South Africa’s GNU has a unique opportunity to engage in the language debate, but if it continues with the Bela Bill, it will unfortunately fail to manage the conflict, repeat the mistakes of the past, and create further internal conflict.
File photo: An Afrikaans student takes part in a demonstration defending the use of Afrikaans as the language of choice at the University of Pretoria, on February 23, 2016. Photo: EPA Kim LudbrookThe South Africa n Government of National Unity should not implement the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill and in particular the sections that relate to language, because it risks provoking conflict.
The position was rather symbolic at the time, because Afrikaans students always felt emotional about the university making commitments to Afrikaans. In that role, I spent hours studying the history of this complex issue, seeking to understand why language is such an emotional topic. As a polyglot fluent in several languages and conversant in a few others, I have a first-hand appreciation for the importance of linguistic diversity.
– University professors and teachers often prefer teaching in English, whereas the students and their parents often have different expectations, resulting in institutional inertia when the government intervenes with the language policy. The issue of language has always been contentious in South Africa and it shifted depending on who was in power. For example, during the Soweto Riots, Afrikaans was imposed onto black students, resulting in the 1976 student protests that notably saw the apartheid regime kill school students when they mandated the imposition of an Afrikaans-based curriculum.
The assault on Dutch was the key issue that Afrikaner nationalists mobilised around before they took over power in South Africa in 1948. This experience – of forced anglicisation and humiliation – galvanised Afrikaners, and deepened their nationalistic fervour. They vowed to build their own schools, and to make their children “appreciate and love their language”.
Then in 2001, Afrikaans was identified by Mbeki's government as a source of conflict in South Africa. He constituted the Gerwel Commission that was headed by, a South African and anti-apartheid activist who wrote mostly in Afrikaans. As the historian Prof. Hermann Giliomee wrote, Gerwel made several propositions to the
The Bela Bill currently being introduced in Parliament makes no reference to the historical context of language issues in South Africa, which could lead to renewed conflict.
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