history
Ebrahim Harvey
LEFT FIELD
The recent re-emergence of the white Afrikaner taalstryd movement has generated heated debate in this and other papers. Unfortunately, there are some historical myths about Afrikaans and the “coloured” people it seeks to win over which have been perpetuated and need to be debunked.
Much as language is the lifeblood of culture and nationhood, Afrikaans and its future must be seen from a historical perspective. What Afrikaans is today is the product of a racist history.
The memory of brutal white Afrikaner rule leads black people whose mother tongue is not Afrikaans to still associate it with the horrors of that past, especially since it was used as a tool for the entrenchment of racist rule and its imposition as a medium of instruction acted as a catalyst which ignited the explosions of June 1976.
Language, even if acquired, and irrespective of the historical soil and political context of its development, is the most durable cultural component in people’s lives. After a long time it assumes a logic and momentum of its own, almost detached in a sense from its genesis or history, which can withstand many great storms in the life of a people. And so it is with Afrikaans. While it is being inevitably marginalised it will never disappear, and why should it? It is deeply rooted in our history.
Now for demolishing the myths. Afrikaans, in its current creole and patois forms, is primarily not a white but a black language. Recent research has found that the first Afrikaans text discovered in Cape Town was written in Arabic script. In an article written in 1993 in The Weekly Mail by the current editor of this paper, Phillip van Niekerk, “Wie se Taal?”, the late researcher Achmat Davids, who conducted extensive research into the origins of Afrikaans, confidently concluded: “Afrikaans, the language of the white tribe of Africa, is a black tongue.”
It is a myth that Afrikaans is the language of white Afrikaners and that it belongs to them. So when Chris Louw and others refer to “our language” they are wrong.
Aside from the 80% of “coloured” (a false, racist and divisive identity) people who speak Afrikaans, many other black people, in urban and rural areas, conversationally speak it. But the language was appropriated by white Afrikaners, invested with virulent racism and used as an instrument in the oppression of black people. Hence it is unlikely that Afrikaans can be cleansed of its racist associations by those who invested it with them or benefited from apartheid rule. It is black people, largely the originators of the language and victims of racist rule, who must do so.
Therefore, this movement that seeks greater and special legal protection for Afrikaans is chauvinistic about a language that in the first place does not belong to them. It also carries the inherent risk of perpetuating sectionalism by laying emphasis on “cultural and language minorities” at a time when the country is moving in a unitary direction. This is evident in the aim of this white Afrikaner nationalist and petit bourgeois intellectual elite to mobilise poor white and coloured Afrikaans speakers to give their campaign credibility. If they succeed it would deepen the divide between “coloured” and “African” people and between black people and white Afrikaners.
It is unlikely that poor white Afrikaners, facing much more serious problems, will gravitate towards this movement. They would be better off seeking closer cultural and class links with “coloured” and other black workers and youth on issues of common interest, which would also provide a social basis that could deracialise, preserve, enrich and even expand the language. It is they, much more than the likes of Breyten Breytenbach and Louw, who apartheid scarred most and who today suffer most from affirmative action and face a bleak future.
By implication, another racist and divisive myth being perpetuated is that coloured people, language aside, are genetically closer to white Afrikaners than they are to African people. Because of the demographics at the time of miscegenation before, during and after slavery and segregation, coloured people have largely African roots and are overwhelmingly descendants of the Khoisan, Malay and other slaves and Bantu-speaking peoples. They have been used for too long as pawns in the self- serving schemes of white Afrikaners.
Afrikaans was so interwoven in the state machinery and public sector of the previous regime that it is only inevitable that it will now suffer significant decline. It will not be rehabilitated in the hands of a sectionalist language movement emanating from a marginalised white Afrikaner intellectual elite that has lost its cultural moorings in the political wilderness they now find themselves in.
It may be useful to end with a translated statement Jakes Gerwel made in 1983, in an article, Literatuur en Apartheid. The language question has historically been used as a political instrument for the white Afrikaner constituency and indeed the whole question of language struggle and language sentiment is a white man’s question. While the political situation has fundamentally changed it is still applicable, perhaps more so, because it appears there is not much more than the illusion of “our language” that is left for the taalstryders.