound like you are trying too hard. Wait too long and the word is already old news. Timing was everything.

Warren Park introduced me to the concept of "kwaMarabo," a dump site near the National Sports Stadium that was equal parts disgusting and magical. Going kwaMarabo was an expedition. You would spend hours picking through discarded items, looking for treasures: soft copper wires (essential for making wire cars, which were serious engineering projects), broken toys that could be repaired, random electronics.

I once found a digital watch there. A real digital watch, with buttons and everything. It did not work, obviously. The screen was cracked and nothing happened when you pressed any button. But for about three days I wore it proudly, telling anyone who asked that it was "just out of battery." Nobody believed me. I did not care. I had found a digital watch at kwaMarabo. That was a story.

How did slang handle the serious stuff?

Not everything was games and girls. Growing up in the ghetto meant growing up with conflict, and conflict had its own rich vocabulary.

A fight was called "dudu." Say it out loud: "doo-doo." The word is almost certainly onomatopoeic, mimicking the sound of fists landing. Dooh, dooh. There is something honest about a word that sounds like the thing it describes. No euphemism, no fancy Latin root. Just the sound of two fists and a bad decision.

Then there was "bhakirenda," which was the slang term for boxing or a fistfight. This one has a clear etymology: the proper Shona word for fist is "chibhakera," and bhakirenda is a playful mutation of that, stretched out and made to sound like it could be an English word. Say "bhakirenda" with enough confidence and someone unfamiliar with Shona might think it is some obscure martial art. "I study bhakirenda." Nobody is questioning that.

The slang around fighting did something important: it made dangerous situations slightly less terrifying by giving you a way to talk about them that felt controlled. Saying "there was a dudu" was different from saying "there was a fight." The slang added a layer of narrative distance. You were not just reporting violence; you were telling a story, and stories have structure, humour, and an audience. Even the scariest events in the ghetto could be processed through the filter of creative language.

How did Shona slang turn everyday objects into metaphors?

One of the things I came to appreciate only as an adult is how genuinely creative Shona slang is with metaphor. This was not random word substitution. There was logic, wit, and sometimes entire social commentaries compressed into a single word.

Take the word mudhara. Literally, it means "old man." But in slang, it became a universal term of respect for anyone who provided, anyone who looked after people. The parking lot attendants in Harare would call every male driver "mudhara," not because the drivers were old, but because the driver-attendant relationship mirrored the traditional one between a father and his dependants. The mudhara provides; the dependants show respect. An entire social contract compressed into three syllables.

Then there was varungu, literally "white people," used by kombi crews to address their passengers. The logic was colonial in origin: during the Rhodesian era, white people were the employers. On a commuter omnibus, the passengers are the employer. Without varungu on the bus, there is no business. So passengers became varungu. The economics of the kombi created its own vocabulary of power and status, echoing a history that nobody had to explain because everyone already carried it.

When cell phones first arrived in Zimbabwe, slang kept pace immediately. A big, clunky, cheap phone was called chidhina, a brick. The metaphor writes itself: it looked like one, it weighed like one, and you could probably defend yourself with one in an emergency. But a sleek, expensive phone? That was chimbeva, a mouse. In Shona culture, mbeva is a prized delicacy in some communities. Something small, delicate, and highly valued. The expensive phone earned the same associations. You could tell someone's economic status by whether they were carrying a chidhina or a chimbeva.

The ATM got two slang names, and both were brilliant. Madziro, "walls," because cash machines were mounted on building walls. And madyirapanze, "one who eats outside," because you could collect your money outside the bank, without going in. That second one carries extra weight because madyirapanze is also a traditional praise name for the Gumbo clan totem. The slang borrowed cultural gravity from an entirely different context and repurposed it for a machine that spits out cash. You have to respect the creativity.

Even beer had its own metaphorical class system. Clear beer (lager) was mafuta endege, "airplane fuel." Expensive, refined, aspirational. Opaque beer (traditional brew) was mafuta etractor, "tractor fuel," or simply masafinya. Cheaper, heavier, gets the job done without pretending to be something it is not. The metaphor mapped an entire economic hierarchy onto beverage choice. You did not just order a beer in the ghetto. You made a statement about your position in life, and everyone at the table understood exactly what you meant.

Onomatopoeia played its part too. A policeman was mungonjo, a word that mimics the clinking sound of handcuffs being snapped onto wrists. A car was vhuzhi, which sounds exactly like an engine starting up. These words did not need anyone to explain them. You heard them and you just knew. The sound was the definition.

