ANC national executive committee member Fébé Potgieter-Gqubule has allayed fears that the Bela Act which is to be fully implemented may kill the Afrikaans language.
Speaking at a press conference hosted by party secretary-general Fikile Mbalula on Saturday, Potgieter-Gcubule said the act would see mother tongue education being extended beyond grade 6 in South African schools including in African indigenous languages and will see pupils enjoying better cognitive development.
Minority rights group AfriForum is against the implementation of the Bela Act, especially as it stipulates that the provincial government will determine a school's language of instruction.
AfriForum said it believes this would disproportionately affect Afrikaans schools as it believes a school's language and admission policy should be determined by school governing bodies.
Potgieter-Gqubule said those advocating for Afrikaans should not isolate the language from the other 11 official languages of South Africa as African indigenous languages have been disadvantaged as a result of apartheid.
“Afrikaans is not going to disappear, it's one of the official languages. It's spoken by a broader community than just the Afrikaner community and for them to isolate themselves that is a problem rather than seeing themselves as a community of 12 South African languages.”
She said English and Afrikaans have enjoyed an advantage over other languages for more than 100 years.
“If you look at the Union of South Africa in 1910, it recognised Dutch and later Afrikaans and English which means for the entire period these two languages were advantaged and this is why it's important that we have to look at how we push the development of our indigenous African languages including the Khoi and San languages” .
She said the introduction of mother tongue education in all South African languages up to grade 12 was the right direction.
“It's much better for children in terms of cognitive development to learn in their mother tongue ... for example, I went to an Afrikaans school because that's my mother tongue.
“I did Afrikaans up until matric, I went to UWC [University of the Western Cape] then I had to switch to English but I was able to cope because my cognitive development was in my mother tongue.”
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