Jitsvinger
After being the first Afrikaans hip hop artist to perform at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, it made me realise how slow the pace of liberating ourselves through our language has been. What makes this fact even sadder is that the Cape has the most diverse genetic DNA in the entire world yet it’s being reflected very dimly across so many platforms in our society – creating exclusivity where culture is promoted.
Decision makers in high positions drag their feet when dealing with the issue of language while ignorant and ridiculous notions of purity have bled the country into xenophobia as a horrific result thereof. Teach the youth their history, share the knowledge of indigenous languages, for example, the clicks that the Khoe shared with the amaXhosa through intermarriages which were commonplace from as far back as the pre-colonial period. You simply cannot separate religion from the culture that groomed it nor can you separate a language from the people who produced it. This is very important when dealing with the issue of identity and language. For over 200 years the slaves of the Cape spoke a language they created among themselves through mixing and borrowing from each other.
This was called Afrikaans. After it was labelled “low Dutch” in the late 1600s, the white elite established themselves through taking the local identity of Afrikaners and standardised the Afrikaans language in 1875 by removing the slave and indigenous influence out of the lexicon.
Today’s youth culture is saturated with Americanism to such a degree that local artists who copy an American expression become instant chart toppers. To me this reflects a deep-seated lack of self-love and expression. Sadly, those of us who embrace our own expression find recognition abroad, headlining main events with fees to match, only to find ourselves coming home from successful tours just to toe the line in getting airplay on local radio stations and hardly being written about in local newspapers and magazines.
So many of my contemporaries find comfort in performing in musicals with large budgets populating the arts scene, but in our own backyard award-winning productions such as Afrikaaps, which celebrates the black origins of the Afrikaans language, get slammed as “Khoe Nationalism” (incidentally by the artistic director of a national arts festival) and in so doing disapproving of its educational potential across all nationalities and cultures.
Statistically the Western Cape is 49.7 percent Afrikaans, largely spoken by non-white South Africans, yet English is the lingua franca and first language of 9 percent of the country and is used for prestigious functions such as the language of tuition and higher education. What role does education play in a society that maintains dominance over the African community?
African languages cannot develop if our thinking, history, knowledge and beliefs are concentrated around being slaves to others. Year after year the public education system spews out millions of youth leaving them unable to think for themselves or utilise this type of education to solve immediate problems in their communities. Since primary school my Mitchells Plein “accent” was ge***r out of me, so much so that I started questioning my mother tongue. Later on I discovered the poetry of Kaapse writers such as Adam Small and Peter Snyders, and discovered the use of performance in order to embrace who I am. It even helped me score high marks in oral class too! We are in a constant state of deception having to feel inferior and incompetent in order for the system we’re in to function properly. Young women and men flock to shopping malls to work as tellers and shelf packers for fear of unemployment and poverty, yet our mineral wealth is being snatched from under our feet.
This must be the result of a strong project of powerlessness through negative stereotypes that perpetuates the ongoing suffering through our generations. After internalising racism from an early age our youth start to create a social reality based on racist ideology that doesn’t recognise progress but rejects it. Self-inflicted violence, abuse, victimisation and later on self-annihilation are commonplace in densely populated communities on the Cape Flats. This is supported by statistics showing our “incapability” to move towards freedom.
What does this reflect? To me it agrees with the institutionalisation of slavery that our country was built on and the deepening horror of one race progressing at the expense of another. Slavery has a deep foothold on language and can be clearly seen in words that are used to describe people, eg, k*****, h*****, coloured. These words are embedded into our sub-consciousness yet we use these degrading names as a term of endearment today.
Through forced migration from various parts of the African continent into the south, a new expression is already in the making… Aweh! Somalikaaps?
l Jitsvinger is a Cape Flats-born conceptual writer and award-winning Afrikaans vernacular hip hop performing artist. He is also a member of the Emancipation Day Coalition.