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lexical item

majita

also: jita, majieta, amajita, mayita, majika, matjita

Sourced3 citations
Tsotsitaal and Iscamthoeverydayin-group

Guys, friends. A Black youth or adult man, and a term of address to one; also lamajita, these guys. One of the most travelled items in the lexicon, current in tsotsitaal varieties well beyond the Gauteng townships where it was first recorded.

Where it comes from

No one person coined this.

It comes from Johannesburg township Isicamtho speakers. The record credits the speech community and the earliest citation that proves it, because Tsotsitaal and Iscamtho was made by a community over time and not in a moment anyone wrote down.

1956precise to the year

1956 is the earliest of the eleven dated quotations the DSAE prints, and the form printed there is majietas rather than majita. Two named sources give incompatible etymologies and this entry picks neither. The DSAE files the word as Isicamtho and derives it from 'magic', by way of The Magic Garden, a 1951 film about petty theft in Black South Africa, proposing the form majika was coined around then. Ditsele and Hurst (2016), citing Hurst and Mesthrie (2013:9), instead suggest English 'jitterbug', the American dance of the 1930s and 1940s. One route runs through a film, the other through a dance, and both are the kind of claim this variety attracts because it draws on Afrikaans, isiZulu, Sesotho, Setswana, isiXhosa and English at once. Note that the DSAE's 'probably coined c1951' is hedged and names nobody, so no coining event and no coiner is recorded here.

What changed on the way out

This one travelled inside South Africa rather than out of it. Ditsele and Hurst's 2016 study of the tsotsitaal of the North West province, several hundred kilometres from the Gauteng townships where the word was first recorded, finds majita current there too and treats it as one of the 'travelling terms' that move between regional tsotsitaals, as against the local innovations that do not. The word left home without leaving the variety.

In use

Recorded means somebody said it and it was written down. Constructed means it was written here to show the shape of the word, and is an illustration rather than evidence.

The evidence

Community voices first, then the sources closest to the community. Press and dictionary citations are evidence about a word’s spread, not its origin.

  1. first usecommunity voice

    Drum, 6 April 1956, printed as the earliest of the DSAE's eleven dated quotations for this word. Drum was the Johannesburg magazine of Black urban life

    “Die witty van die reely-reely majietas”

  2. scholarship

    Tebogo Ditsele and Ellen Hurst, 'Travelling terms and local innovations: The tsotsitaal of the North West province, South Africa', Literator 37(2), a1274 (2016), which records majita as 'guys' or 'friends' and cites Hurst and Mesthrie (2013:9) for a competing etymology

    Tebogo Ditsele and Ellen Hurst

    “Hurst and Mesthrie (2013:9) suggest that it possibly comes from the English word 'jitterbug', which was the name of a style of dance in the 1930s to the 1940s in the United States.”

  3. dictionary

    majita, n., Dictionary of South African English (entry e04471). Filed as Isicamtho, with eleven dated quotations from 1956

    “Isicamtho, probably coined c1951 in the form majika, adaptation of magic from The Magic Garden, a 1951 film”

Something wrong here? Correct it. Corrections from speakers of a variety take precedence over anything recorded here.