IS AFRIKAANS AN ANTI-COLONIAL VICTORY LANGUAGE OR AN OPPRESSORS LANGUAGE

South African history is being rewritten, given new appendices, and/or is in a continuous state of redefining itself. Unfortunately, The process is muddied by the various historical contributions of the country’s nationals, especially in defining who the victors are in the broad anti-colonial struggle. The contestation for this position has fortunately escaped the wrath of being a political mobilisation rallying point, notwithstanding its appearance in a sideshow discourse often led by the politically naive and uninformed.

Although the Nelson Mandela-sponsored reconciliation path as evidenced in the CODESA negotiations and the 1994 government of national unity arrangements, the often underplayed reason for the maturing political ‘toenadering’ amongst South Africans is that of an unwritten anti-colonial pact between the dominant ‘white tribe of South Africa and the post-1994 political elite. It is not a coincidence that the primary reference point for South Africa’s political history is the National Party and the African National Congress, both of whom were birthed just a year apart to ‘decolonise ’ South Africa.

The ANC’s key rallying point at the time of its formation was, in the main, an anti-colonial agenda that had to be sponsored by the cooperation of all tribes in South Africa. The National Party’s movement was premised on the need to decolonise South Africa and establish a sovereign country, which, in the then terms, was a republic. These political aspirations triggered a two-stream anti-colonial liberation struggle completed on their right and merit at different historical times. In the political history of ‘White Afrikaner South Africans, ’ the 1961 declaration of South Africa as a republic represents a political milestone in the ‘volksbou’ project.

Whilst the post-1961 republic was celebrated as a milestone, the in-lag liberation struggle was intensified with an armed struggle being launched, as well as a form of colonialism being lionised in definition terms. The 1961 anti-colonial breakthrough almost bankrupted the moral high ground of the ANC and PAC-led anti-colonial struggles. The rescue package included a concerted effort by the continuing liberation movement to define Apartheid as a colonialism of a special type (CST), where both the colonised and coloniser share geographical borders. As the anti-CST struggle was pursued, the 1961 anti-colonial victors consolidated the new South African State within an ‘independent context’.

The drive to decolonise South Africa and entrench its sovereignty mindset was critical in the consolidation. The key driver of the decolonisation process was to cement Afrikanerdom-dominated South Africanness through legislation and other means in all aspects of South African life. In pure anti-colonial terms, the assignment was meticulously executed in the sense that by 1971, Afrikaans had grown to become a language of science and commerce. This elevation of Afrikaans created space for mother tongue instruction at all levels of educational experience, and as a consequence, a mindset was established in both ethical and cultural terms. The competitiveness of South Africa on the global stage suddenly had, as a conduit, the Afrikaans language, albeit to the exclusion of ‘non-Afrikaans choosing’ South Africans, particularly Africans, according to today’s definition of black people.

In his memoir, Ngugi declares that the instruction of a nation in a second language creates a nation that is strangers to national culture. In this context, accessing information for science and commercial applications is bound to carry the often not-so-pronounced superiority and inferiority nuances inherent in the transporting language. The first form of culture, and thus all other defeats, is to subjugate language and, by extension, obliterate the traditional orientation of the colonised through literature and art. The Afrikaans ‘assignment’ succeeded in removing itself from this vulnerability; it is, in fact, surprising to note that the central Afrikaner literature celebrates the South African environment and landscape with indigenous passion.

It is in this context that South Africans should have an honest dialogue on whether Afrikaans is an anti-colonial victory language or a language of the oppressor. The inquest should interrogate to what extent the BJ Voster 1976 arrogance damaged society’s potential to embrace Afrikaans as a language of science and commerce. We should also investigate to what extent Anton Rupert’s vision of defining ‘coloureds’ as Afrikaners contributed to the growing influence of the ‘coloured community’ in the science and technology field because they can access such in their ‘default mother tongue’.

The tension around dual-medium schools and universities should be contextualised within this prism. If unchecked, the majority's inability to embrace Afrikaans as a language of science will continue to produce leaders who perpetually believe solutions to this country’s problems lie outside our borders. This is simply because solutions written in Afrikaans are overlooked.