[lg policy] South Africa: Dark clouds over Matie centenary

Thu Mar 1 16:00:21 UTC 2018

 Dark clouds over Matie centenary
Hermann Giliomee |
28 February 2018
Hermann Giliomee says management has been relegating Afrikaans to a
marginal position on campus

*DARK CLOUDS OVER MATIE-CENTENARY*

The University of Stellenbosch (US) is probably one of the few universities
worldwide where the management is locked in a constant conflict with its
convocation of alumni.

At the same time there are few universities in the world where old-students
remain so loyal to their alma mater as in the case of US-alumni.

They see the US as an institution rooted in a very special university-town
with Afrikaans as medium of instruction and with graduates who have
excelled on a national and international stage.

As someone who studied at US and who spent roughly an equal amount of time
lecturing at US and UCT, I can testify that US is a very special type of
university with a distinct character, ethos and sense of belonging. It is
significantly different from other universities in the old British
Commonwealth. At the same time most of the English speaking alumni that I
know attach great value to their studies at Stellenbosch in Afrikaans
medium.

The special emotional ties with Afrikaans are strengthened through the fact
that the office of “Die Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal” (WAT), founded
in 1926, is located on the campus.

The WAT-office contributes to awareness of the fact that Afrikaans is, like
Heinz Kloss, a German linguist stated, the only non-European, non-Asian
language in the world to achieve university status.

At Stellenbosch the critical turning point arrived in the early 2000s with
the appointment of a new rector. Prof. Rolf Stumpf, who narrowly lost out
on the position, and then left to become rector at the University of Port
Elizabeth, declared that the existence and development of US were mainly
determined by the Afrikaans community and that no higher-level development
could occur without the Afrikaans community’s active co-operation.

Stumpf attached great value to diversity. He said: “I have always believed
that US should remain an Afrikaans university from a national-diversity
perspective – diversity clearly implies much more than just race and
gender. Language coupled with culture are also important considerations for
diversity.”

Instead, Dr. Chris Brink became US rector in 2002 after declaring to
council that a limited English offer could be imported, but that his “good
management” would ensure that Afrikaans remain the most important medium of
instruction. But he tried to manage the language policy without
language-proficiency conditions, rules and supervision, which predictably
led to the large-scale undermining of Afrikaans.

In 2006 Jean Laponce, a French-Canadian academic widely regarded as one of
the experts on the fate of minority languages, was asked about the future
of Afrikaans at US. He took one look at policy and then predicted:
“Afrikaans will survive on the US campus but only as a decoration.”

Nevertheless Afrikaans speakers continued to prefer Afrikaans. In the only
opinion poll ever that the US-management requested to be conducted by an
independent body (the Lawrence Schlemmer report of 2008), more than 80% of
Afrikaans speakers and approximately 40% of English speakers indicated a
preference for predominant Afrikaans medium tuition. Instead of using the
report as a basis for language policy, management allowed the intake of
English speaking students between 2008 and 2016 to double from 7000 to
14000 (nearly half of the total). The overwhelming majority were white.
Recruiters from UCT had little doubt that the flight to Stellenbosch had
much to do with fact that the traditional English campuses were becoming
increasingly black,

US not only took in increasing numbers of English-language students but
also dropped their demand that newly appointed lecturers had to become
proficient in Afrikaans before receiving tenure. In 2016 in the High Court
in Cape Town the US admitted that over 200 lecturers (between a quarter and
a fifth of the total) were unable to provide tuition in Afrikaans, The
university authorities also admitted that the university flouted its own
language policy.

Under Brink and his two successors over the past 15 years an ideology was
developed whereby management took upon itself the right to redefine the
identity and place in the community of the university, and radically change
the language policy.

They have tried to justify this by pointing to the fact that the university
contributes nearly one-third of the budget from the so-called third
money-stream (donations, contract work etc.). This argument is invalid. The
third money-stream is only made possible through using the infrastructure
which were erected with taxpayers money (Afrikaans speakers were until
recently the language group that contributed most to the tax revenue), and
the huge donation from Jannie Marais and several old students over the
years.

