A Kenyan friend of mine who is in the country doing academic research told me how impressed she was that we South Africans were so health conscious that the average local person can, off the top of their head, tell you how much they weigh, what their blood pressure is, and how tall they are.

I looked puzzled at that, and she played me some clips from interviews she had conducted during her research.

In one of the clips, the woman interviewed said, "When Mbeki was in charge, I was weighing around 98kg. But in January or February 2008, just a few months after they removed him, I was down to 80kg."

Another woman testified, "It was Malema and his party who got me hospitalised. When they stood up in parliament shouting that Msholozi must pay back the money, and Msholozi's followers in my neighbourhood argued that the president would only pay back the money over their dead bodies. My blood pressure skyrocketed to around 180/120."

A man also explained, "I only came to know how tall I am during a service delivery protest in my area when I was arrested and thrown into a cell overnight where I could not fit lying down at full stretch. The doctor who came to examine me in that cell, measured me and proclaimed that I was 1.8m tall and my cell was not that wide.

"That cell had been designed for Khoikhoi cattle rustlers in days gone past."

I was truly fascinated by these figures, especially that these people only came to know of their weight, blood pressure and height not necessarily because they were health conscious but were forced by political realities to be tested.

Still talking about figures, my friend and I zoned in on a new obsession by some who make proclamations such as "I am 100% Zulu" or "I am 100% Venda", and so forth.

My scholarly friend asked how, in a region that had witnessed numerous wars and huge human migrations, anyone could proclaim to be 100% anything?

How apt an observation. For a start, before King Shaka's ascendancy, the Zulu people were a minor political reality, overshadowed by the likes of the abaThethwa, amaNguni, amaNdwandwe and so forth. As Shaka rose, he used his spear to knit these disparate groups into a single political quilt called amaZulu.

Therefore, the assertion that there is anyone who is 100% Zulu is ahistorical buffoonery.

AmaXhosa are, in fact, a melange of ethnic identities: abaThembu, amaRharhabe, amaMpondomise, amaMfengu and so on.

Not many South Africans realise that Thabo Mbeki's people, amaMfengu, actually originated from KwaZulu-Natal in the mid-1800s.

At the height of Mfecane wars, Mbeki's people, the Dlaminis, trekked from the Newcastle area in KwaZulu-Natal ending up in what was then called Xhosaland.

Asked by the locals where they had come from, the dirty, destitute strangers said, "Simfenguzile" which translates into "we are hungry"or "we are wanderers".

From then on, these Dlaminis got referred to as amaMfengu. They inter-married with the locals, ultimately becoming part of the larger Xhosa group. Therefore, can anyone proclaim: "I am 100% Xhosa!"?