Sometimes a tweet can be injudicious, like that moment in a bar when you inadvertently look up and catch the eye of some drunken jock berating his girlfriend. You’re now a witness to a public faux pas, or even worse, an agent in someone’s realisation that what he unconsciously assumes is normal behaviour is, in fact, grossly anti-social. Get ready to dodge a punch.
This happened to me on Twitter, that crowded bar of the ADD, or attention deficit drunkards, during the State of the Nation speech by @jacobzuma (Mr President to you non-Tweeters). Struck by the hostility shown towards Zuma’s speech-delivery skills, I tweeted (and this is a de-twittified version of the actual 140 characters), “Amazing how critical English-speaking South Africans are of a man kind enough to give a State of the Nation Address in English, which is not his first language.”
Sheesh. I’ve had occasion to note, in previous columns, how rude and unmannered South Africans are becoming. But when you’re getting responses that vary from the downright racist to the depressingly classist, you can’t help thinking, man, we’ve got a long way to go. And we don’t even know where we’re going.
I’m reminded of Speak English or Die, that classic love song by American balladeers Stormtroopers of Death. It goes a little something like this:
“You always make us wait/ You’re the ones we hate/ You can’t communicate/ Speak English or die. You don’t know what I want/ You don’t know what I need/ Why must I repeat myself/ Can’t you fuckin’ read?/ Nice fuckin’ accents/ Why can’t you speak like me?”
Some of the examples were, frankly, as insane as those lyrics. Tweep @Yaaseen83 screeched in upper case, “ER…. THE NATIONS [sic] 1ST LANGUAGE THANKS!!! THAT WASN’T A PRIVILEGE TO THE NATION, MORE LIKE A RIGHT.” Well, no. We don’t have a first language, and in fact, I think the right enshrined in the constitution is to be able to address Parliament in the official language of your choice. English is only the first language for around 8% of our people.
Another person, who I think has now deleted the tweet, as it’s disappeared off my timeline, told me to compare Zuma’s performance with the great job Pik and PW Botha did as second-language speakers. Not only is this selective memory — PW was certainly no great orator in English — it’s also amazingly offensive to compare a man who spent the first (and the productive, some might say) part of his life fighting apartheid, with the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of rotund racist claptrap.
A tweet from @sznq read: “Cut him slack? Mandela, Mbeki & the deputy president did it better. It’s his job! His speaking is appalling.” Of course, Mbeki has a Masters degree from the University of Sussex. And the “deputy president” has, at least, a matric pass. Mandela attended Fort Hare University and Wits, and has a degree from Unisa. Jacob Zuma had no formal schooling at all, so this is hardly a fair comparison.
A fellow editor tweeted that “[English] is also my 2nd language. It’s no bloody excuse. Zuma’s biggest problem was the way the speech was written.” My response to that was, “You went to Stellenbosch Uni and Grey College, Zuma went to jail. Slight difference.”
The irony, of course, is that many of the people making fun of Zuma’s English were Afrikaners, or “Dutchmen” as the English-speaking South Africans making fun of their accents in the 80s used to call them. As @steynsays_music tweeted, “They do the same to Afrikaans people trying to speak English also.” You’d think that this segment of our population would be a little more sensitive to second-language speakers.
And it’s a little rich when English-speaking Sarf-Efrikans fresh off the ridicule bus from London are making fun of someone’s ability to speak lekker English. I couldn’t help but be reminded of an Antjie Krog essay I read, which was about the Julius Malema “Bloody Agent” blow out. Unfortunately, I can’t find the essay online, so I’ll have to paraphrase, with apologies.
If I remember rightly, Krog was arguing that Malema’s outburst at a BBC reporter during a press conference was prompted by frustration at being bamboozled by a native English speaker, and by an inability to effectively express himself in a second language. I’ve probably got that wrong, so if anyone has the essay, please correct me. But it strikes a chord.
[I’ve just found the full Krog article, courtesy of @DieGiel on Twitter, and it’s way more nuanced than my crude summary. Here’s an extract:
“I bet it was not so much what the British journalist had to say as that it was said in a particularly confident, smooth-flowing English accent which sent Malema into his rage. The obscenities and sexual belittling step out of the works of Fanon and Mbembe, but one has to ask: What would he have said if he was allowed to speak his mother tongue? Firstly, the journalist would have had to wait for a translation before he could fire his question.”]
If we’re going to focus on a person’s ability to speak good English, and in this particular case, to be a good orator, we’re playing the man, not the many political balls he’s fumblingly trying to juggle. There are so many reasons to criticise Jacob Zuma. Picking one that is about driving home a privileged idea of class and language is to just make it more difficult to judge using reason, and to convince using argument.
- You can read Chris’s column every Tuesday here, and follow him on Twitter here.