The words we use may well break our bones
We can give SA credit for successes or wallow in negativity, writes Gillian Godsell
THINK there are three things that we South Africans do to ourselves that deprive us of hope: we overestimate what other people are getting right, we underestimate what we are getting right and we forget where we have come from.
If we occasionally look back at where we have come from, we will have a better sense of the progress we have made, for example, in education.
In 1968, Muriel Horrell of the Institute of Race Relations calculated that for every 100 000 of the white population there were 886 matriculants. For every 100 000 of the black population there were 13 in matric.
This cohort, according to which so very few got matric or even went to high school, is still in the workforce today. Some are teachers in black schools — teachers without a matric, teachers with very little English trying to teach pupils who also have very little English to write exams in English. And these are exams set according to a demanding curriculum that requires critical thinking and a high standard of analytical writing.
We need to measure distance travelled — and also use the right measures — if we really want to understand what is happening in South Africa.
Stellenbosch economics Professor Servaas van der Berg changed the usual measures when he wanted to get a better insight into National Student Financial Aid Scheme students ’ performance. Common wisdom holds that students on aid scheme bursaries do not do well. Van der Berg and his colleagues carried out a longitudinal study over nine years.
IThe results, reported in Focus, the journal of the Helen Suzman Foundation, showed that, measured over a longer time period, the aid scheme students persevered longer and had a slightly higher graduation rate than students who had not received state funding.
These are the students with the least resources in the higher education system in terms of finance, which is why they got the bursary, but also in terms of books in the home, computer access and language confidence. Many of them are first-generation students — first in their family to attend university.
The Van der Berg figures are cause for celebration. They do not just tell us that students from difficult backgrounds are in our universities and passing. They hold out a hope for the future: for leaders with a different life experience who will perhaps be different kinds of judges, actuaries, doctors, CEOs or teachers. They embody a hope for a more inclusive kind of excellence.
I see this inclusive excellence as a characteristic of the way South Africans do things. There is a powerful example in the Square Kilometre Array project. This project is cutting-edge science, taking the whole world into the future.
The South African part of the SKA is wonderfully inclusive. There are eight other African countries involved as partners: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.
This inclusive excellence is local, too. The closest town to the SKA project is Carnarvon. In the early days, the standards at Carnarvon High School were not wonderful and this mattered to the international astronomers and engineers and physicists involved in the SKA. They wanted the pupils to be part of this exciting story. So they found a good maths and science teacher for Carnarvon High because, if the youngsters had good maths and science, they could be trained as the technicians who would maintain and repair the big telescopes. And maybe one day one of them would be an astrophysicist.
Some years ago I interviewed Bernie Fanaroff, the South African director of the SKA. I asked him what gave us the edge in what then looked like a contest with the Australians that we could not win. He explained that no blueprints existed for such big telescopes. Scientists and engineers have to design them and build them.
South African engineers know how to work without a blueprint. But more than that, they enjoy it. They actually prefer not having a blueprint — crafting a solution out of thin air. Making a plan, solving a problem met bloudraad en ’ n tang (with a piece of wire and a pair of pliers) is in our DNA. What a wonderful DNA to have going into the 21st century with all of its unknowns.
Why is it so hard for us to believe this kind of good news about ourselves? Why do we find it so difficult to be positive, to have hope for our future? I think the answer has to do with language.
Hope is a language. It is our choice whether or not we use it. But it is not a take-it-or-leave-it choice. If we choose not to use the language of hope, we choose, even if it is unconsciously, to use some other language. We may choose the language of affront, outrage, even
’ despair. Powerful stuff, that. Extremely addictive. We may choose the disengaged language of “whatever ”, “I don’t care”, “just don’t involve me” — or retreat into language that is clever, mocking, cynical. The language we choose to live in, to tell our story in, shapes a lot of things.
There is no one who understands the power of language better than Deborah Tannen, an academic and linguist. In her book The Argument Culture, she pleads with UK and US leaders to use words differently, to back away from the divisive, vitriolic language she believes is destroying the social fabric in the Englishspeaking part of the Western world. Her book was written in 1998. The paralysing political polarisation in the US is more or less what she predicted 15 years ago.
Polarising language offers only two sides to any story. It narrows reality and distorts truth. We South Africans do not need to be trapped in toxic language. We can choose the language of inclusion, the language of hope. We can choose the markers we want to measure our progress by. We can even choose not to put our country in the dock any more. When South Africa is not The Accused and we are not spending our time and energy collecting evidence for the prosecution, there is time and space to see complexity and change. We do not have to see nuance and forward movement instead of seeing the pain and violence and anger. We can see them together. They are part of the same pattern.
If we can get beyond the narrowing language and the distorting measures, perhaps we will be able to see that we are just another developing country getting some things right and some wrong. And then we can turn our Lent question around. Instead of asking why we would have hope in South Africa, we could ask: “Why wouldn’t we?”
This is an edited version of a talk given at St Paul Anglican Church, Parkhurst, Johannesburg, as part of a Lent series on “Hope in South Africa”. The full talk is available on Whammedia.co.za/toxic-language-sadna-and-hope. Godsell teaches at the Wits Graduate School of Public and Development Management and hosts a weekly programme, Jozi Today, on community radio station Radio Today