The dangers of weaponising Afrikaans

It must be one of the great tragedies of SA that the adults of today choose to keep alive the divisions and animosities of the past, seemingly bent on passing them on to their children and their children’s children.

The debate, such as it is, about the Basic Education Laws Amendment (Bela) Bill, is a case in point. The bill seeks to introduce a range of changes affecting the running of state schools, including issues such as corporal punishment and government oversight of language and admission policies. But it is the section on language policy that appears to have caused the most agitation.

Leading the charge against that provision has been the DA, which marched in protest to the offices of Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi. Its federal chair, Helen Zille, described the bill as an ANC attempt at “school capture”. Through the changes, the DA claimed, the ANC was “attacking mother-tongue education, especially Afrikaans”.

The bill is now out for public comment. It is noteworthy that the fate of Afrikaans should feature so prominently in the DA’s campaign against the bill. But it is not the first time that the language, now shared by white and millions of other South Africans as a home language, has been weaponised to further political goals.

Before 1994, it featured prominently among the symbols of the apartheid state, culminating in the wrongheaded attempt to force black schools to adopt it as a medium of instruction with the disastrous, yet watershed, events of 1976. It is the DA’s right to speak up in defence of Afrikaans, even though there is nothing in the bill that factually calls for the erasure of Afrikaans from the South African schooling system. It is, as the saying goes, a free country.

Though parties like the DA are promoting the narrative that Afrikaans is being deliberately attacked by the ANC government, there is scant evidence of this. The last time I checked, Gauteng, long run by the selfsame ANC, issues its motor vehicle documentation in both English and Afrikaans. And much of the medication we consume in the country is packaged in Afrikaans and English.

In that and other senses Afrikaans continues its historical privilege as one of the two languages that predominate in important communications. All this is quite apart from the fact that Afrikaans is constitutionally recognised as one of the republic’s official languages, a status that cannot be abolished on the whim of politicians from whichever party.

What we have, therefore, is not a factual proposition, but the imputation of a motive by the DA, presumably because it sees political advantage therein. Yet being loyal to the facts might have been a more useful contribution to the nation’s current engagements on the bill.

More importantly, this manufactured controversy about the fate of Afrikaans has the potential to divert us from the crucial question of what is the best way to actualise the founding vision of creating a new, more inclusive and united nation out of the ruins of apartheid.

The truth is that it would be disingenuous to argue that Afrikaans has not been used in some former Model C schools as an exclusion mechanism to keep out its nonhome-language speakers, most of whom happen to be black. All in the name of upholding white parents’ constitutional right to choose.

Instead of being distracted by the red herring thrown out by Zille and the DA, our focus as a country should be first to affirm and develop black languages, which have historically been discriminated against and are still marginalised today. It must be conceded that since the arrival of colonialism every black person knows that to get even half a chance in life they must have at least a working knowledge of Afrikaans or English, or both.

There has, therefore, been no incentive for white South Africans to learn black languages. What we had, and continue to have, is a one-way street in relations between black and white, where only blacks are obliged to learn a language that is not their mother tongue.

And if we accept that a language is a bearer of the culture of its speakers, we have to agree that the failure to learn black languages by white South Africans has ensured that, even under democracy, we continue to misunderstand each other as compatriots on either side of the racial dividing line.

It goes without saying that the inverse situation would go a long way to enhancing mutual understanding and tolerance across the racial divide.

The adoption of a language in our public institutions is not a neutral act without consequences. It can either divide us or unite us. It is a consideration that those who are marching, purportedly to save Afrikaans, must take on board. Are they fighting to restore Afrikaans to its prior status of dominance, or are they fighting to save a language facing imminent death?

The choices we make today have implications not only for the adults making them, but more so for future generations of South Africans of all races. The question being whether they will inherit a still-divided country where racial misunderstanding and mutual suspicion reign, or one that is more united and better than its predecessor, with inhabitants who share a genuinely common citizenship and solidarity.

To live up to our nation-building vision, would it not be a good start to make it compulsory for every child going through the schooling system to learn not only the dominant Afrikaans and English but a black language too? Instead of kicking one language, Afrikaans, around like a political football?

Already, I can hear naysayers, the eternal pessimists, raising a thousand obstacles to such an undertaking.

And finding easy scapegoats against a history in which the ruling party has not exactly covered itself in glory. They might ask: where will the teachers come from?

How long will it take to train them? And the learning materials? Not insurmountable challenges if there’s the national will, I’d say.