The moment I heard this song, I was excited to look up the lyrics. The music was so evocative and different that I figured there must be some wonderful imagery hidden in the lyrics.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the lyrics anywhere.
Plenty of places to stream the track, but nowhere to find the lyrics so that I could copy-paste them into a translation site and unlock their secret meaning. So I went with the only lyric I had: the song’s title.
Google Translate told me “Ngum Nya Ko” translates into English as “I chewed it.” Which struck me as slightly less poetic than what I was expecting. For a second opinion, I went to DeepL’s translation tool, which deciphered “Ngum Nya Ko” as “I don’t know him.”
What?
Lara Translate, which claims to be “the world’s best translator” told me it might be a fragment of non-Swahili slang. Which…what? “Non-Swahili”? So, like, any language in the world other than Swahili? Way to narrow it down there, Lara.
Quillbot was least helpful of all: it told me that the English translation of “Ngum Nya Ko” was…you’ll never guess… “Ngum Nya Ko.” Well, super.
Finally, after a deeper dive into the band that put this song together, I got my answer. The three members of Toto Bona Lokua come from Cameroon, the Caribbean, and the Congo. Their music draws on a wide range of influences that can only be described with a liberal mixture of place names and hyphens: pan-African, Afro-Caribbean, cross-Atlantic.
To reflect their disparate origins, and global citizenship, their 2018 record “Bondeko” is sung in an invented language; a combination of real words from their respective languages, plus onomatopoeia and vocalizations that they came up with themselves.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. I love the soft finger-picked guitar.
2. I love the peaceful background vocals.
3. I love their invented language, not only because it sent me on a wild goose chase, but because my own daughter is currently going through a phase of inventing her own language. She’s taught me how to count, and she’ll often employ an invisible remote control which she points at me when she wants me to switch into the made-up tongue. It’s called “Tevey” by the way, and I think Toto Bona Lokua would approve.
Recommended listening activity:
DIY-ing a language of your own.