Thinking about June 16. Nasi iSpani!!

At the pinnacle of having successfully transformed South African society to conform to Apartheid, the BJ Voster-led National Party government sought to start the cultural assimilation of 'its subjects' through the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. In pursuit of establishing a racial hierarchy which would have permeated society by concentrating economic and political power in the hands of a racial-cultural oligarchy with Afrikaners at its helm, the introduction of Afrikaans would have made South Africa's brand of colonialism a complete hegemonic endeavour. Artificial as this pursuit of Apartheid-inspired acculturation of South Africa, its institutionalisation through law made its enforcement as a legal program of the state more algorithmic and pathological can attract rebuttal by jurisprudence which undergird it. 

Whilst Apartheid as a political order enjoyed the support of its significant taxpayers and monopoly capital, its social order dimension grew into a liability on its soft balance sheet. Collusion with its injustices through cheap labour-based growth rates some companies reported on the stock exchange, propelling its social engineering objectives by creating artificial in-private sector racial hierarchies to conform to the apartheid ideology, the private sector has already made Afrikaans the language of the master in entities that needed the state to survive as businesses. 

 

In its imagination of socially controlling all South Africans, education and controlling access to skills emancipatory to humans were subjected to robust regulation. All black education was state-controlled, save for costly 'liberal' zones of private education still in the hands of 'non-compliant', yet colluding, mission schools. The syllabi of education became the softest frontier of the cultural subjugation war whose implications were calculated to have a posterity impact only a similar recalibration could reverse. Not only was racism a towering expression of state power over differently recognised race groups, but whiteness became the social representation of what Apartheid sought to achieve over Blackness. 

 

The normative justification of Apartheid through its artificial accountability ecosystem that included a Parliament and a rule-by-law justice system created a world in which those invisible to the reigning legal system were seen as a caste not deserving the attention of those visible to the legal system. Introducing Afrikaans as the dominant language of power, commerce, and industry would have made Apartheid epistemic or epistemologically legitimate over time. 

 

The aesthetic objectives of creating non-white or non-Black zones of excellence driven by a state budget-driven program created a spatial normality of poverty, inequality, and unemployment being perpetually seen in race terms. Even if there remains a chance that the ideology of Apartheid might undergo some changes of face, its designs made white domination difficult to fundamentally alter. Language would have been the DNA to carry it beyond the generation, ensuring it is entrenched. 

 

Notwithstanding, it should be mentioned that Afrikaans is not Apartheid but a language of a people with cultural aspirations beyond what political leaders who spoke the language made it to be. Despite its experience by non-Afrikaans-speaking Black people as a language whose most significant use was concomitant to the enforcement of Apartheid, the language of law and order, the language that stripped fundamental rights of respect, and so on, it is a language like others that has its human side. 

 

June 16 should thus be seen as the day the system that the enforcement of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction represented was rejected, and not Afrikaans as a language and Afrikaners as a people. The narrative of June 16 does not foreground that the first victim of the rebellion was part of a community that speaks Afrikaans as a first language and is proud to do that. Some of the greatest anti-apartheid activists and icons are non-white Afrikaans speakers, albeit classified as Afrikanses, in the Afrikaans-speaking community. 

 

June 16, as Premier Panyaza Lesufi has given it content beyond its significance of pushing back the last frontier of African subjugation through acculturation, is about youth fighting for its right to employment, education, economic opportunities, and access to human emancipating skills. It is as much about locating iSpani where it is created as it is about creating opportunities for youth to be creators of iSpani. The Nasi iSpani is one of the programs from a leader of society brigade icon in the person of the Premier of Gauteng to articulate the necessity to spana. Interestingly the etymology of iSpani is and like many words, from the Afrikaans word 'span', which has meanings that include 'work' and 'team'. 

 

The span character of what the June 16 generation did to recalibrate a global view of South Africa and the capital of racism it was becoming or had become is what our re-theorisation of June 16 beyond the rhetoric trapped in nostalgia should be. In governing party parlance, the motive forces of June 16 should be recalibrated beyond SOWETO. Still, they should include Orania if South Africa is to live the liberation promises its Constitution is about. 

ISpani, as the Premier has aptly coined his program, should be more than what it now looks like. It should be developed into a clarion call by youth to identify all zones of iSpani creation. It should identify all templates that require calibration to create iSpani creators. The township economy should be seen within the prism of iSpani. Resuscitation of the teaching ethic as a function of work ethic must be seen as iSpani. The Black Industrialist program must be measured through the philosophical prism of iSpani. June 16, 2023, must culminate into a Leader of Society Brigade focused of the Nasi iSpani focus areas. Happy June 16, South Africa. CUT!!!