Goodbye isiXhosa

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From Prospect Magazine, Issue 122 , May 2006

Goodbye isiXhosa
by RW Johnson

The South African constitution guarantees "parity of esteem" to no less
than 11 languages. But English, despite being the mother tongue of only 9
per cent of the population, will soon crowd out the rest

Race has clearly been the dominant factor in South Africa's difficult
history, but language comes a close second. Generations of Afrikaners
bristled with anger at the story of how, in Alfred Milner's South Africa,
immediately after the Boer war, a child who spoke Afrikaans was made to
sit facing the wall wearing a dunce's hat. More than 60 years later, as
the tide of linguistic nationalism trampled over Anglo sensibilities, the
South African post office was still stamping every letter with the slogan
"Die Wonder van Afrikaans." And while the apartheid government was able to
jail Mandela in 1962 and intimidate his supporters into silence, it went a
step too far in 1976 by trying to insist on Afrikaans tuition in black
township schools. The resulting explosion inaugurated an era of popular
protest which never really stopped until apartheid was toppled and
majority rule ushered in.

When, however, the new constitution was drafted in 1996, African
nationalist indignation at the centuries of white dominance mingled
fatally with linguistic correctness to produce a perfectly mad language
policy: there were to be 11 official languages as well as special measures
to promote and expand the almost dead languages of Khoi and San. The
11isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Sepedi, English, Sesotho, Setswana,
siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga and isiNdebelehad to enjoy "parity of esteem
and must be treated equitably." In addition, the Pan South African
Language Board was set up to create "conditions for the development and
use of all official languages."

 The French, when weighing the question of British entry to the EEC,
worried that "three languages mean one." That is, while French-German
bilingualism was a viable mix, once English was admitted, any gathering of
three nationalities would quickly lapse into English because it was the
one international language almost everyone knew. And so it has proved:
today English is the EU's dominant language by far. But if just three
languages mean one, then 11 do even more certainly. The ANC elite, many of
whom spent decades in exile in London, invariably speak English. The space
occupied by Afrikaans in the broadcast media has shrunk to a fraction of
what it once was and manufacturers have quietly removed Afrikaans
instructions from their products. You can use any language you like in
parliament but 90 per cent of the proceedings are in English, and Hansard
gives only an English translation of the other ten languages. English is
reinforced at every turn, not only by the familiar forces of the
anglosphere but also by the arrival of satellite television, English
football, the internet and South Africa's re-entry to the Commonwealth.
Even next-door Namibia and Mozambique, Commonwealth members both, are
striving to become English-speakers. Since 1994, South Africa has rapidly
and irreversibly moved towards becoming an English-speaking country.
Yet the oddity is that according to the 1996 census, English is only the
country's fifth language: 22.9 per cent have isiZulu as their mother
tongue, 17.9 per cent isiXhosa, 14.4 per cent Afrikaans, 9.2 per cent
Sepedi and only 8.6 per cent English. And, theoretically, not only must
the ten other languages enjoy "parity of esteem" with English, but the
country is supposed to be moving towards "the use of all official
languages," including their use as languages of science and research at
university level. This doctrine is so ludicrously at odds with reality
that it asks for trouble.

Thus far the main problem lies with Afrikaans, whose 20th-century
achievements were undeniably remarkable. From being the lingua franca of
downtrodden ex-slaves (the coloureds) and of the beaten, broken and
divided Boer nation in 1902, the language progressed to a point where,
well before 1994, a huge volume of literature had been translated into
Afrikaans, which had also generated its own impressive corpus of poetry,
novels, history and biography (see "Rainbow Afrikaans" by Rachel Holmes,
Prospect May 2004). Afrikaans press, television and radio thrived, and
there were five Afrikaans-language universities (Pretoria, Stellenbosch,
Potchefstroom, Free State and Rand Afrikaans) and another bilingual one
(Port Elizabeth). Afrikaner nationalism was easily the most successful
form of African nationalism the continent had seen, and by the end of
apartheid the vast bulk of Afrikaners were modern middle-class people,
appalled at their racist past and keen to make peace with their fellow
South Africans. They are critical to the success of the new South Africa,
for although hundreds of thousands of them are to be found in diaspora in
the English-speaking world, they are notably less likely to emigrate (or
more likely to return) than their white English-speaking peers. For an
English-speaker like myself, it is a real pleasure to find that the old
animosities separating Afrikaners from anglophones have disappeared
completely. And whereas 40 years ago you often met Afrikaners who couldn't
speak English, today no such person exists.

