Protest for the taal -- but is it really at risk?
Afrikaans groups say their language is under threat, but are they and their heritage really facing a ’crisis’? investigates
SPEAKING at this year’s ANC January 8 celebrations in Cape Town, President Jacob Zuma stated that “all the problems began” when Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape. He was loudly cheered by the ANC faithful.
Then, at the recent Africa Day celebrations in Mamelodi, Zuma deviated from his prepared speech to claim, in Zulu, that “Africans were living in peace and having fun, but then the others — whom I do not want to name — arrived”.
In the interim, on Tuesday May 5, some 1 500 representatives of Afrikaans cultural organisations descended on the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria for a “crisis summit” called by trade union Solidarity.
The “crisis” referred to focused on a feeling among many in the mostly white Afrikaans community that Afrikaans is under siege, and that the ANC government is reducing its speakers to the periphery.
A motion of no confidence was passed in the government and a task team appointed to report back before the end of the year on steps to safeguard Afrikaans and its speakers from the perceived government threat.
The event is viewed as seismic in the Afrikaans community, with debates raging on all media platforms. Yet, as usual, the event, the debate and the alienation it claimed passed almost unreported in the English-language media, as unnoticed by those outside the Afrikaans fold as it is vital to those within it.
But now the government has to take note: the Federation of Governing Bodies of South African Schools has won an in- terim high court order against the Gauteng education department to stop it implementing a system it claims prevents the 124 Afrikaans schools in the province from determining language policy. They would have had to introduce parallel-medium classes in English and Afrikaans which, they claim, would have undermined the right of pupils, guaranteed in the constitution, to be educated in the language of their choice, subject to practicability, equity and redress provisions.
In court papers and afterwards, the education department vehemently denied targeting Afrikaans or the rights of governing bodies, but the court halted the implementation of the new system. In the Afrikaans community, Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi stands accused of duplicity between his words and his actions, to put it kindly. Some say he is a liar, a charge he denies vigorously.
Instead, the department says education and access to education is a right that must coexist with language rights. It says the issue is not about “taking away any language”. Rather, it is about using what the country has and, in this case, schools using what they have to the full advantage of those who qualify to attend that school.
But how deep is the alienation among Afrikaans speakers, how valid is it, and what, if anything, can be done about it?
Solidarity CEO Flip Buys says the alienation runs deep, especially outside the DA-governed Western Cape, where, he claims, the relatively high quality of service delivery and a A FOOT IN THE PAST? Folk dancers at the Voortrekker Monument in December 1949. Cultural organisations say the government is pushing Afrikaans speakers to the periphery provincial government that does not specifically target Afrikaans insulate its citizens from what is happening elsewhere in the country.
Rather than violent service delivery protests, the Afrikaans community is increasingly turning to the courts, says Buys.
“The core of the 1994 agreement — majority rule and minority protection — is being broken by the government.”
Buys believes parallel-medium instruction is but a halfway house down a slippery slope to unilingual English instruction and the eventual loss of Afrikaans’s higher functions — one that, he charges, universities already find themselves on.
ANC supporter Renier Schoeman of the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities says there is little doubt that a number of Afrikaans speakers feel alienated by attempts to diminish the role of Afrikaans in the educational, public and commercial sectors.
“I believe the encouragement of such a positive attitude is the key to promoting a shared national and social cohesion,” Schoeman says. “Afrikaans speakers should be more forthcoming in playing a positive and constructive activist role in what is important to them.”
An Afrikaner in government, Deputy Minister of Co-operative Governance Andries Nel, disagrees with the notion that Afrikaners are disempowered.
“On the contrary,” he says, “this generation of Afrikaners is heir to the accumulated benefits of the past as well as beneficiary of the freedom and democracy of the present. All social indicators — income, wealth, employment, life expectancy and education — put Afrikaners at the apex of our society. Afrikaners continue to play a meaningful role in government, business, culture and civil society.
“We must not confuse the empowerment of others with disempowerment of ourselves, or loss of privilege with discrimination. The best guarantee of our own empowerment and security is the empowerment and security of everyone in our society,” Nel says.
One thread in these divergent views is an almost subconscious tendency to use Afrikaans and Afrikaner interchangeably, although most Afrikaans speakers are coloured. It may almost define the difference between the louder view in the north of the country, which Buys amplifies, and the moderate view prevalent in the south.
Michael le Cordeur, chairman of the Afrikaans Language Council and a lecturer at Stellenbosch University, favours parallel-medium schools where classrooms are available. He does not go so far as to call Solidarity’s initiative a white thing, but between the lines he is adamant: “I fight for language rights and the court is correct: the decision lies with the parents, and the MEC is wrong. What I cannot understand is how parents can morally justify unused classrooms while black children nearby have none. Such parents should take the initiative. Parallel medium costs Afrikaans nothing. But in practice, if not in law, when we go to court, we lose.”
Western Cape finance MEC Ivan Meyer calls for “cultural warmth” on all sides, by which he means the ability to learn from and listen to others as an enriching rather than a threatening experience.
The question, in the end, must surely concern the interplay between language’s role as communication medium and its role as expression of identity within the reality of limited resources. There is the true crisis — an unresolved matter but one being tackled in a country often described as the world’s social laboratory: a work in progress.
The core of the 1994 agreement — majority rule and minority protection — is being broken
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