OPINION Afrikaans is alive and well

THE AFRIKAANS language has gained traction in South Africa as the language of exclusion where black students and pupils are denied access to education. It is more known as the language of the oppressor which during the hard-core apartheid years of 1976 led to the uprisings in Soweto.

More recently, in the 2018 court case involving the Overvaal High School governing body and the Gauteng Department of Education (Hoërskool Overvaal v Panyaza Lesufi), the district director in the department refers to the Afrikaans language as, “a tool of segregation and discrimination during apartheid which 90% of South Africans bemoan, a language whose legacy is sorrow and tears to the majority of whom it was not their mother tongue”.

And yet, when we observe the national statistics, we find Afrikaans as the third-largest mother-tongue language in South Africa with Zulu being the largest and Xhosa in second place.

English finds itself in the sixth place of the 11 official South African languages.

When we look at the census statistics of 2011 we see that the Afrikaans language speakers comprise of 50% coloured speakers, 40% white, 9% African and 1% Indian speakers. That means that in 2011, 602 000 African South Africans named Afrikaans as their mother tongue. As to Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor, it is certainly true that Afrikaans has been forced down the throats of the majority of South Africans.

This was part of the apartheid ideology of dominance, which also related to the dominance of their language. However, said Constitutional Court Judge Johan Froneman in his minority judgment in the University of the Free State case: “White Afrikaans speakers are becoming a minority of Afrikaans language users and there is now greater awareness of those Afrikaans speakers whose role in the origin and history of the language has been shamefully marginalised.”

This relates to the influence on Afrikaans by the Khoi people, the slaves, the broader South African society and not only white Afrikaner influences. Although, in the overbearing dominance of the apartheid state this is the space appropriated by the state and its institutions.

No, said Judge Froneman, “it is vital that their (the marginalised Afrikaans speakers) voices be heard about the future of Afrikaans and how that future will affect them”.

Here lies the challenge of Afrikaans, to present its inclusive and transformative face to a broader South Africa.

People speak it, live it and enjoy it. In fact, last year, with approximately 50 000 matriculants sitting for the Afrikaans mother-tongue matriculation examination, approximately 120 000 matriculants wrote Afrikaans as non-mother-tongue speakers. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

• Dr Titus is the executive head: corporate relations at the ATKV. He is also a part-time commissioner at the SA Human Rights Commission

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