When I glanced through the June 8 Mail & Guardian, I noticed the article “Selebi se galery kry nog ‘n rakker”. I confess to being surprised, pleased, intrigued and then, as I read, troubled.
Surprised because, yes, in this very English-language publication, it was surprising to find an article written in another South African language (in this case Afrikaans). Initially, I was pleased; I wondered if this signalled a shift towards acknow-ledging that South Africa is a multilingual society.
I was then intrigued that Afrikaans should have been chosen at all. It occurred to me that, with the burgeoning readership of African-language newspapers, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to publish an article, at least initially, in another language — Zulu or Xhosa perhaps? I did not think that Afrikaans was the wrong choice, but it was a puzzling choice since it appeared on its own in the M&G.
It was only after I had read three-quarters of the article that I noticed the ad at the bottom that read: “If you think it’s tough reading your Mail & Guardian in Afrikaans, try writing matric in it.” The ad went on to say: “On June 16 1976, the school students of Soweto rose up against the apartheid government’s policy of compulsory Afrikaans schooling. In next week’s M&G, we remember the youth of 1976 …” and so on.
At that point, ambivalence set in. Certainly, the point made by the newspaper is valid. The imposition of Afrikaans was symbolic of an order that brutally sought to oppress communities, adults and children, literate and illiterate, who were denied access not only to quality education, but also to such education in our languages, underdeveloped, neglected and marginalised as they were in the shadows of English and Afrikaans. So I felt that the point being made, to remember the past, was right.
But I also felt co-opted, wrongly, as a reader. Coerced, in fact. Coercion, it seems to me, is what makes this ad problematic, not because of what the ad says, or the article above it, but because of what is not said. Maybe this was intended; the newspaper sought to provoke an unsettling reaction. Perhaps it was a mistake.
The ambivalence comes not from what is said about our past, but what is said about the present and the future; about English and other languages. If the point of the ad was to suggest that the absence of freedom to choose a language in which to read is wrong, where are the articles in other languages to celebrate the choices we can now make after 1994?
Afrikaans is my second language. I am pleased that I have a second language, and at least it is a language born here that makes me bilingual and gives me some access to communities and people with whom I might not otherwise be able to communicate. What the ad achieves is to target that language and locate itself, the language, and the reader, only in the past. There is nothing to indicate how the freedom attained through June 16 enables us to choose Afrikaans and any indigenous language used by South Africans for print in the M&G. Why should reading in any of these languages (other than English) be tough now? What is the point of a memorial if it speaks only of the past, and so ambivalently about the present? And this brings me to a second point.
The ad acknow-ledges one context (the past) but makes wrong assumptions about another (the present) to which it nevertheless addresses itself (June 16 2007). It is both a cheap shot at multilingualism and a minority language, and in its silence, an arrogant celebration of English — its colonising and hegemonic tendencies somehow forgotten.
In the history books, the struggle against the imposition of Afrikaans in 1976 found partial expression as a struggle for access to English, as it represented for many an education freed from the hatreds enshrined in apartheid language policies, and that the use of English, if secured as a right, would be a means of freeing people from the binaries of superiority, inferiority, black and white, literacy and illiteracy. What the ad neglects to mention is not so much that Afrikaans came to represent all of what was wrong with education, but that English remained the second “official” language as well: hegemonic, inaccessible, powerful. If you think its tough reading your M&G in English, try writing matric in it in 1976, 1986, 1996, 2006, 2016, 2026.
June 16 1976, as far as the language question is concerned, was not only a partial struggle to choose English in the short term, but also a struggle to assert freedom of choice for future generations.
Finally, is it “your” M&G or is it your South African M&G? When it grows up, perhaps it might reflect inclusiveness in the real sense, through a variety of languages, Afrikaans included.
Robert Balfour is professor of language education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal