Former South African president FW de Klerk said on Friday that Afrikaans, the mother tongue of his white minority group, is under threat after regional police accused authorities of banning the language.
A group of Afrikaans-speaking police officers complained to De Klerk’s Centre for Constitutional Rights that officials in the Western Cape had declared English the only means of communication.
De Klerk was South Africa’s last white president and won a Nobel Peace prize for his role in fostering racial unity and securing its smooth transition from apartheid to the first all-race poll in 1994.
He has often been at loggerheads with the black-led government and has accused the ruling African National Congress of marginalising whites with policies meant to empower blacks.
He suggested Afrikaans was another such issue.
”Language rights are not a right-wing issue. They are important to South Africans from across the political spectrum … [and] we shall resist political pressure from any quarter,” he said in an e-mailed response to questions from Reuters.
Western Cape police have said their aim was to improve communication between the province’s different language groups by encouraging the use of English.
But de Klerk said the issue went deeper, although he backed off earlier threats by his group to challenge the language ruling in court.
”Clearly, the status of Afrikaans as a language of government in the Western Cape SAPS [South African Police Service] is at threat, in contravention of section 6 of the Constitution,” De Klerk said in an e-mail from Taipei, where he was attending a conference.
”Afrikaans is also under threat in other areas of public life, including certain aspects of education.”
Afrikaans — a modern version of the Dutch spoken by settlers that arrived in South Africa from the 17th century — was the dominant language under decades of white minority rule.
But in post-apartheid South Africa it is only one of 11 official languages, and critics say it is threatened by the scrapping of Afrikaans-only universities. — Reuters