Irish budget airline Ryanair’s cheap ’n nasty Afrikaans-language “nationality test’’ is a surreal flashback to the “dompas” and the pencil-in-the-hair tests that made apartheid a cause of needless suffering and provided endless opportunity to lampoon the racist bureaucracy that upheld the regime and its rules. And just in that sentence you already have two Afrikaans words, the most infamous of which, apartheid, has become the universal byword for oppression. Put that in your test, Ryanair!
Needless to say, Ryanair’s peculiar take on inflight entertainment has drawn outrage in SA, which is predictable and warranted, even if there is a sense of perhaps protesting too much.
Criticism has come from quarters as diverse as the government (“a backward profiling system”, according to home affairs), to the Afrikaans Language Board, which called it “absurd” and said it drew unwanted attention to Afrikaans when it is already on the back foot politically speaking. The board could have pointed out that, uniquely, Afrikaans is not only the third most-widely spoken language in SA, but also the most widely spread among all population groups, which lends the Ryanair test a certain perverse validity.
It hardly helps that the self-styled champion of what it expropriates as Afrikaner issues, AfriForum, goes to court essentially for the right to display the old SA flag.
Yet such is the prevailing sense of linguistic embattlement that a silence broken only by tut-tutting is seen as the prudent course for Afrikaans and its champion. This says something about the unique historical conundrum facing the language among our other “10 official languages’’ (with a 12th on the way), a discomfort that is a legacy of the imbalance and resentment created by the promotion of the one and the corresponding neglect of the others.
Ryanair’s “test’’ quite obviously speaks of gross historical obliviousness and insensitivity, and it’s why South Africans across the board are annoyed, especially Afrikaners (who are actually “gatvol’’) and the government. Yet in its apparent eagerness and haste to distance itself from Afrikaans and its useful role in SA, to disown it in a way, the ANC government again finds itself uncomfortably reminded of the rather more concrete and as yet unmet challenge of addressing the intersection of language and race, and privilege and poverty, in the real world it presumes to govern. The fact that most of the land (farms) is owned by white Afrikaners, and the pervasiveness of Afrikaans itself in what was once called the “platteland”, are seen by some as the central issues of our politics, when more useful attention might focus on our cities and creating jobs.
It hardly helps that the self-styled champion of what it expropriates as Afrikaner issues, AfriForum, goes to court essentially for the right to display the old SA flag. And it camouflages this with a bogus freedom of speech argument.
The recent fuss about the Afrikaans Taalmonument in Paarl, Western Cape, was another occasion for drawing up a social media laager. The DA, which fancies itself as a defender of what it sees as newsworthy minority causes, joined in. The “taal” is under attack! Yet the monument’s management appears to have embraced the notion of an institution that promotes all local languages, not just Afrikaans. And it gets public money, too, so is there any good reason, or justification, for retaining a name that suggests and promotes the idea of a public institution dedicated to a sectional interest arguably to the exclusion of others, and which it attempts not to be in practice? Renaming the Taalmonument? The horror.
Historically, the status of Afrikaans has been a proxy for political struggle, from being declared an equal official language in 1925, to being rejected on June 16 1976 as a cause for hatred. In democratic SA, protection of language (mostly Afrikaans) has sometimes been seen as camouflaging a push to retain privilege, and resistance to that has fed the narrative of Afrikaans as a language under siege.
Yet if more of those who took it upon themselves to bemoan the alleged demotion of Afrikaans bothered about the state of promotion of Xitsonga literature and instruction, for example, and what they could feasibly do to help it too, they might have more credibility and we might cultivate a more tolerant atmosphere that celebrates all our languages, rather than regarding them as a template for conflict.
We got here because, as a concession to apartheid interests at the constitutional talks before 1994, the logical preference for English as SA’s official language had to factor in Afrikaans and give it equal status. So it was a short step to demanding all of SA’s languages got the same. It seemed fair, but from the point of view of efficiency and economy, 11 official languages obviously impose a huge burden on the state and our taxes.
Languages also have to be taught to become a lived reality, yet our schools are caught in a paradox produced by our ambiguity over language policy. Mother-tongue tuition is discouraged in favour of English, a first step to neglecting the mother tongue, which at no stage becomes necessary for tuition. Yet English is poorly taught, as just another subject, and is inadequately grasped even though it is meant to be the linguistic foundation of all learning.
That said, English should undoubtedly be our one official national language; the other 10 languages to be promoted and used in public institutions as the demographics demand at provincial level, and taught in schools as numbers and demand in the provinces dictate, according to national norms and standards.
Another step in the right direction would be to drop the obnoxious and pejorative Darwinian shaming of languages as “indigenous’’ or otherwise, which seems to unnecessarily stigmatise languages, as it does people. Leave that type of talk for the botanists. In mischievous hands, languages divide; in more creative and benign hands they inspire mutual respect in spite of differences.
We should be proud of all of our languages, and preserve and nurture them all.
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