Word power: Afrikaans and Afrikaners

Most commonly-held notions about this southern African language are simply wrong.

Ironically, those notions are the fruit of prejudice.

Many who sneer at the language do so because they believe Afrikaans is somehow “tainted” –  a “white” tongue, still stubbornly clung to by a “racist” minority.

In fact, in South Africa today, the majority of “first language” speakers of Afrikaans are not white people, not Afrikaners.

(and Afrikaners are themselves rather more diverse – attitudinally and otherwise – than is generally recognised)

Before you read any more, I suggest you listen to words spoken in Namibia last year by Breyten Breytenbach.

 

 

(for around 10% of Namibians, Afrikaans is their “first” language. For many more, it functions as a Lingua Franca. As I know from personal experience, it is no rare thing to hear two black Namibian citizens speaking to each other in Afrikaans)

Breytenbach is an Afrikaner.

When I was a teenage exchange student in South Africa in 1971 he was already Afrikaans’ de facto poet laureate; at the time his poems were (still, somewhat surprisingly) on the syllabus at the school I attended.

I say “still, somewhat surprisingly”, because by that time he was an uncompromising opponent of apartheid, living in exile in France.

Even had the Apartheid regime been willing to “overlook” the “wrong” views of the man previously hailed as the greatest poet in “their” language’s history, Breytenbach would have been unable to live in South Africa, “legally”.

His wife Yolanda was not white, so he and she were in breach of the regime’s Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, and of its so-called Immorality Act.

The poet, essayist, artist and activist visited his own country clandestinely in 1975.

As an alleged “terrorist”,  Breytenbach was imprisoned for more than seven years.

And, yes, you did hear Breytenbach say, correctly, that the first known printed  publications in Afrikaans were in Arabic script, for use in Cape Town’s mosques and madrassas!

Afrikaans is a deal older than Afrikanerdom.

Afrikaans began as a means of communication between people of various races/ethnicities/nationalities/cultures.

It did not begin as one particular subset’s tongue.

I say “tongue”, advisedly; Afrikaans was for a while an oral language, only.

Yes, there later were Afrikaners who sought to conflate Afrikanerdom and Afrikaans…even Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom and apartheid.

But the language was never in fact exclusively “theirs”.

In 2018 only around 40% of South Africans who speak Afrikaans as their first language are Afrikaners.

For around 7 million South Africans Afrikaans is their first language; millions more speak it as their second or third tongue.

In South Africa, Afrikaans is first language for more citizens than is English.

In “first language speakers” it is number 3 among South Africa’s 11 official languages; geographically and racially speaking its total reach in South Africa probably still exceeds English.

By definition, any language’s future is unknowable.

That said, the key to Afrikaans’ future probably has rather more to do with its currently-larger number of Coloured “first language” speakers than with its currently-smaller number of Afrikaners.

 

 

To see Afrikaans as tainted or as forever-abhorrent is as wrongheaded, unfair and plain daft as it would be to dismiss German as “Nazism’s language”, or to damn English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, etc because of the  “Colonial” atrocities so many times committed by their speakers.

Among those who died fighting Nazism were not a few who spoke, wrote and dreamt in German.

Some of apartheid’s most effective opponents – and some of its victims – spoke, wrote and dreamt in Afrikaans.

Click here for a very interesting and substantial article/ overview from South African History Online.  

It justifies its “unlikely” headline – Afrikaans: the Language of Black and Coloured Dissent – and It considers several centuries of history.