Julian Kunnie
Cape Town - June 16, 1976, is a watershed year in South African/Azanian history, as the year that sparked the massive student uprising against the imposition of Afrikaans as the premium language of instruction in high schools and other institutions and against the white minority rule system of apartheid.
Though this event saw more than 1 000 students being brutally shot down in cold blood and tortured by police, with thousands fleeing the country and forced into exile, to join the ranks of the liberation movement, the ANC, PAC and the Black Consciousness Movement, the issue of language oppression persists in post-apartheid South Africa in 2022.
Despite South Africa being a supposedly free country constitutionally in 1994, the fundamental and core system of apartheid still persists, and language, in addition to classism, sexism and, of course, anti-African racism continues, with women from the working classes of the diverse black communities still being viewed as a sector to be exploited as servile domestic labour.
That structure has not radically changed, which is indeed a disgrace, an abomination to the human race because these are our grandmothers, granddaughters, mothers and sisters who raised us and they deserve to be treated with justice and dignity and not be seen as exploitable labour.
The youth of 1976 sacrificed their lives for a liberated country, rejecting the imposition of a minority colonial language as the first language of instruction in black schools.
Yet, the ANC-led government continues to skirt the issue of indigenous African languages being disseminated throughout South Africa’s curriculum from kindergarten through to university.
Notwithstanding the dominant language of English by far as the principal language of communication, business, education, commerce, banking, housing, etc., the state is responsible for shifting gears and requiring that everyone become fluent in at least one indigenous African language, first reading and then speaking.
This may sound revolutionary, and to some degree it is, but in a country where the overwhelming majority have a mother tongue that is not English, there needs to be a language and a cultural revolution.
South Africans desperately need to be decolonised, freed from the yoke of 370 years of language and cultural strangulation.
Mother-tongue education is a prerequisite for any child’s growth and personal self-esteem, while valorising the ancestral culture to which she or he belongs.
This is not abnormal for any people or culture, as in China or Korea, for example. For South Africa to continue to expect and require, for instance, that non-English mother-tongue students, especially at matric and at university, take these important educational exams to receive the necessary qualification is totally absurd and a violation of basic human linguistic rights.
The pretext of “it’s too difficult and costly to produce indigenous African literature at every class level” while the government makes billions from African miners and workers, and banks make billions in profits, shatters this fabricated excuse because the regime is determined to make the country fully compatible with western capitalist investment, and such measures would send negative messages that the country is becoming “African nationalist”, which is furthest from the truth.
Such measures would only be restoring human rights of language that every learner and student in the world is entitled to: learning best takes place when learning using one’s mother tongue.
This is a formidable uphill and ongoing struggle to decolonise and re-Africanise South Africa, recalling the spirits of both Soweto of 1976 and the life sacrifices of the youth and that of Steve Biko from 1977, with their spirits yearning for a resting place in a truly liberated South Africa/Azania.
No particular linguistic group or community should feel threatened by such shifts; instead, the members of these groups would become more culturally and linguistically versatile in Africa, and enhance mutual respect among the various communities, so that this diversity is celebrated in visceral ways, not superficial ways as we see in certain areas where indigenous African languages may be visible on noticeboards and so on, with English still being the dominant norm.
English is not a bad language even though it originates in the tiny colonial country of England, where people in Ireland, Scotland and Wales were oppressed by the dominant English and often feel so even today.
English will not lose its value in this revolutionary shift. It will still be used in communication, yet as time proceeds, English mother-tongue speakers and Afrikaans mother-tongue speakers will find that they are enriching their knowledge of language, culture, themselves, Africa and the world.
The world is certainly not monolingual: most people in the world do not use English, considering China, India, Russia, Japan, Korea, etc., as the means of primary communication.
Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga taught us in the classic “Nervous Conditions” that African people use English for broad external communication, but share deep thoughts, feelings and expressions only in indigenous African languages.
Africa has always been a land and continent of amazing diversity, with more than 2 000 languages and cultures, one of the most in the world, along with Asia.
When people from central Africa travelled to the southern and south-western tip of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, they embraced the languages of the indigenous Khoi and San people in this part of the continent.
This is how all Nguni languages like isiXhosa and isiZulu retain the clicks in their structure and essence in one way or another, and even Afrikaans has become indigenised in this regard, as we see in Namibia and South Africa.
People engaged and interacted with each other with respect and mutuality, recognising the ancestral guardians of particular regions of the continent.
War and conflict was not the way of interaction and involvement and relating to one another.
Eurocentric colonialism radically changed that from the 1500s in Africa and other parts of the world, because it came as a colonial conqueror and self-seeking invader, using English, Dutch, French, Spanish, etc.
We all understand that we need to live in peace and justice, mutual respect and cultural reciprocity with each other, and burying the horrific days of apartheid permanently, never allow one group of people to dominate another.
South Africa in her truly liberated form as proposed here, reaching deep into her indigeneity and openly rejecting the Anglocentric, capitalist, competitive and elitist culture, will benefit not just non-English mother-tongue learners, but those who use English as a mother tongue too.
This is the hope and the vision that all in South Africa in particular and Africa and the world in general need to embrace: genuine cultural respect and reciprocity, starting with being able to speak even fluently the languages of others, particularly those that in the past have been so violently, economically, socially and educationally marginalised, heavily so because of language and culture.
Africa embraces all as Mother of us all. We all belong to Africa, and we need to live this truth! Soweto will rise! Vukani Soweto! Vukani Soweto!
Kunnie is an international educational activist, researcher and author who has travelled the world. He advocates for land, cultural and language rights, especially of the world’s indigenous people. His fifth book, “The Earth as Mother and the Collapse of Capitalism in the 21st Century”, will be published in late 2022.
Cape Times