Ken Owen joined the gathering of Afrikaners in Stellenbosch and found their fears unconvincing
TO Nelson Mandela and Joe Slovo and, yes, to the cadres who ravaged the townships in the Eighties, I give thanks: they have liberated me to use and enjoy Afrikaans, the only language that properly describes the landscape and the life of my Lowveld childhood.
For many years I denied that pleasure, taking as my guide the bitter adage: Die taal van overwaar in die mond van die verowerde is die taal van slawe. At high school, for five interminable years, I fought a lone batte to preserve my English in a hostile post-war Afrikaans environment.
Of course, there was a price to be paid. Some poetic concepts come to me only in Afrikaans, and even today I struggle sometimes to translate my second language into my first. By foregoing Afrikaans, I limited myself and diminished my sensibility.
Now the collapse of Afrikaner hegemony has set me free, and I am euphoric. Never before had I fully savoured the rich endowment in the possession of two languages.
These reflections have a purpose: they explain both why I joined a gathering of Afrikaans intellectuals amid oaks and white walls at Stellenbosch (where else?) to discuss the future of Afrikaans and why I found their fears unconvincing. I care for the language, and I am confident that it will survive.
Indeed, Afrikaans has never seemed to me more secure than since the ruling class of Afrikaners stopped courting the enmity of all mankind. Afrikaans-speakers number six or seven million people and they have a regional power base in the Western Cape comparable to the Zulu base in Natal. The language is both modern and indigenous, and has important lines of support to Northern Europe.
The support base is sound. Speakers of Afrikaans encompass a proletariat of (mainly coloured) urban workers, peasants and country-folk, a powerful intellectual community, and a prosperous (mainly white) middle class. These elements are complementary: if the intellectuals provide the angst, the proletarians and the peasants provide stamina and durability, and the middle classes provide the newspaper readers and theatre audiences. It is a formidable alliance.
The outlook for Afrikaans then is altogether rosy, provided one does not confuse it with the career interests or the status of the dispossessed white elite, but the group at Stellenbosch would not take comfort. Most were familiar figures from the verligte gatherings of the Eighties, who had done much for FW de Klerk’s noble act of capitulation, but now they were caught up in gloom, and the gloom focussed – or pretended to focus – on the language.
Breyten Breytenbach was there, of course, he who lives in Paris and writes in English but still weaves magic in own tongue; so too was Van Zyl Slabbert, and Ton Vosloo of Nasionale Pers, and Hermann Giliomee and Willie Esterhuyse (hero of the epic battle against Koot Vorster for the soul of the church), and Martie Meiring, and Marinus Daling, Afrikanerdom’s economic czar. The belligerently nationalist editor of Rapport, Izak de Villiers, was hilariously paired, in my mind, with that wonderfully reckless poet-turned-journalist Antjie Krog. She marches miles ahead of her people, he marches miles behind.
There were some fresh faces: Jakes Gerwel from the president’s office, and Neville Alexander (the world’s only remaining undoubting communist, perhaps?); and Adam Small, who once tried to give up Afrikaans as a drunkard tries to give up drinking, vainly; and, for intellectual piquancy, a clever Gujarati-speaking Harvard-trained professor from Uganda, Mahmood Mamdani.
Mamdani, who professed afterwards to have been startled to find an audience 95% white male, offered some interesting insights: Arabic had conquered North Africa because the Arabs defined as an Arab anyone who spoke Arabic; one could become an Arab by learning the language.
Afrikaans, on the other hand, failed to capture Southern Africa because it divided Afrikaans-speakers by race, alienating the coloured allies who were assigned a lesser status.
As always, the debate comes back to problems of definition. Slabbert, perceptive as usual, posed the obvious question. Who is the enemy?
Who indeed? Breyten made cleverly cruel jokes about the SABC and the werfbobbejane, the tamed Afrikaners, who work there; Martjie Meiring grumbled that the English in Pretoria were undermining Afrikaans; others spoke disapprovingly of the white English racists flocking now to Stellenbosch to escape black people, and then demanding to be taught in English.
These were mere complaints. As definitions of threat they lacked conviction. Behind them one discerned, ominously, the long Afrikaner history of “survival” politics. White Afrikaners are above all the children of an open frontier, perpetually insecure. Among the earliest political documents discovered by Hermann Giliomee and Andre du Toit was a petition from the frontier boers beseeching Holland for help to save their children who, without prospects of work, were drifting into the Khoi communities, and becoming absorbed into heathen Africa.
That, really, has always been the temptation and the threat – to slip across the frontier – Van Riebeeck’s hedge, Lord Graham’s line of forts, the mad distinctions of race classification boards – and to become truly African. To vanish in a greater whole. To be no longer separated, no longer sustained by an umbilical cord to Europe. That fear, unspoken, was detected by Neville Alexander, who warned against the formation of new laagers, but gently.
He was trying, it seemed to me, to avoid being wounding but, even so, the schism in the soul and the heart, the flaw which has divided Afrikaans church and state and town and family, lay exposed: the old verligte elite is ready to build in helping to build a new South Africa, but not to be subsumed in it.
For those, like Beyers Naude or Derek Hanekom, who have stepped across the chasm, life is easier. One defends one’s language by using it, by writing, by teaching, by singing, by offering it in the service of South Africa. Some things English does well, other things Afrikaans does better; and, I am sure, for some purposes Zulu is essential. We are a polyglot of people and we must learn to use our richness of languages.
I find the prospect enchanting but for those who, in the deep recesses of their minds, are still defending frontiers to keep Africa at bay, the future must inevitably seem heavy with gloom. Raka has breached the gates of the citadel and will live among us, as NP van Wyk Louw foretold, forever.