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<h4 class=""><strong>The dividing line in our society, between the haves and the have-nots, has become the ability to speak English</strong></h4>
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Hans Pienaar</div>
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<span>08 December 2015</span>
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<p><em>PICTURE: ADRIAN DE KOCK</em></p><p> </p><p>In recent weeks,
President Jacob Zuma and South African Broadcasting Corporation boss
Hlaudi Motsoeneng have been mocked for their poor command of the English
language — and many believe they deserve this. But how many of us can
truly say we speak English better than them? The 4 million-plus South
Africans who say the language is their mother tongue? One million of us?
One hundred thousand?</p><p>I can’t claim I have a 100% command of
English, even though I make my living as an editor fixing other people’s
language — recently I changed "soldier on" to "shoulder on". I’ve lost
count of the times I have come across "damp squids" or "just deserts".</p><p>But
when debating the language policy of Stellenbosch University, it has
been taken for granted that we can all speak English properly. The
university’s council announced last Monday that Afrikaans and English
would have equal status, and it would henceforth devote itself to
multilingualism.</p><p>All sides can claim victory. Open Stellenbosch
should be happy with the undertaking that any demand to be taught in
English should be met, even if it means that, eventually, the offering
in English supercedes that of Afrikaans.</p><p>But some in the movement
for transformation have already rejected this advance. Their major
gripe, expressed in a petition signed by hundreds of lecturers a few
weeks ago, seems to be that multilingualism is a "guise" to retain
Afrikaans as the medium of instruction.</p><p>Taking a stand against
multilingualism, and assuming that SA’s English proficiency is strong
enough to step into the void, recalls the infamous Macaulay Minute. In
the colonial power’s debate on education in India, Lord Thomas Macaulay
declared in 1835 that all indigenous languages should be regarded as
inferior to English, including those as ancient as Sanskrit and as
widely spoken as Arabic.</p><p>The Macaulay Minute became a keystone in
ideologies of white supremacy driving the British empire, and of the
policy to use English as a tool to co-opt local intelligentsia into the
strategy to govern territories with only a handful of whites.</p><p>While
it is true that English is the language the most people in the world
claim they can understand, it is the mother tongue of far fewer, about
300-to 400-million, ranked third. In SA, it also comes in third, after
isiZulu and Afrikaans.</p><p>The more convincing argument is that
English is the language of science and technology, but this is not a
fait accompli. When science started to become a major preoccupation in
the 19th century, English shared this status with French and German. The
latest major triumph of science, the Higgs boson, was discovered by
scientists from all over the world, many of whom struggled to express
themselves in English.</p><p>According to Michael Gordin in his book
Scientific Babel, German became so stigmatised by the two world wars
that scientists shunned it, preferring English.</p><p>During the Cold
War, Anglo-American governments poured vast sums of money into the
translation of Russian scientific papers into English, for their
scientists to pirate new findings as quickly as possible and so further
cement its status.</p><p>The primacy of English as a language of science
is not due to any magical property, but to the machinations of power.
This will change, as Korean, Chinese and Japanese grow in stature.</p><p>A
key concern that may explain the anxiety over local languages among
some Maties staffers is that it would compromise their ability to plug
into global academia.</p><p>What really happened with the Open
Stellenbosch movement was that the short-term, self-interest of a
handful of black students — some of them from foreign countries — merged
with the long-term needs of globalised academics. This reinforced a
trend started in 2000, when Nelson Mandela’s solution for indigenous
languages was implemented: at least two universities should be devoted
to each of SA’s 11 languages, provided they also made lectures available
in English.</p><p>As historian Hermann Giliomee has shown, when
Stellenbosch University started offering lectures in English, it quickly
became a victim of its own success and student numbers exploded.</p><p>The
percentage of black Afrikaans students surged, but they were vastly
outnumbered by white, English-speaking students from other parts of the
country.</p><p>The least taxpaying South Africans could expect from
state-subsidised universities is that their policies be geared towards
solving local problems and that they provide personnel for local
enterprises and effort.</p><p>A local problem is the education disaster.
Many factors play a part, but poor literacy has been a consistent
culprit. In 2013, the Department of Basic Education’s annual national
assessments found only 37% of Grade 9 pupils were considered literate.</p><p>Despite
this, students enrol at universities with the belief that they can
understand English, and because their marks are routinely adjusted up —
ironically, to make up for the fact that they are taught in a
non-indigenous language. The result is SA’s spectacular university
failure rates.</p><p>Bettina Wyngaard, a black lecturer at Stellenbosch
University, calls it a "horrendous fallacy" that her colleagues "can
speak English with the same facility as Afrikaans, and that their
students can properly understand English".</p><p>Black students have a
double challenge: not only do many have to cope with a vastly inferior
education in maths and science, they also have to master a language that
is not their mother tongue. It is absolutely no surprise that the
average failure rate for first-years is 60%.</p><p>The dividing line in
our society, between the haves and the have-nots, has become the ability
to speak English. It is probably best seen in the diverse fates of
Zimbabweans who have fled to SA to escape Robert Mugabe’s misrule. Those
who mastered English have been welcomed by companies chasing black
economic empowerment points; those with deficient English settle in
shacks, where their linguistic disabilities became their identity —
"makwerekweres".</p><p>Amalgamated Beverages Industries, Africa’s
largest bottler of Coca-Cola, earlier this year launched a project in
Matjhabeng, Free State, inviting young entrepreneurs to be trained as
vendors. About 2 000 responded, this was cut down to 66, and eventually
22 — with proficiency in English as one of the criteria.</p><p>This is a
stark example of the application of Macaulay’s strategy; he advocated
that English be promoted among "the higher class of natives at the seats
of government", as crucial to the divide-and-rule strategy of the
British empire.</p><p>SA obviously needs to improve the teaching of
English in schools. This cannot be the only solution, as the backlog of
teachers who can teach in English is huge. We also have to tackle
teaching in domestic languages, and changing our universities into
multilingual institutions will be vital.</p><p>If Open Stellenbosch
wants to avoid being tagged as Macauley acolytes, it will need to start a
new chapter, Open UCT, and agitate for Afrikaans to be introduced as a
medium of tuition there in order to serve poor, black Afrikaans speakers
from the Kaapse platteland.</p><p><a href="http://www.rdm.co.za/politics/2015/12/08/language-policies-reflect-a-complex-web-of-power-and-disparity">http://www.rdm.co.za/politics/2015/12/08/language-policies-reflect-a-complex-web-of-power-and-disparity</a><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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