lebitla la mosadi ke bogadi 2025 May 10    web.archive.org
Reading something online, I stumbled across this African phrase in its translation: "a woman’s grave is at the place/home of her husband" and I had a difficult time understanding, being removed culturally from the phrase's origin. There's not much online about it (or even which language the phrase is in), but I still managed to find the absolute nerdiest source: an academic research paper from 2015, the PhD thesis written by Seepaneng Salaminah Moloko-Phiri at University of Pretoria, South Africa (they are now an associate professor at South Africa's North-West University in the School of Nursing).

According to the doctor:

The proverb “lebitla la mosadi ke bogadi” is used as a language tool during premarital counselling to instruct African women on the value of marriage and to encourage married women to stay in their marriages. However, some African proverbs which are commonly used to define the marital relationship between men and women appear to be gender-biased and focus more on women only therefore perpetuating ill-health, discrimination and oppression.

The study concludes that some women found the phrase positive and some negative, which doesn't seem like much, but at least does convey a culture wary of the implications.

Lumpenmilitariat 2025 Apr 30    journals.sagepub.com
Marx and Engles in the 1940s coined the term Lumpenproletariat when discussing the unthinking lower class of society who are easily exploited by counter-revolutionary forces. It includes criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes.

But then there is the term Lumpenmilitariat. Polish journalist and chronicler of Africa Ryszard Kapuściński in his essay collection The Shadow Of the Sun introduced the word to me, attributing it to Ugandan historian Ali Mazrui, and explaining it thusly (in 1998):

Here is one of Africa’s problems: its intelligentsia lives for the most part outside its borders, in the United States, in London, Paris, Rome. Remaining in their native countries are, at the bottom, masses of illiterate, downtrodden, utterly exploited peasants; at the top, the corrupt bureaucracy or arrogant, coarse soldiers (the lumpenmilitariat, as the Ugandan historian Ali Mazrui calls them).

Being me, I needed to know more. And so, linked here is where I believe Mazrui first introduced the term, in an academic political science paper written while a professor at Uganda's Makerere University and published in March 1973, about two years into Idi Amin's military dictatorship of the country. Amin's politics famously drifted while in power, and Makrui's paper is an examination into why, seemingly framed in an attempt to reckon what he was witnessing in Uganda with the theory of Marxism.

And so, the word in question, defined by Makrui's own self:

The lumpen proletariat is a mass of disorganized workers and ghetto dwellers in the developed world; but the lumpen militariat is that class of semi-organized, rugged, and semi-literate soldiery which has begun to claim a share of power and influence in what would otherwise have become a heavily privileged meritocracy of the educated.

Mazrui later left Makerere University and Uganda entirely after feeling that he lost political standing by declining an offer by Amin himself. Quoted in 1986 in the New York Times:

I was, in a sense, running away from Idi Amin. For a while, I was in good standing in Uganda. But I declined his invitation to be his Kissinger, a special adviser. I might have done some good. Or, possibly, I wouldn't have been alive to talk to you here today.

He spent much of the remaining portion of his career in the USA, a professor at several prominent universities here, and even produced a TV documentary.