University misled the public

SOUTH Africa’s top historian, Hermann Giliomee, investigates the manner in which, in South Africa, the Afrikaner group is unique and exceptional in comparative world terms. Small nations’ survival as a group is constantly in turmoil, and therefore they are different from the bigger nations that can fall back on centuries of history and the promise of an uninterrupted future. In this follow-up to The Rise and Demise of the Afrikaners, Giliomee sets his insightful eye on what is specific to the Afrikaners and their history. The NG Kerk’s influence on apartheid, the extraordinary role that Afrikaaner women played, the public service, and the demand over corruption under apartheid come under the lens. The last chapter looks at the ‘broken heart’ of the Afrikaner community.

Here is an extract from Maverick Africans.

Switching to English

IF one surveys the fate of Afrikaans between 1998 and 2018 as a medium of instruction at tertiary level, one is struck by how little prepared the two largest Afrikaans-medium universities were with respect to preserving Afrikaans. Van Wyk Louw warned that the very existence of Afrikaner people was imperilled if a thousand people in strategic positions gave up on being Afrikaners and on preserving Afrikaans as a medium of instruction.

In the early 1990s the Suid-afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns submitted a memorandum to Dr Gerrit Viljoen, the NP’S chief constitutional negotiator, on the measures required to preserve Afrikaans at university level. But Dr Viljoen had to retire for health reasons and his successor, Roelf Meyer, in response to an inquiry from the Akademie, replied that he knew nothing about such a document.

From 1998 the University of Pretoria introduced parallel-medium instruction without any undue pressure from government. The steady decline of Afrikaans at the university until its abolition as a medium of instruction 18 years later was fairly predictable.

Stellenbosch University turned itself into an English-medium university in 2017. The role of the ANC government in the anglicisation of Stellenbosch University was only marginal.

It did exert pressure but not of the kind that would cow any university council or management with a backbone. The truth is that the university for a variety of reasons willingly embraced the English language as the main medium of instruction, while at the same time relegating Afrikaans to an inferior position.

As I explain in my book The Rise and Demise of the Afrikaners (2019), the process started in the late 1980s. The trigger was the introduction of the ranking system that graded universities and lecturers predominantly in terms of their research output. Stellenbosch University was found to be far behind the University of Cape Town and Witwatersrand University and well below the University of the Orange Free State in this respect.

Firstly, the university appointed English-speakers with a good research record and put no real pressure on them to become sufficiently proficient in Afrikaans to be able to teach in it.

Secondly, the administration offered no incentives to staff to publish in Afrikaans. The proportion of Stellenbosch University staff publishing scientific articles in Afrikaans was the lowest of all Afrikaans-medium universities. In 2018 I attended a conference at Leuven University, Belgium, which is ranked among the top 50 universities in the world. Lecturers here were expected to become proficient in Dutch in order to teach in it. The organiser of the conference, who is a law professor at Leuven, stressed how important it is that universities provide special incentives for the staff to publish at least some of their scientific contributions in the national language.

Thirdly, there was at Stellenbosch no incentive for English-speaking students to become proficient enough to follow lectures in Afrikaans. The so-called T-option (using both Afrikaans and English as medium in the same lecture) was widely employed. Dr Van Zyl Slabbert, an alumnus who earlier had taught at Stellenbosch University, appropriately described this method as “a pedagogic absurdity”.

While black students were flocking to the former liberal universities, many

English-speaking students fled to Stellenbosch after being assured that they would be under no compulsion to become proficient in Afrikaans. They could simply wait for the lecturer to repeat in English what had been said in Afrikaans.

After studying the Stellenbosch language policy, Jean Laponce, a French-canadian authority on language displacement, predicted that “Afrikaans would survive at Stellenbosch but only as a decoration”.

Fourthly, Stellenbosch University ignored studies that found Afrikaans-speaking students preferred Afrikaans-medium instruction. In 2007 the council authorised me to investigate student preferences by way of a poll conducted by a professional company and supervised by professional people. It was found that more than 80% of Afrikaans students preferred the option of predominantly Afrikaans-medium instruction, while more than 40% of English language students said the same.

Instead of taking the poll seriously, the university greatly increased the intake of English-language students, both white and coloured. From 2008 to 2017 the number of white English-speakers grew by more than a quarter, while that of coloured English-speakers more than doubled. White Afrikaans-speakers declined by 10% and the number of coloured Afrikaans-speakers only slightly improved. The numbers of African students who spoke either English at home or one of the nine official Bantu languages rose from 830 to over 2 300.

Overall the university increased its intake of undergraduates between 2003 and 2017 by nearly half from 13 875 to 19 880. During this period the number of white English-speaking students increased from 2 384 to 5 458 and that of coloured English-speakers from 512 to 2 588. White Afrikaans-speakers dropped in this period from 8 210 to 6 926, while coloured Afrikaans students increased from 1 329 in 2004 to 1 433 in 2017.

The participation of coloured Afrikaans-speaking students in tertiary education and in successfully completing their university studies is the lowest among all communities in the country.

That Stellenbosch University is doing almost nothing about this constitutes the real betrayal that is being perpetrated by the Stellenbosch authorities and academics.

By 2017 most of the undergraduates were English-speaking. It was widely claimed that Afrikaans students indicated their preferred language of instruction as English in the hope of improving their chances of being admitted. It is still unclear why Stellenbosch University increased its total intake of undergraduates so dramatically between 2008 and 2017. An ex-vice-chancellor, who is considered an authority on the subject, expressed the view that as far as the state’s subsidy formula goes, the optimum undergraduate number for Stellenbosch University is 10 000.

At Stellenbosch University the number of teaching staff who could not lecture in Afrikaans steadily increased. In 2016 the university was forced to admit in the Western Cape High Court that despite presenting itself as a bilingual university, a fifth of its lecturers were unable to teach in Afrikaans and that in the case of 268 modules the university violated its own language policy as specified in the University Yearbook.

Between 2002 and 2016 office-bearers at Stellenbosch University continued to assure the public that Afrikaans was safe at Stellenbosch. Having followed the process closely and having served as a council member for four years, I was prepared to testify in the 2016 court case that nowhere had I seen a university so blatantly misleading the public about a vital service it was offering as Stellenbosch University did with respect to its language policy.

Maverick Africans is published by Tafelberg, an imprint of NB Publishers. It retails at R350.