Inevitably, many Afrikaners view the shrinkage of the Afrikaans cultural
space with dismay. An ironic and little noticed fact is the way Afrikaners
have sought new, urban homelands. Once formerly white high schools became
racially integrated, they normally became English-speaking, so Afrikaners
wanting their children educated in their mother tongue were forced to quit
rural and small town communities and congregate in larger agglomerations
still able to support viable Afrikaans schools. If you drive through
Limpopo province (the old Northern Transvaal) you see how one small dorp
after another has been abandoned by whites, now congregated in a few
larger centres like Louis Trichardt, Potgietersrus, Pietersburg and
Pretoriaand even these have been renamed, respectively, as Makhado,
Mokopane, Polokwane and Tshwane. The result is far fewer Afrikaans high
schools than before but more Afrikaans matriculants. To see towns
commemorating such trekker heroes as Louis Trichardt and Andries Pretorius
lose those names breaks many an Afrikaner heart.

Meanwhile, Rand Afrikaans University has become the University of
Johannesburg and has become predominantly English-speaking, like all the
other Afrikaans universities, with the sole exception of Stellenbosch,
currently the subject of a major cultural struggle. Stellenbosch, the
intellectual cradle of Afrikanerdom, is the jewel in the crown: one of the
top research universities in the country, it is set in the beautiful and
historic town of Stellenbosch amid the Cape winelands. Those concerned
about the survival of Afrikaans, led by the great historian of the
Afrikaners, Hermann Giliomeea man victimised under apartheid for his
liberal viewsargue that it is crucial that at least one Afrikaans
university remain. They have done their homework, anxiously researching
how some small language groupsthe Danes, Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, the
Flemish and the French Canadianssurvive. The answer is clear. First, all
Flemings (for example) must be fluent in a major international
language--English, French or German, often all three--so that they are not
handicapped through being Flemish-speakers. Second, they must not only be
able to send their children to Flemish-language primary and secondary
schools but there must be at least one Flemish university. This is
critical because the propagation of a culture requires the renewal of an
intelligentsia that writes its books and newspapers, translates works from
other languages, teaches in its schools, produces its radio and television
programmes and so on. And, if tertiary-level education was only available
in, say, French or English, this would quickly become an argument for
these languages to take over at secondary and primary level too. While it
is likely that English and other international language texts will
predominate at postgraduate level, it is important that seductive
arguments for bilingual language instruction at undergraduate level be
resisted, for experience shows that if such arrangements are allowed
between a minority language and an international language, they become
mere staging posts en route to the complete victory of the stronger
international language.

The campaign to preserve Afrikaans recently won an important victory when
Giliomee and two of his supporters were elected to the university council
at Stellenbosch. The unusually vigorous campaign saw both the university's
rector and the chairman of the council oppose the Giliomee slate, which
nevertheless won with 79 per cent of the vote. Still, it is far from
certain that those who wish to preserve Afrikaans will win in the end.
Partly this is because the government continues to exert pressure on
Stellenbosch to "broaden access." For although the university is happy to
take in Afrikaans-speaking black and coloured students, most blacks and
many middle-class coloureds want to be taught in English, and so 72 per
cent of Stellenbosch students are white. The only way to change this is
for the university to offer more courses in English. With language rights
guaranteed by the constitution, the university could hang tough on this if
it wanted to, butand this is the critical factora large proportion of
Afrikaners, including the rector, Chris Brink, would far rather expand the
role of English, despite the slippery slope that means for Afrikaans, than
remain outside the new South African mainstream. For Afrikaners are
Christian folk, and many are now carrying a great load of Calvinist guilt
about having inflicted apartheid on the country, and are uncomfortable
about doing anything which carries echoes of apartheidsuch as maintaining
a mainly white university. Such feelings are powerfully reinforced by a
wish to stay on the right side of government. But their anxiety is more
existential. For so long and so loudly did the apartheid government make
Afrikaans the language of racism and oppression that many Afrikaners are
now reluctant to assert their own identity or culture, in much the same
way that after 1945 many Germans became uncomfortable with assertions of
German identity. Indeed, many Afrikaans families now have children in
London or Sydney, and even back home some send their children to
English-language schools. When Giliomee and others insist that if the pass
is not defended Afrikaans will retreat back from the public realm into
merely a kitchen language, they often encounter Afrikaners whose response
is a shrug of the shoulders and a Que sera, sera.

