<h1 id="article_headline">Language denied means citizens ignored</h1>
<div id="article_byline"><strong>NEVILLE ALEXANDER</strong> CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - Feb 03 2012 15:56</div><div id="storycontainer">
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<span class="article_lead">Last month the parliamentary portfolio
committee on arts and culture held a series of public hearings on the
South African Languages Bill 23 of 2011. About 34 civil society
organisations made written submissions to the committee and many of them
used the opportunity to speak about their submissions and with the
parliamentarians from the different parties that form part of the
committee. </span>
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<img src="http://www.mg.co.za/uploads/2012/02/03/graphictonguesedit.jpg" style="margin:5px;" border="0"><br><br>
On the surface, therefore, this was an excellent example of "democracy
at work", all the more so because it was steered by the dynamic young
chair of the committee, Thandile Sunduza, whose infectious sense of
humour was -- and is -- an essential antidote to the sickening tensions
and potential conflicts that are never far from the surface in any
discussion of the language question in post-apartheid South Africa.<br><br>
I cannot in a short article do justice to the substance and the texture of the many excellent and seriously meant submissions.<br><br>
However, it is possible to suggest the thrust of the critique and
recommendations that emerged from the hearings, because there was a
large measure of overlap between all the submissions. <br><br>
Before I do so, I have to give some relevant background to the Bill. As
long ago as 2003, a South African Languages Bill was drafted by
officials of the then department of arts, culture, science and
technology as the juridical counterpart of the National Language Policy
Framework. Whereas the latter, which did not -- and does not -- have the
force of law, was approved by Cabinet and has been used, more or less,
by government departments and provinces as a guide to the implementation
of language policy consistent with the section 6 provisions of the
Constitution, the Bill was shelved on the grounds of, among other
things, impracticability.<br><br>
<b>The need for an appropriate language law</b><br>
Language planners and language scholars who study or live in
multilingual or linguistically diverse polities know that, without an
appropriate language law, the natural tendency to augment the social and
economic power of the dominant language community and the hegemony of
its language at the expense of the numerical or social "minorities"
simply manifests itself unchecked. <br><br>
For this reason all of us who work in this domain have consistently
tried to put pressure on the government to bring the 2003 Bill before
Parliament, none more so than Cerneels Lourens, an attorney based in
Brits in North West. His persistence, supported by many of us at
different levels and in different modalities, finally forced the
government to act in terms of the court order issued by the North
Gauteng High Court in Pretoria two years ago to put the appropriate Act
on the statute book by March 16 2012.<br><br>
It is, therefore, pertinent to point out that in complying with the
court order, the department of arts and culture has taken a literal,
minimalist position by only addressing section 6(4) of the Constitution.
In terms of this section, "the national government and provincial
governments, by legislative and other measures, must regulate and
monitor their use of official languages".<br><br><div class="articlecontinues"><span class="article_body"></span> CONTINUES BELOW<span class="article_body"></span> <br></div><center><div style="width:300px;height:250px">
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Most submissions pointed out explicitly or implicitly that by
restricting itself to this aspect of section 6(4) of the Constitution,
the government is in effect reneging on its duties with respect to
sections 6(2) and 6(3), as well as the rider to section 6(4), which
states: "Without detracting from the provisions of subsection (2), all
official languages must enjoy parity of esteem and must be treated
equitably."<br><br>
All the submissions agree that if the Bill's proposed use of a minimum
of two official languages for purposes of government were to stand, the
explicitly stated intention in section 6(2) of the Constitution, that
the government should do everything in its power to take practical steps
to develop the indigenous African languages and their use in all
spheres of life, would be negated.<br><br>
<b>Linguistic diversity</b><br>
They accuse the government of not being committed in practice to the
principle of multilingualism or linguistic diversity, whatever the
rhetorical genuflections to it might suggest. This is not some empty
formula of a modern democratic polity. In fact, it goes to the heart of
what we understand by the concept of "democracy".<br><br>
"Power to the people", "the people shall govern" and all the other
sloganised versions of this concept ultimately go back to the fact that
if the people or the citizenry are denied practical participation in
public life, specifically in the decision-making processes on the
fundamental aspects of their lives -- such as employment, health,
education, childcare, etcetera -- they are ipso facto reduced to
