No, not because Charlize Theron, to wholesale lampooning, claimed that only forty-four people speak the language. Nor because I’ve mailed a CV out to Wanatu. Orania – the travel doccies go – is a thrifty, quaint little enclave with a charm so disparate from the mainland that the koeksister enjoys more respect than the vuvuzela happens to lie a few hours from my native Colesberg. But believe me, getting the cantankeroues 10111 (that’s the police to you, ou maat) number on the line has nothing to do with me learning Afrikaans.
Fluently, off the cuff, the idiomatic platitudes steeped at Oom Oubaas-level. Probably wishful thinking to aspire to such proficiency but a man can – and must – always dream, just as well as he knows he’s probably pulling a fast one on himself. More so when there’s a comeuppance to be squared with the late Ms Jack, the long-limbed, oriental cheek-boned primary school teacher who tried, with clerical patience to supple my Xhosa tongue into it. We are yet to forget that when that patience had run thin, the sellotaped cane was always within arm’s reach.
And the gorgeous Ms Jack, a praying, church-going Christian, was a firm adherent of ‘you spare the rod’ and all such unforgiving scriptural tenents. It might sound like cruel and usual punishment in the post-religious-fundamentalism, wokeist age but back in the day – where to backchat a teacher secured you an appointment with a principal whose six of the best ensured that you never forgot the lesson – we’ve never really held it against her.
But before I’m drawn into defending myself against accusations of incubating latent askari tendencies, in my defence, Oubaas, real name Pierre van Pletzen, was a greybeard thespian on 7de Laan, an Afrikaans soapie that often held court in many a African household at around 18:30pm Monday to Friday. Yes, it wasn’t as you’d expect the Huxtables or the Morokas that drew a bulk of the Rooibos-imbibibg African gogos during that time but the conversations taking place over a melktert at Oppiekoffie.
Truth is, the language ascribed as that ‘of the oppressor’ within the revolutionary apparatchik (I should henceforth relinquish 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 other dozens of languages that make up the kaleidoscopic Mzansi dialect. Politically, the previous regime was draconian in shoving it down people’s throats. Mandela, on the other hand opted to embrace, even put his head on the chopping block on its behalf, in a climate in which to do so was political harakiri.
Strangely enough even the most aversive cadres went along with the old man’s scheme. You could say that’s because the objective of staging the first democratic election trumped all other grievances: Let’s vote ASAP, and once in power we’ll then iron out these other issues. I’m no social scientist but on that score both the Nats and the cadres, I think, were a few inches off of middle stump. And in that outswing they doubled down on really what ought to have been an obvious issue – you’ll be seriously up against it trying to wipe out the organic. You could have a go at putting it on the backburner but Afrikaans has come a long way and is too deeply embedded into the social fabric to be obliterated completely. As long as the are two Afrikaans speaking people in the world, chances are, the language will remain.
The facts speak of a language that need not be alarmed not even in the face of the BELA Act, often considered a government attempt at suppression. With 6 365 488 (10.6%) speakers, SA’s 2022 census had Afrikaans as the third most spoken language in the country. Huisgenoot, the Afrikaans lifestyle/tabloid magazine has been treading water in the magazine publication space just as so many of its competitors have drowned. Afrikaans authors feature prominently on the annual top ten lists, so too its musicians despite there being only 2.44 million whites who identify as Afikaners. By most measures, this means that the language is faring on rather swimmingly.
In the wake of the Economic Freedom Fighters’ recent descent on Kleinfontein, the Afrikaner-only settlement outside Pretoria, has gotten the internet simmering, reigniting the long-standing discourse around minorities in general and Afrikaners in particular. The short of it is that certain pockets of Afrikaners especially in light of Donald Trump’s offer to grant them US refugee status, are calling for the right to self-governance. To the black political fringe and the more liberal whites, this smacks of ‘segregation,’ ‘separate development’ and all those other dirty words of separatism. Surprisingly, it hasn’t only been leftist politicians who’ve taken umbrage against this, but also several whites. The journalist Max du Preez was first to put himself in the firing line. Then in a beautifully-articulated opinion piece in Daily Maverick, the winemaker Philip Constandius has come out to have his say.
Of Afrikaans-Greek extraction, Constandius has been one of those who has come close to hitting the nail on the head. 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 Roets or is it just my imagination? Is his patriotic vision a thinly disguised neo-apartheid ploy in a user-friendly package, or is it 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 is, in the bigger picture, rather trivial. You don’t believe me? 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 across the border by the morning.
The South Africa we thought we knew is being slow-cooked in a Macbethian brew of corruption, porous borders and an immigration service that clearly has its hands full. The upshot of all this is that, in a decade, the contents of the metaphorical ‘bowl’ will necessitate reconciling with the new ingredients in the salad as well as learning to ‘adapt or die’ accordingly. 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 likely find yourself needing some proficiency if you wish to conduct commerce effectively in the future Mzansi.
One paranoid businessman friend of mine even suggests a hidden economic hand bent on taking over the SA 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 only to arrive here, open up a shop and start coining it.
Gayton, Mashaba or Operation Dudula may chant and wage a supposed war against ‘illegal aliens’ but in reality it is nothing but playing to the gallery or posturing. The country clearly doesn’t have the capacity. Things are falling apart before our very eyes. And to clutch onto 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 larger of self-determination might protect them from it all. As for me, I’m polishing on the Afrikaans only because I believe the future may be less hostile if we can only learn to accept that earlier observation. We’re all in the salad, together.