But if the future of Afrikaans is now in some doubt, then, a fortiori, all
the other African languages must be under far greater threat. None of
them, after all, has a fraction of the accumulated literature or
institutional support of Afrikaans. When the apartheid government set up
separate tribal homelands, the first act of each new homeland government
was to adopt English-medium education. And although the apartheid
government set up a series of tribal universitiesTranskei, Zululand, Venda
and so onnot one even considered using anything but English. And even
though the then government would doubtless have made money available for
it, none of these universities made any serious effort to promote or
develop indigenous languages. The irony is that now that the homelands
have been scrapped and there is an assertive African nationalist
government that views tribalism as reactionary, it has committed itself to
promote these indigenous languages in a way apartheid bureaucrats could
only have dreamed of. This commitment is, moreover, made in the teeth of
market forces. African language departments report dramatic declines in
student numbers, to the point where keeping them open is mainly a matter
of political will. Similarly, although educationalists are unanimous that
children do best when allowed to use their mother tongue to learn other
subjects, black parents are almost equally unanimous in resisting this
option. Although primary education is given in mother tongues, when
Limpopo province recently introduced mother tongue education into state
secondary schools, many black parents angrily accused school authorities
of "academically damaging" their children. They, like their Afrikaans
counterparts, have understood that proficiency in English is the key to
the job marketand in a country with 40 per cent unemployment, this has an
understandable urgency.

The workaday reality is that the courts still use just English and
Afrikaans (though black judges, who often don't know Afrikaans, are
exerting pressure for an English-only system) and each province is
required to teach at least two of the official languages in its schools,
taking into consideration the dominant languages of the region. What this
usually boils down to is that schools continue to offer English and
Afrikaans as they always did but now add isiZulu in KwaZulu-Natal,
isiXhosa in the Eastern and Western Cape, Sesotho in the Free State and so
on. This induces a sense of equity, but at a price. There is a huge
shortage of properly qualified African-language teachers. The curriculum
has to find space for three languages, of which two will only ever be of
any use in South Africa and, quite possibly, only in one province of it.
And, since the curriculum is already top-heavy with languages, there is no
room for other international languages or even for the other main
languages of Africa--French, Swahili and Arabic.

The ministry of education has, nevertheless, asked all universities to
submit plans explaining how they are going to promote and develop African
languages. Most universities have submitted plans of such vagueness that
the ministry has asked them to resubmit, but since doing anything serious
would inevitably be expensive and higher education is cash-strapped, it is
clear that little will happen. With one thunderous exception: the
University of KwaZulu-Natal, the country's second biggest, where the black
vice-chancellor, William Makgoba, is a committed Africanist.

Makgoba is a controversial figure who left Wits University in 1995 after a
storm in which he stood accused of maladministration, bringing the
university into disrepute and falsifying his CV. In his autobiography,
where he describes himself as "a first-rate, world acclaimed African
scientist," he also happily admits that he consulted witch doctors for
special potions with which to scare his enemies. He writes of "my
unquestioned brilliance as a scholar and (my) pioneering achievements,
with few equals in my field." Certainly, his inauguration was that of a
monarch, with massed bands, choirs, operas, recitals and presentations at
four different centres, and he swiftly granted himself a salary
considerably larger than President Mbeki's. The campus lampposts are now
festooned with banners describing UKZN as "the premier university of
African scholarship." Although a majority of the university's academics
are still white males, Makgoba launched a broadside in which he compared
white males to displaced senior apes and insisted that they must learn to
speak, sing, eat, dance and dress like Africans if they were to find any
hope of acceptance. His inaugural address had the promotion of isiZulu as
a key theme and UKZN has announced that it is preparing to introduce
compulsory isiZulu courses for all students and to make fluency in isiZulu
a condition for all academic appointments.

