Afrikaans is ‘more African’ than English
Is Afrikaans a threat to South African values of non-racialism, human dignity, the achievement of equality and advancement of human rights and freedoms?
Is Afrikaans as a language under threat?
My answer to these questions is a resounding no!
South Africans have a lovehate relationship with the Afrikaans as a language; some see it as an “oppressor’s language”, while others like myself see it as part of our heritage. On the other hand, English is seen as superior, in fact some associate speaking English “well” with intelligence.
On a cultural level, the post-1994 government has dismally failed to promote indigenous languages, let alone promoting multilingualism.
The battle, it seems, has been between English and Afrikaans and against the rest.
The apartheid government used language to divide and oppress, it was part of the National Party’s grand plan of “separate development”; they exploited a language for sinister political ends.
Today, the democratic government is using English as a tool for racial integration, is it working?
No, because in the process it undermines indigenous languages.
Language is a form of identity, it’s more than just a business transaction, which is what English has become, albeit to the detriment of indigenous languages.
The conversation therefore should not be along the lines of us choosing between English or Afrikaans, rather about promoting multilingualism. After all, South Africa has 11 official languages.
There have been various reactions on social media about the planned Afrikaans teaching university by union Solidarity.
Even the firebrand Gauteng MEC for education, Panyaza Lesufi, got into the discussion objecting to such a move.
Let me make it clear that I am against any form of discrimination, so if Solidarity plans to use this new university to advance ethnic chauvinism and perpetuate a racist agenda, then by all means let’s be against it.
However, I am not in the business of pre-empting things.
What’s interesting to me though, is why are we quick to object to an Afrikaans teaching university when we are dominated by English teaching universities?
And we don’t find that strange, in an African country nogal?
I remarked to my colleagues the other day that I was taught in English, from primary school to high school every subject was in English except for isiXhosa, this despite being in a public school with dominantly isiXhosa pupils.
So the government, which MEC Lesufi is part of, should be ashamed that 25 years later, it has done almost nothing in letting our indigenous languages play a key role in our education system, in the judiciary and other key sectors of the state.
Equally one agrees with Lesufi on the Orania question, it should have never been allowed. The existence of that “small dorpie” as an Afrikaans-only settlement collapses the whole democratic experiment.
Speaking in parliament during a debate on President Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address on August 22 last year on whether Die Stem should be excluded from our national anthem, EFF leader Julius Malema said “we are not talking about Afrikaans as a language, we are talking about Die Stem … an apartheid song that was sang when saluting that apartheid flag which the court said it’s hate speech”.
Obviously one has to agree with the EFF that anything that symbolises our problematic past should not receive such a high-placed status in a democratic SA.
It might owe its roots to the Dutch, but I put it to you that Afrikaans is more African than English.
Those of us who grew up in the townships will tell you that it’s even a lingua franca of the clever boys (tsotsis) in the hood.
So no, Afrikaans is not under threat, it’s embraced by “South Afrikaans” across the board, and spoken by over sixmillion people as their first language, the majority of whom are not of Dutch ancestry.
We have failed though, as a people, to use indigenous languages for integration.
Twenty-six years later, many white South Africans still find it difficult to pronounce my name, which is one of the simplest names in the isiXhosa language; instead, white South Africans expect me to be fluent in English for their own convenience.
Therein lies our problem, and it’s where we are missing a very crucial point in this conversation, of how we can use our languages, especially indigenous languages, to bridge the gap between white and black.
To think about it, I should have written this piece in isiXhosa to stress the point. I need to decolonise myself also. Wandisile Afrika Sebezo (writer
and blogger at Plett Tourism)