This was published as "Talking about language in a colonial tongue" in the Sunday Times on 22 September 2024.
The South African Constitution opens with the words, 'we, the
people of South Africa, recognise the injustices of the past'. One of the most
profound injustices of the past is the suppression of African languages,
relegating them to a secondary status. Instead, the English language,
privileged by the imperialism-driven power of RSA's primary colonialism and
Afrikaans, privileged by apartheid as a (secondary) colonialism of a special
type, was institutionalised as the doorways to knowledge, science, commerce,
and industry. This historical context is crucial to understanding the current
state of language rights in South Africa.
The marginalisation of
African languages had significant consequences for non-first-language speakers.
They found themselves disadvantaged in science, trade, and
industry, forced to navigate a world where their grammar and vocabulary relegated
them to second-class status. In this situation, they were not losing their
freedoms but surrendering them to those whose language their imagination
relied on to understand them.
Language, as a tool of
power, domination, and liberation, plays a significant role in shaping power
relations. The Afrikaners' rejection of English as the sole language of power
in South Africa had a profound impact. It elevated Afrikaans to a language of
power, domination, and liberation from the primary colonization by Britain.
Afrikaans liberated its speakers from the cultural, social, political, and
economic control imposed by British colonial power. The creation of key
sovereignty-defining institutions, such as the rand, the reserve bank,
state-owned entities, globally competitive universities, an armament industry,
nuclear power capability, and globally competitive infrastructure, can be
traced back to these cultural awakenings.
Language is an integral
aspect of identity. The need for identity, purpose, and belonging is as old as
humanity itself; most wars were and are still fought because of it. Most civil
strife or disobedience erupted during cultural limbos when identity needs were suppressed
or unmet. Capitulation to assimilation by the weak, including a socio-cultural
and narrative determination as most indigenous South African languages have
been condemned to be, does not translate into acceptance of the dominant as a
permanent condition. As the balance of forces changes, so does the intensity of
self-determination by the marginalised.
However, it will be
foolhardy for those with new power to use a potent combination of policies to
create new contexts of language disadvantage. The renaming of Leningrad to St
Pietersburg is a monument to demonstrate how cultural identity matters linger
in society, and language is the worst of fuses to ignite social unrest or
withdrawal.
Aside from the cultural
self-determination politics of language conversation, there is a compelling
human cognition case to be made for promoting Indigenous languages as a medium
of instruction. The issue is not just about minority rights but the language
rights of all people in a diverse society. The inclusion and exclusion into
science, commerce, industry, and economics through language should be isolated
for discourse based on non-racialism and non-sexism. This is a matter of
fundamental importance in a society as diverse as South Africa.
In establishing a
background of permanence to mitigate the risk of indigenous languages being
marginalised, again by the dominant or historically privileged languages, the
Constitution treats this matter as a human right. The Bill of Rights, a
cornerstone of the democratic order, enshrines the rights of "we the
people" and affirms human dignity as a value. It, therefore, obligates the
state to respect, protect, promote, and fulfil the rights in the Bill of
Rights. The government, as the most active agent of the state, in concert with
other agencies in a state, such as the private sector and other legal persons
or corporate citizens, are read in ‘the respect, promote, protect, and fulfil
the rights’ obligations the constitutional order enshrines.
If a consensus is
reached on the protection of language rights of the minorities, and worse, if
some are declared as official languages, the obligation index of government to
respect, promote, protect, and fulfil the right of such languages to exist gets
higher. Within the limitation of rights context and a further obligation to
circumscribe the potential of language rights becoming an unintended or
intended tool and mechanism of undermining non-racialism, an asymmetrical
obligation to ensure affirmative action programs to include into the dominant
language might be a mechanism to manage redress. It is known in South Africa
that English and later Afrikaans, and arguably also Zulu, are conquerer
languages. It was the reckless acts of Afrikaans-speaking forebears who chose
state-institutionalised racism and apartheid as a system of social engineering
and control that brought the privileging of Afrikaans onto the sharp edge of
forensic 'deprivileging' without denying its right of indigenousness.
The scale and force of
privilege apartheid afforded to Afrikaans in South Africa is so vast that
sections of the political (power) establishment are comfortable respecting,
promoting, protecting, and fulfilling the rights of non-indigenous languages
over it, despite it being only spoken in RSA. This underscores the urgent need
for a national consensus to mitigate risks related to language rights. Suppose
there is a residue of the past that lingers into the present. In that case, it
is the reconciliation of the racism under apartheid and how it culminated into
the 1976 social capital disaster it had on Afrikaans as an indigenous South
African language. Language empowers a society to create a universe, a system of
values and truths, and then compel those speaking it to heed its rules. It is
how the interior of the rules of the language, its human interaction grammar,
assumptions of its vocabulary, salient features embedded in its idiomatic and
proverbial expressions, and how it postures in the constellations of all manner
of power which will catapult it to be part of the trusted currencies of a
non-racial, non-sexist, united, democratic, and prosperous South Africa.
As the case for chapters
3 and 4 in the BELA Act to be revised or otherwise is made, the test should be
to what extent all the agencies in the RSA State are working within their
obligation to respect, promote, protect, and fulfil all rights in the
Constitution. To some, this might be a test of their readiness to share the
deepest of the cultural advantages of their indigenous languages on a
non-racial, non-sexist, united, and democratic basis. To some, it might test
their readiness to see all South African languages with the same matrix of
indigenousness. This will be an aspect of South Africa's cultural order
reconfiguration, which the post-1994, or Tintswalo, generation would
require templates and scaffolding to work their future with. It is essential to
send a message to the next generation of South Africans and never assume that
all important information is in English only. They must grow in a world that
believes in the validity of all science in the language it is discovered
with.
Beyond what the
Constitution provides on language rights, a national consensus requires
attention. The re-Balkanisation of Europe, the brewing tribalisation of African
politics, and the emerging sophistication of identity politics are risks only
respect, promote, protect, and fulfil the language rights of all mindsets can mitigate.
CUT!!!
Comments
Post a Comment