These plans have met with strong resistance. Jean-Philippe Wade, professor
of culture, communications and media studies, points to the lack of
isiZulu textbooks and journals, and even of many academic concepts in
isiZulu. If Makgoba's plans go ahead, he says, they will turn a university
of 60,000 studentsanglophone since its inceptioninto "an academic
wasteland and a global joke." Even the proponents of such a change find it
so difficult to conceive that they have drawn up a 20-year plan for its
implementation. And they admit that a mountainous (and expensive) task of
translation into isiZulu lies ahead if the plan is to become real. Most
academics at the university seem determined to ignore it and hope that it
will go away.

Yet the idea deserves some sympathy. Already more than half the
university's students are isiZulu-speakersthough many of them insist on
speaking English, which is seen as more fashionable and modern. Moreover,
isiZulu is the best developed of all the African languages, as well as the
most widespread. There are three Zulu newspapers but none in any other
African tongue, and Zulu-language radio and television have large
audiences. And isiZulu is an Nguni language, so can be understood without
too much difficulty by other members of the Nguni groupSwazis, Ndebeles
and Xhosas. If you go to Soweto, you find that the language actually used
on the street is Tsotsitaal, a strange mixture of isiZulu and Afrikaans,
and in other townships you find other such amalgams, though always with an
isiZulu base.

In Kenya and Tanzania, post-independence governments favoured
Swahili-based education, with the result that this single lingua franca is
now entrenched, not just in east Africa but far beyond. Clearly, this was
a route the South African government could have taken. Had it done so, it
would have had to choose isiZulu as its vehicle, tried to encourage its
broadening into a sort of pan-Nguni language and given large-scale support
to it. But even to mention such an idea is to see its political
impossibility. For non-Zulus, this would be seen as nothing less than a
continuation of Shaka's forcible incorporation of vanquished tribes into
the Zulu nation. (Defeated warriors would be killed or enslaved and their
women and children forcibly integrated as slaves or concubines, so that
within a generation they all spoke only isiZulu.) Xhosas, who predominate
in the ANC leadership, would strongly resist, as would the branches of the
wider Sotho group (including Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana-speakers). It
would, in a word, reawaken the spectre of tribalism, of which the ANC is
terrified. It is clear why the constitution-makers took refuge in the
safer solution of 11 official languages.

That constitutional provision seems certain to guarantee the death of most
of the languages it claims to protect. Yet everyone is pretending
otherwise. At Stellenbosch, those who wish to expand the role of English
pretend it will not happen at the expense of Afrikaans, though it
certainly will. Tell isiZulu or Sotho-speakers that their languages are
under threat and may one day disappear, and they simply do not believe
you. Last year I attended the premiere in Durban of the touching film
Yesterday, set in the foothills of the Drakensberg where Aids ravages
black communities as badly as plague once ravaged London. The producer
Anant Singh told a rapturous audience how he had decided to "dump English"
and shoot the film in isiZulu with English subtitles. One Zulu luminary
after another, including the provincial premier, followed him to the
podium to emphasise this triumph of the isiZulu language and the vital
importance of promoting Zulu. They were all applauded to the echoyet every
one spoke in English.

Few wish to acknowledge what is going on. Point out that Nigeria has
adopted English as its official language, that China is launching whole
new universities with English-language instruction, that proficiency in
English has been made obligatory at the University of Maputo in next-door
Mozambique, and that South Africa cannot escape these trends, and you will
be met with a smile and much confident claptrap about our 11 official
languages, all of which are supposed to have a rosy future. It would be
almost unbearably painful to many South Africans to realise that this is
just not so, that a language which is the mother tongue of just 8.6 per
cent of the population is taking over completely and will gradually
exterminate most or even all the other ten languages. And one really is
talking of extermination. The ancestors of South Africa's 1m Indians
arrived here 120 years ago speaking only Indian languages. Today the last
university department of Indian languages has been closed down and very
few Indians can speak a word of Hindi or Gujarati. They are uniformly
English-speaking. The notion that African languages in South Africa are on
course to emulate the fate of the Indian languages has not yet struck
home. When it does, such an outcome will seem like a final triumph of
colonialism over African nationalism.

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