Management also espouses the view that it does not specifically have to
address the needs of the Afrikaans speaking community, nor has it any
responsibility to ensure the transfer of the Afrikaans culture. In reaction
to this John Coetzee, Nobel-laureate, wrote to me: “I fully support you.
Management’s policy does not even mention the word culture.”

In 2016 when the university revised its language policy, Fedsas the
governing body with whom most Afrikaans school boards are affiliated,
declared in a memorandum to US that its members in the Western Cape were
unanimously in support of Afrikaans remaining a fully-fledged medium of
instruction at US. Management ignored them.

Despite turning the US increasingly into an English medium institution
management over the past fifteen years have continued to issue the
assurance “Afrikaans is safe at US”. Some utterances boil down to openly
misleading the public. The current rector, Wim de Villiers, talks one year
of the precious position of Afrikaans on the campus, and the next year
during the official welcoming ceremony of first year students he does not
utter a single word in Afrikaans.

As a result management has zero credibility with regard to Afrikaans.

On 26 August, 2017 Beeld newspaper made the justifiable observation that
the process on the US-campus reminds one of how the late Harvard political
scientist, Samuel Huntington, described certain processes of reform. He
used the words “duplicity, deceit, faulty assumptions and purposeful
blindness”. This can be applied to the US of today.

Since 2002 the US Convocation of Alumni has been the only statutory body at
US that has demanded a solid, sustainable full status for Afrikaans. This
does not mean the exclusion of English, but rather that the medium of
English should not undermine and ultimately destroy that of Afrikaans.

The demand is motivated by the following considerations:

*Afrikaans is indisputably the most effective medium of instruction for
those with Afrikaans as mother-tongue.

*The large amount of Afrikaans schools in the province are dependent upon
teachers who have studied for their degree and teachers diploma in
Afrikaans.

*US has a special task of empowering brown Afrikaans speakers, who are
disadvantaged in tertiary education participation. They have the lowest
attendance rates of all communities and the regression started in 1990 when
the UWC flipped from Afrikaans- to English medium.

In September 2017 Mahmood Mamdani, a highly regarded Ugandan academic who
recently emigrated to the USA delivered the T.B Davie Academic Freedom
Lecture at UCT. He told the startled audience that the universities on the
African continent have failed to develop a specific academic tradition. The
exception was the Afrikaans-medium universities. In the course of the
previous century it was transformed from a language with a status little
higher than that of the other African languages on the continent to one
that became the bearer of a specific intellectual tradition. He expressed
his dismay that the ANC government did nothing to enable other African
languages in the country to attain this status. Sonja Loots, an Afrikaans
columnist who attended the meeting wrote: Mamdani caused consternation when
he looked his audience in their face and stated unambiguously: “Afrikaans
is the most successful instrument of decolonisation on the African
continent.”

It is a great irony that 56 kilometers away the University of Stellenbosch
was busily engaged in the task of relegating Afrikaans to a marginal
position on the campus as a medium of instruction and communication. The
year 2018 is supposed to be the year in which the university celebrates its
centenary. Instead it looks to become one of the darkest years in the
university’s history.

The movement *Gelyke Kanse* was created after the US-council approved a new
language policy on 22 June 2016, which was seen as a policy that would
quickly lead to the demise of Afrikaans as medium of instruction. The
management of the convocation and Gelyke Kanse believe that US has a unique
opportunity to establish a comprehensive bilingual university such as the
one in Ottawa, Canada and the one in Freiburg/Fribourg, Switzerland. We
live in a country with more than 7million Afrikaans home-language speakers,
and in the Western Cape half of its population and two-thirds of the brown
population have Afrikaans as a home-language. And where, furthermore, there
are no less than three English speaking universities within a stone’s throw
from US.

*Hermann Giliomee is a previous member of the US-council and a member of
the movement Gelyke Kanse.*

*A version of this article first appeared in Beeld newspaper. *
Sign up to our free daily headline newsletter
<http://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/subscribe>
<http://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/email-page?email_page_request=email_page&page_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.politicsweb.co.za%2Fopinion%2Fdark-clouds-over-matie-centenary&object=1657287>
Related Articles
Afrikaans is
<http://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/afrikaans-is-in-crisis-and-the-da-is-silent>

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

-------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20180301/872aa836/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list