Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
You don’t have to be a fluent Afrikaans- speaker to know that an oorleg committee is not the same as an oorlog committee. The former seeks consultation; the latter war.
A Cape Town English-language newspaper, however, got them mixed up recently. Some of us might even say the confusion was understandable. The paper was confronted by the fact that a group of Afrikaans-speaking notables had formed themselves into a committee to advance their language. And, the history of Afrikaner nationalism being what it is, it seemed natural to one or other journalist on the paper to assume this must be an oorlog committee.
It was, however, a consultative committee, set up with peaceful intent to bring together the ideas and outlooks of all those – white, brown and also black – who speak the language and to launch, if you like, some sort of second Afrikaans language movement.
I say “some sort of” because among its participants there is a wariness about recreating anything like the exclusively white cultural, religious and political project that developed after the 1920s around the National Party of JBM Hertzog, DF Malan, JG Strijdom and Hendrik Verwoerd. Those now involved argue that the old approach did not exactly do much for the relationship between a majority of Afrikaans-speakers and the rest of South Africa.
And, if attempted again, they argue, it would almost certainly cause even more acute feelings of alienation than many Afrikaans-speakers already experience. If seen by other South Africans as an attempt to re-invent apartheid, its consequences could be far worse.
The origins of the consultative committee go back to a meeting at Oude Libertas in 1996, according to Herman Giliomee, former professor of politics at the University of Cape Town and one of the committee’s prime movers. A continuation committee appointed at that meeting failed to get its act together, although informal discussion continued among individuals.
Then, early this month, largely at the instigation of Ton Vosloo, chair of Nasionale Pers, a follow-up “consultative committee” convened a meeting. Participants included Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, the former opposition leader; Jakes Gerwel, director general in the president’s office; Neville Alexander, the academic; Antjie Krog, the writer; Hennie de Wet, executive officer of the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereenigings; Carel Boshof the elder, former head of the Broederbond; and his son by the same name, a leading light in the Orania boerestaat.
Some – and they include a few of my Afrikaans-speaking friends – cannot resist the temptation to ridicule the committee. But the danger in doing so is that one fails to see a new spirit is abroad among a significant cross-section of Afrikaans-speaking opinion-formers. This movement may come to involve a fundamental redefinition of what it is to be an Afrikaans-speaker. In the process, it may come to be formative in a (hopefully benign) re-awakening of ethnic cultures across South Africa.
As any committee of intellectuals is prone to do, this one engaged in self- conscious wordplay. Some in its politically diverse membership had difficulty in using words like groepe (groups) or gemeenskappe (communities) to describe the different sets of Afrikaans-speakers they wanted to bring together. These terms were too resonant of apartheid.
Giliomee eventually gave them a way out. He offered the word platform to describe what they were trying to create for Afrikaans-speakers. And the grateful participants then squeezed the metaphor in every which way to extract from it every last drop of meaning: a platform had the advantage of having neither walls nor a roof, you see; and trains could be shunted to and from one; and so on and so forth.
Those present also added to the currency of a new term, Afrikaanse, although it irritates some like Giliomee. It is intended to be a more inclusive term than “Afrikaner” which, because of its historical baggage, has come to imply someone who is not only an Afrikaans- speaker but who is also white, socially conservative, protestant and probably politically aggressive.
The term Afrikaanse tries to take account of the heterogeneity of Afrikaans-speakers: they include different races, different classes, different political outlooks, and they cover the walls of their homes with a range of cultural icons from Michael Jackson and Chester Williams to hunting rifles and photos of ancestors humourless enough to make a hangman jealous.
The movers and shakers on the committee, such as Giliomee and Vosloo, have more than enough money or brainpower, or both, not to be affected by the more extreme feelings of humiliation and dispossession that have affected many Afrikaners since whites lost exclusive political power in 1994. They may, as a consequence, be hard pressed to provide a cultural vision that is credible to less fortunate white Afrikaners.
The poorer 70% of these Afrikaners saw their wealth decline by about a third in the 21 years to 1994, according to Sampie Terreblanche, a Stellenbosch University economist who refuses to be associated with the committee. But, malleable as political memory is, many of these white Afrikaners nonetheless blame this fall, and any subsequent decrease in their economic fortunes, on the African National Congress.
The committee’s greatest contribution may come, ironically, via its willingness to help foster mother-tongue instruction in other smaller South African languages such as, for example, Venda. Giliomee, among others, believes that struggling for the advancement of Afrikaans alone is not an option; all the smaller South African languages must seek to deepen their roots and to grow, and must be helped to do so.
The prospect on offer is that Afrikaans- speakers will come to feel the struggle for their language is one of a number of parallel struggles, rather than one in which they believe they are struggling alone for cultural survival. If so, then the sense of alienation and disempowerment felt by many of the whites among them could ease.
In the process, the temptation to which Afrikanerdom has succumbed in the past – to wage an all-or-nothing struggle and very nearly to lose everything in the process – could become a pattern of the past.