Why did every hood develop its own slang?

This is the question that eventually led me to start paying serious attention to Zimbabwean slang as an adult. Why did Mufakose have different words from Warren Park, which had different words from Highfield, which had different words from Mbare?

Part of the answer is identity. Your slang was your postcode. The words you used told people exactly where you were from, and in the social geography of Harare, that mattered. A kid from Mbare sounded different from a kid from Budiriro, and both sounded different from a kid from the low-density suburbs (who probably did not use much slang at all and was considered slightly suspicious for that reason).

The proof was in the names. Every ghetto suburb in Harare had its own slang name, a shortened, reshaped version that only people who belonged there (or knew people who did) would use naturally. If you could rattle off these names without hesitating, you were from the streets. If you used the full government name, you were an outsider, a teacher, or a parent who had given up trying to keep up.

Here is the map I grew up with:

Look at the patterns. The "-z" and "-ez" endings show up everywhere: Mbilez, Budaz, Warrenz, Bvukwez, Mebaz, Tonaz, Bluz. It is the same nativisation process that Mawadza documented in her study, applied to the places themselves. Some got creative alternatives. Chitungwiza became "Chitown" (self-explanatory) or "Musha Mukuru" (literally "the big home"), which tells you everything about how residents of that satellite city saw their relationship to Harare proper. It was not a suburb. It was an entire civilization that happened to depend on Harare for employment.

Saying "I'm from Mufombi" instead of "I'm from Mufakose" was not laziness. It was a declaration of belonging. It said: I know this place from the inside. I am not a visitor. I did not read about this suburb in a newspaper. I walked its streets, played hwishu on its corners, and earned the right to call it by its real name.

Part of the answer is isolation. Before the internet, before widespread television, before any of the homogenizing forces that flatten language today, each neighbourhood was a semi-closed linguistic ecosystem. Words were invented locally, tested locally, and spread (or died) locally. A brilliant piece of slang could thrive in one suburb and never cross the road to the next one.

And part of the answer is competition. Nobody would admit this, but there was a quiet rivalry between hoods. Having better slang, fresher slang, more creative slang, was a source of neighbourhood pride. It was like having the best football team or the toughest guys. Linguistic innovation was a status game, and every hood was playing it.

This is why documenting Zimbabwean slang matters. These are not just words. They are postcards from specific times and places. Every entry in the ShonaSlang dictionary preserves a moment in someone's lived experience, a game of hwishu on a dusty street, a whistle code echoing through a Mufakose evening, a terrified twelve-year-old trying to say "bhebhi" without his voice cracking.

Has the slang landscape changed since the 80s and 90s?

Completely. And not at all.

The mechanics are the same: borrow, flip, shorten, encrypt. Young Zimbabweans today are doing exactly what we did in Mufakose, taking the language around them and remixing it into something new, something that belongs to them and excludes everyone else. That impulse has not changed in forty years and probably will not change in the next forty.

What has changed is the speed and reach. A new word coined in Mbare on Monday can be trending on Zimbabwean Twitter by Wednesday and used by diaspora kids in London by Friday. The neighbourhood borders that once contained slang have dissolved. Everyone is connected now, and language moves at the speed of a WhatsApp forward.

This has created an interesting tension. On one hand, slang is more widely shared than ever. On the other hand, the hyper-local flavour that made each hood's vocabulary unique is fading. The Warren Park slang that confused me in 1992 might not exist as a distinct thing anymore, absorbed into a more generalized Harare youth vocabulary that draws from everywhere.

That is part of why projects like ShonaSlang feel urgent. The slang is not disappearing. It is evolving so fast that yesterday's words get buried under today's. If nobody writes them down, they vanish. And with them vanishes a piece of the culture, a record of how people lived, played, fought, fell in love, and made sense of their world through the words they invented.

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I still cannot whistle very well. Never could, honestly. I was always the kid who heard the signal three seconds late and arrived at the game after teams were already picked. But I listened. I always listened. And the words stuck.

If you grew up in a Zimbabwean ghetto in the 80s or 90s (or any era, really), you have your own vocabulary buried somewhere in your memory. Words that nobody else would understand. Words that instantly transport you back to a specific street, a specific game, a specific moment when language clicked and you realized you were part of something.

Add those words to the dictionary. Record the pronunciation. Write the context. Because if you do not, who will?