By Phakamisa Mayaba
No, it’s not because Charlize Theron, to wholesale lampooning, claimed that only forty-four people spoke the language. And also not because I’ve mailed a CV to Orania, that quant and thrifty little Afrikaner enclave where the koeksister enjoys more respect than the vuvuzela, only a few hours’ travel from my native Colesberg.
Even being able to get a response from the cantankerous number 10111 (that’s the police to you, ou maat) has nothing to do with my renewed resolve to learn Afrikaans – so I can speak it fluently, off the cuff, with idiomatic platitudes or platitudes at the level of ‘Oom Oubaas’, a character in the venerable Afrikaans-language soapie 7de Laan, of which more later. It’s probably wishful thinking to aspire to such proficiency, but a man can – and must – always dream, even while realising that he’s probably pulling a fast one on himself.
The more so in painful memory of the late Ms Jack, the long-limbed, oriental cheek-boned primary school teacher who tried, with clerical patience, to twist my supple Xhosa tongue into it. I still need to forget that, when that patience ran thin, the sellotaped cane was always within reach.
And the gorgeous Ms Jack, a praying, church-going Christian, was a firm adherent to ‘spare the rod’ and other unforgiving scriptural tenets. This may sound odd in our post-religious, wokeist age, but back in the day – when back-chatting a teacher got you an appointment with a principal whose six of the best ensured that you never forgot the lesson – we never really held it against her.
In my defence, I need to mention that 7de Laan held court in many African households at six-thirty in the afternoons, Monday to Friday, over an astounding 23 years. Yes, it wasn’t the Huxtables or Morokas that captured the attention of the Rooibos-imbibing African gogos during that time, but the conversations over melktert in the fictional coffee shop Oppiekoffie in the fictional community of Hilllside.
Truth is, the language labelled as that of the ‘oppressor’ by the revolutionary apparatchik (I probably need to give up any hope of being taken seriously in MDR circles) has been around long enough to rub off on, borrow from, fight with, swear at and live – for better or ill – alongside the dozens of other languages that make up the kaleidoscope of Mzansi. The previous regime shoved it down people’s throats, triggering the watershed Soweto uprising in the process. Mandela, on the other hand, opted to embrace it, and even put his head on the chopping block on its behalf, at a time when when this was regarded by many as political hara kiri.
Strangely enough, even the most hard-case cadres eventually went along with the old man’s scheme. You could say that’s because the first democratic election trumped all other objectives: let’s just vote, and once in power we’ll iron out all these other issues. I’m no social scientist, but both the Nats and the cadres were a few inches off middle stump, missing what should have been an obvious insight, namely that trying to wipe out the ‘organic’ would be a futile exercise. You could have a go at putting Afrikaans on the national back burner, but it’s far too deeply embedded in the social fabric to be eliminated altogether.
Today, the facts speak of a language that need not be alarmed, not even in the face of the BELA Act, widely considered a government attempt at suppression. According to the latest census, there are 6 365 488 Afrikaans-speakers in the country, amounting to 10.6 per cent of the population. This makes it the third most spoken language in the country. (Also, contrary to popular belief, most Afrikaans-speakers are not those kortbroek guys with the funny tans, but so-called ‘coloured’ people.)
The Afrikaans lifestyle/tabloid magazine Huisgenoot is a long-standing mainstay in the publishing space in which many English-language competitors have drowned. Books by Afrikaans writers feature regularly on the top ten lists, and so do songs in Afrikaans, despite there being only 2.44 million whites who identify as Afrikaners. By most measures, this means the language is doing rather swimmingly.
Despite all of this, some white Afrikaners continue to feel their culture (and their very existence) are threatened, and are claiming the right to just hang out on their own, blowing on saucers of black coffee and chomping boerebiskuit. This has given rise to Afrikaner-only enclaves at such as Orania and, more recently, the Kleinfontein settlement outside Pretoria. (They also have to do their own ‘hande-arbeid’, but that’s another story.)
Not unexpectedly, this view is widely rejected by many South Africans on the grounds that it harks back to the separatism that spawned the rather unfortunate policies of apartheid and ‘separate development’. Indeed, the EFF recently staged a march to Kleinfontein, and tabled a motion in parliament calling for these ‘race-based enclaves to be ‘eradicated’ on the grounds that they pose a danger to South Africa’s democracy.
