Fight linguistic terrorism
Khoe demand rights on Mother Tongue Day
WHO are we when the words of our ancestors no longer exit our mouths? When we speak the words learnt by our ancestors by force?
How then do we make sense of this world where the words (our weaponry) are the ones of those whose sole purpose was to disrupt and destroy our existence? Who said our ancestors sounded like turkeys clucking?
Language is more than just the collection of signs and words we use. It informs our existence, guides us in a foreign space, helps us understand the world we inhabit, helps us heal when hurt. Language is identity, language is heritage, and language is culture.
So what happens to you as a person, to your group, when those sacred words are taken away? And not just taken away, but by force and sheer brutality.
And this is the case for the millions of people in South Africa who have been categorised as coloured. An identity created by the British, used extensively post 1838 – the emancipation of slavery at the Cape – to put Khoe people and slaves in one politically convenient box.
Erasing our ancestral memories, identities, our history but the worst is erasure of our languages. Because when you erase the first languages of this land, it’s easy to erase the existence of the first people of this land and to erase the atrocities committed against those groups.
How many Capetonians and South Africans know that Cape town is called Hui!Gaeb, which in the Khoekhoe language means “where the cloud gathers”, or that Table mountain is called “Huri Oaxa”, or where the sea rises?
They say that when a language dies, its like a museum that burns to the ground.
It’s important to recognise and advance African languages, but what about the first languages of this land?
How do millions of people stop speaking their languages? Easy. You rob them of their land, their cattle, their economic power, and you force them to work as slaves on their own land, forcing them to speak your language.
You also force them to abandon their own beliefs where the only way you could teach them about your God is by having them understand your language.
This also explains why the Nama Khoekhoe, a group with ancestral connections to South Africa, managed to retain the Nama dialect of the Khoekhoe language.
What about the N|UU language, which is considered the oldest language in the world, with only one fluent speaker, Ouma Katrina Esau?
How do you see the death of your greatest linguistic and cultural asset and do nothing?
How did SA not problematise this coloured identity post-1994, and ask why, in a post-democratic dispensation seemingly determined to rid ourselves of the remnants of colonial and apartheid oppression, people continue to use the racial classifications of those colonial oppressors?
Were there discussions that recognised how deeply problematic it was that Khoe/brown people would call Afrikaans – which is really a simplified German – the Hottentots’ language, the language of the lower classes and promoted to official status after 1874 in Paarl by majority French descendants, who I do believe were really “angry” at the Dutch who “killed” French at the Cape Colony?
The minority Dutch speaking elite were opposed to having Afrikaans elevated to an official government language, which is interesting considering that Afrikaans would later be offered with Dutch as an academic department at South African universities.
Afrikaans itself would be created by our Khoekhoe people, who prior to 1652 owned this land, owned thousands of cattle and were the ones these passer-by ships would trade and converse with until they decided to not pass by any more.
One of my favourite Khoekhoe words is kakapusa, which means forgetting or amnesia, and I believe this characterises South Africans who post1994 decided that a certain group’s history would be more important.
Krotoa, Doman, Genommo, Lang Elsie, Queen Hoho, among the first revolutionaries of this land, would be forgotten.
A tweet from our Minister of Arts and Culture, Nathi Mthethwa, reminded us that we have our own revolutionary leaders and should tell their stories, but how do we tell their stories if not in the languages we spoke?
Last year there was an exciting exhibition called Inte-RESTING Times, curated by Annelize Kotze at the Iziko museum. It raised the question as to what museums such as Iziko should do with its unethically collected human remains collections.
The casket that brought back Sarah Baartman’s remains was also on display. The curator decided that she would display Diana Ferrus’ influential poem, I’ve Come to Take You Home, in the same space as the casket. This time, however, the curator decided to translate it into Afrikaans and the Khoekhoe language. The translating was expertly done by Alwina Monica Dax, a Khoekhoe teacher and translator based in Namibia.
The first time I saw and read that poem in that space I almost cried, because we often forget that not only was Sarah Baartman’s body transported to another place, but she was deprived of her linguistic and cultural heritage.
For four years she could not speak the Khoekhoe language to anyone, she had to make sense of this violent and foreign world in a language that was not hers. For years the only person she could speak the language of her heart and soul to was herself and we can only imagine how this destroyed her. And so to see this poem I’ve Come to
Take You Home also meant that we have brought Sarah’s mother tongue home.
That the museum recognised the loss of Sarah’s language but also that of millions of Khoe in South Africa.
For me it was one of the most beautiful restorative gestures ever.
Language loss is researched at universities in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US, and yet not a single South African university has published an article about the language loss of South Africa’s First People.
It is also universally suggested that language loss leads to increased risk of violence, alcohol and substance abuse and suicides. These are all the things you see in coloured communities like Lavender Hill, Manenberg, Hanover Park, Heideveld and Ocean View – majority Khoekhoe communities.
As we commemorate International Mother Tongue Day, let’s be reminded that as a country, the First People of this land were and are still robbed of our languages, our culture and our identity, but also that this land was and is deprived of an opportunity to connect and pay their respects to the First People of this land.
When you speak your ancestral languages in 2019, recognise that you are linguistically privileged and can do your part in the reclamation and the restoration of the first languages of this land. That you can fight the linguistic terrorism and end the tortured tongues of the millions of Khoe people who continue to be imprisoned by languages that are not ours. Denver Toroxa Breda is a First Nation Khoe language and cultural kuwiri or activist and writer. He is determined to fight for the awareness, officialisation and reclamation of the First languages of this land, still not recognised after 25 years of democracy.