subjects, non-citizens. They can participate fully only if they are able
to interact with the powers that be in languages of which they have a
proper command. <br><br>
For most people in South Africa today those languages are the nine
indigenous African languages and Afrikaans. Hence, any ambivalence with
respect to the principle of promoting multilingualism and developing
these languages and their use in high-status functions amounts to a
failure of governance and an elitist policy of exclusion of the majority
of the people. <br><br>
The Bill, as it stands, will continue to entrench the dominance of
English, and to a lesser extent Afrikaans, in government and public
life. This is, in my view as well as those of many of the civil society
organisations, a middle-class policy that benefits those who are more or
less proficient in English, or who are aspiring to become so and have
the means to do so.<br><br>
In the longer term the Bill will have to return to the original
proposals of the 2003 Bill, in which all these matters were carefully
researched and addressed. The government should not act in an ad hoc
fashion merely to comply with a court order. It should do so on the
basis of a long-term strategy guided by the vision of a genuinely
democratic South Africa in which "unity in diversity" is more than just a
scribble on the coat of arms.<br><br>
This is the place where the dog lies buried. However, there are a few
other issues that have to be addressed urgently if the language issue
is to be treated with the urgency it warrants.<br><br>
<b>Urgent general review needed</b><br>
One of the most urgent is a general review of the language dispensation
in the new South Africa that will involve a careful audit of the
structures and processes, legislation and its implementation with
respect to the use, development and attitudes towards all our languages,
including sign language. In this connection, the functions of the Pan
South African Language Board and the Commission for the Promotion and
Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic
Communities will have to be reconsidered from within a totally different
frame of reference.<br><br>
Those of us who are motivated by a belief in the benefits of
multilingualism in all spheres of life, rather than by narrow
ethno-nationalist considerations, realise that after 18 years the time
has come to reconsider the compromises of 1994 with a view to crafting a
framework that will take us beyond mere rhetoric and beyond the desire
of most middle-class people to be some kind of black English -- or
American -- men and women.<br><br>
We live in Africa, most of us are at least bi- and very often
multilingual, as most African people are. We need to plot our own
pathways through the complexities of a post-apartheid South Africa
entangled in the thickets of globalisation.<br><br>
An English-only or even English-mainly route is without any doubt a
detour that our children's children will have to retrace to return to
the mainstream of the new nation we are trying to construct.<br><br>
The government will pass this Bill because it has to and not because it
wants to do it. It will be vigorously contested both inside and outside
Parliament. It has the potential of deepening one of the fault lines
of South African society that hitherto has not, except in the Anglo Boer
War and in the 1970s, been used to justify social conflict.<br><br>
If the political and intellectual leadership of this country want to
avoid this, we need to be completely candid with ourselves and the
citizens. We have to reconsider the language issue in its entirety in
the context of socioeconomic and cultural dynamics that are not
always completely under our control.<br><br>
Above all, we have to expose and reject the threadbare, see-through
arguments about "the costs of multilingualism" and the potentially
even more disastrous view that the Constitution in section 6 only
obliges the government to legislate for the establishment of the Pan
South African Language Board and the regulation and monitoring of the
use of all official languages, which is the fig leaf behind which the
arts and culture department is trying to hide the poverty of its
imagination.<br><br>
If only such laws as the Constitution explicitly enjoins government to
initiate were to be passed, we would be the most "lawless" society on
the planet. As citizens of a land of good hope, we deserve much better.<br><br>
<i>Dr Neville Alexander, former director of the project for the study
of alternative education at the University of Cape Town, writes in his
personal capacity.</i></span>
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<td class="border" width="40%"><h2>Related Articles</h2><ul class="greydot"><li><a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2010-10-15-african-languages-are-cool-ok">African languages are cool, ok?</a></li><li><a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2010-03-16-high-court-victory-for-sa-languages">High court victory for SA languages</a></li>
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</div><br><div id="disqus_thread"><div style="width:300px"><div class="photocaption"><strong>Learning in many tongues:</strong>An
English-only or even English-mainly route does not suit South Africa
because most of its population is multilingual. (Oupa Nkosi, M&G)</div><br>
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