It’s probably fair to say that, until recently, most people have regarded these settlements as oddities rather than a real national threat. However, the Trump administration’s decision to recognise Afrikaners’ claims of persecution to the point of starting to grant them refugee status in the US has pushed the debate around Afrikaners and Afrikaans to a whole different level. Given its emotive nature, and its sudden geopolitical status, participating in this debate has become very risky — particularly for Afrikaners.
Among those who have put themselves in the firing line is the journalist Max du Preez. [Editor’s note: In a notable piece first published in Afrikaans in Vrye Weekblad and then in English in Daily Maverick, Max has taken a nuanced and provocative look at Afrikaners’ claims of persecution, finally urging Afrikaners to count their blessings and start ‘thinking outside the braai shelter’.]
Then, in a beautifully articulated opinion piece, also published in Daily Maverick, the winemaker Philip Constandius, who is of Afrikaans-Greek extraction, has come out to have his say. He writes that he has been pondering his Afrikaner heritage ‘when there is a renewed attempt to protect the rights of Afrikaners; a time when the kortbroeke of AfriForum and Pioneer Roets are at the forefront of the Trek Nouveau. I respect their efforts; they saw an opportunity to pressurise the ANC government, and they used it.’
He continues: ‘But is the ghost of Hendrik Verwoerd stirring in the mind of [Koos] Roets, or is it just my imagination? Is his patriotic vision a thinly disguised neo-apartheid ploy in a user-friendly package, or a true attempt to save South Africa?’ That line is the clincher, the one that unsettles both the politicians and the ordinary black folk. Indeed, talks of separate enclaves are particularly unnerving to those who still remember the hard-time Struggle years.
Constandius goes on to make a remarkable point in the face of all the noise. ‘I like Corné Mulder’s analogy of South Africa as a fruit salad. Pineapple, pawpaw, grapes and many more fruits mixed together. South Africa is not a smoothie, however, and with this I agree. However, no fruit salad comes in layers or fruit pieces cordoned off from one another. The salad is an agglomerate held together by a bowl. This bowl is South Africa.’
The mutually reinforcing paranoia that poisons both the Afrikaner and the comrades’ minds is, in the bigger picture, rather trivial. Do you disagree? Just take a look at the undocumented foreign nationals in the country. You can’t, because government doesn’t know exactly how many there are. But the news stories give an iceberg glint: the Jeppe fires, human trafficking in the suburbs, unknown hitmen who supposedly slip into the country at night, shoot someone, and are back across the border by the morning.
Fact is that the South Africa we thought we knew is being slow-cooked in a Macbethian brew of corruption, porous borders, and an overwhelmed immigration service. The upshot of all this is that, in a decade, all of us will need to get used to new ingredients in the metaphorical salad, as well as learning to ‘adapt or die’.
To ensure you don’t find yourself left behind, perhaps learn some Arabic, or a few East Asian languages. Throw in there some Shona or Swahili because, at this rate, you will probably need it if you want to do business in the future Mzansi.
A paranoid businessman friend of mine even suggests that there is a hidden economic hand, bent on taking over the South African economy. To him, it doesn’t make sense how an immigrant from a third-world, war-torn country can up and leave with nothing but the clothes on his back, arrive here, open up a shop, and start coining it.
Gayton McKenzie, Herman Mashaba and Operation Dudula may wage a supposed war against ‘illegal aliens’, but in reality this is nothing but posturing, or playing to the gallery. The country clearly doesn’t have the capacity. Things are falling apart before our very eyes. And to cling to the cudgel of identity politics means you’ll likely isolate and insulate yourself so much so that you may find yourself lost in the land of your forefathers.
Perhaps the Afrikaners who see the changed country are scared, and reckon that the laager of self-determination might protect them from it all. As for me, I’m polishing my Afrikaans, only because I believe the future may be less hostile if we can learn to accept that earlier observation. We’re all in the salad, together.
FEATURED IMAGE: Protest against the Bela Act at the Voortrerkker Monument outside Pretoria, November 2024. (Image on X, former Twitter.)
This an edited version of an article that first appeared on Phakamisa Mayaba’s website, eParkeni. Used with permission.