COLOURING IN AFRIKAAPS GAPS
Gees flows with torrent of words for new dictionary
Q uintin “Jitsvinger” Goliath wrote his first rap in Afrikaaps on a typewriter at high school in 1996.
Words like jits (cool), dala (do it), ghuftie (huge) and poenas (cute) captured the language distinctive of the working class on the Cape Flats.
In 2021 words expressed by this popular hip-hop artist and poet are among those being collated for the first Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps.
The dictionary is about more than Kaaps vocabulary. It is the latest step in the “Afrikaaps” movement to free the language from the strictures imposed on it by suiwer (pure) Afrikaans and to celebrate the culture and history of Kaaps, which is spoken from Cape Town to Namaqualand.
Support for the dictionary has exceeded expectations, says professor Quentin Williams, director of the Centre for Multilingualism & Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). “When we invited submissions, our phones lit up like a Christmas tree.”
Day one of the trilingual dictionary project was July 28. By Friday, the team had about 150,000 words for possible inclusion.
“We started by compiling words from texts written in the language and idiomatic expressions used by authors, and moved on to words from performers, poets, pastors and other sources. They are diverse and quite different to those of the Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal,” says Williams.
The UWC centre and the NGO Heal the Hood are driving the project with support from the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Film & Media Studies. UCT centre director, professor Adam Haupt, says that excitement about the dictionary spread like wildfire.
Heal the Hood co-ordinator Shaquile Southgate says the first formalised dictionary of Kaaps “will instil pride in the language”, one of the first features of identity. The NGO focuses on youth development on the Cape Flats through the hiphop culture.
“Children do not feel comfortable speaking their home language of Kaaps at school, but also not speaking formal Afrikaans or English has disenfranchised them,” he says. “Recognising the Kaaps language will be empowering for them.”
Afrikaaps sounds different to what is traditionally associated with “Pretoria Afrikaans”, according to Kaaps rapper, actor and activist Simon “HemelBesem” Booi.
The “icons of success”, the sports and arts celebrities portrayed in the media, are expected to sound like this suiwer, or pure, version, he said in a TEDx talk at Stellenbosch University.
“This is a problem for us, this is the suiwer thing, how we should sound.”
When we invited submissions, our phones lit up like a Christmas tree Quentin Williams, above Professor compiling the first Trilingual
Dictionary of Kaaps
The portrayal of Kaaps is the opposite of this beautiful, suiwer sound, being “rough, onsuiwer” and derogatory”, says HemelBesem. “If those are the only two examples of Afrikaans for our kids, that tell us suiwer Afrikaans is what success sounds like, then we have a big problem in South Africa.
“Most people who speak Afrikaans are people from my demographic.”
If a student arrives at university with Afrikaans sounding different to the Pretoria version, they will get told one of two things, he says.
“They will say: ‘My bru, you’re a skollie. Don’t talk that skollie language, that gangster language.’ That’s the one.
“Secondly, it will be: ‘Jy’s van die plaas af, you’re from the farm. Don’t speak like that.’ “These are the two things that take away the confidence of our kids.”
The denigration of Kaaps to elevate suiwer or pure Afrikaans was masterminded by the architects of apartheid who, in the ’50s, broke up mixed-language and diverse communities like District Six in Cape Town while banishing the vernacular from classrooms.
Even today, Kaaps-speaking children at school are taught in English or textbook Afrikaans, which sound foreign to them, says Williams.
In 1976 the imposition of teaching in Afrikaans sparked the uprising in Soweto and, ironically, 45 years on, language barriers still stifle learning in Cape Flats schools.
Williams says they want the school curriculum to open up for learning in Kaaps.
This would include cognitive subjects like maths, and to offer content for students and pupils in their mother tongue.
Universities should allow students to do postgraduate degrees and write their theses in Kaaps, says Haupt, who has written two academic books and co-edited another related to post-apartheid counterculture and hip-hop, in collaboration with hip-hop artists.
“The idea of the dictionary is to be a resource for speakers, for educators and for policymakers, for them to understand and respect Kaaps and not to dismiss it as slang,” he says.
Formalising the language will help to debunk the stereotypes perpetrated for decades against “Afrikaans speakers who are not white”, such as Kaaps being a gangster dialect, says Williams.
Children on the Cape Flats are born into three languages, Kaaps, English and Sabela (the language of the number gangs), he notes.
With the steady rise of Kaaps and publications in the