pondok, noun

Forms:
bondhoek, pandokShow more Also bondhoek, pandok, pondhock, pondhok, pondoek, pontok.
Plurals:
pondoks, or (formerly) pondokken.
Origin:
Afrikaans, MalayShow more Afrikaans (also pandok), from Malay pondok hut, shed; school and lodgings for students of religion.
Note:
The word was used in Cape Town, at the beginning of the 19th century, of the reed huts occupied by slaves in the gardens of slave-masters’ properties. The word occurs frequently in the records of the Court of Justice from this period, and moved into South African Dutch and South African English usage. (In modern Malaysia the pondok is a rural, resident, Islamic educational institution, conducted in reed huts.)
A rough shelter, usually a crude hut or shanty made of scraps of wood, cardboard, corrugated iron, etc.; loosely (often jokingly), a small house; pondokkie sense 1.
1815 A. Plumptre tr. of H. Lichtenstein’s Trav. in Sn Afr. (1930) II. 185Near it stand six or eight pandokken, as they are called, a kind of huts made of reeds woven into a wooden frame, which are inhabited by the principal Bastard-Hottentots.
1818 C.I. Latrobe Jrnl of Visit 218The present dwelling..is a hovel, not much better than a Hottentot’s bondhoek.
1832 Graham’s Town Jrnl 6 Apr. 59The State of Cape Town..will suggest a remedy, namely..to prohibit pondhoks being erected on any common or other public land within five miles of the town.
1843 J.C. Chase Cape of G.H. 235The Hottentots..planted themselves at the outskirts of the country villages in small pondhoks, or huts, partly covered with old rags, decayed hides, sugar bags, and occasionally a little thatch.
1852 Trial of Andries Botha 60Was it a house or a pandok? It was a house.
1888 Cape Punch 4 Apr. 203You have liv’d for years here, darling,..In this tidy little pondok...Oft I think of the sasaaties, And the biltong that I ate; In this quaint and curious pondok Years ago when we first met.
1893 J.G. in Cape Illust. Mag. Mar. 252Cookery is an art, and it is not learnt in the pandok.
1920 F.C. Cornell Glamour of Prospecting 112The few miserable Hottentots occasionally to be found there, living in miserable pondhoeks of leaves and branches.
1960 J. Cope Tame Ox 221Must I be a servant in the kitchen, are they going to make me live down in the location in a pondok?
1963 M. Kavanagh We Merry Peasants 152He had a wife and two small children in a temporary pondok of corrugated iron cardboard and flattened out paraffin tins at Nyanga township (temporary section).
1968 A. Fugard Notebks (1983) 169At Veeplaas Boesman got a job at the Zwartkops Salt Works. To begin with rented a small pondok — later built one of their own.
1973 Cape Times 9 June 11Waiting lists of up to four years for City Council houses drive many people, some of them white-collar workers, to live in pondoks.
1987 M. Poland Train to Doringbult 138He glanced at Elsa and said, ‘I thought that I might convert Koen’s old pandok into a holiday cottage but Liz wants to build a new house altogether.’
1990 C. Laffeaty Far Forbidden Plains 88As they approached the farmhouse she saw that it was little more than a pondok built of wattle-and-daub, roofed with zinc.
A rough shelter, usually a crude hut or shanty made of scraps of wood, cardboard, corrugated iron, etc.; loosely (often jokingly), a small house; pondokkie sense 1.
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