Jo'Burg Days: A New Language
"Is change always for the better,'' asks Barbara Durlacher in this thoughtful article about the haste to obliterate the Afrikaans language in South Africa, a country which one day may be known as Azania.
“This station is closing now, Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen, Goeie More Dames and Heere, Baaie Dankie.”
Every morning in the sunny sitting room at nine she heard these polite sentences, as the preliminary to the morning closing of the fledgling Johannesburg radio station. And just as regularly, her father, obsessed with his English roots, and his family’s much vaunted upper-class position, would rush into the room, and pointing a pretend gun at the radio say “Bang! Buy-a-donkey, yourself, you fool!” as he switched off the set.
His prejudice and snobbery were unshakeable. During her youth, despite Afrikaans being the second official language of the country and a young language with a wealth of colour and inventiveness and pithy sayings, he resolutely refused to allow her to learn to speak it. He subtly ridiculed and mocked the language, the people, their customs, music, dress and behaviour until the message was unmistakable, “Leave it alone, make no attempt to learn to speak it, and protect your language and racial purity at all costs.”
As it happened, living in Johannesburg with its cosmopolitan European population, and the infusion of many hundreds of new English immigrants who arrived at the end of World War II, there was little opportunity to converse in Afrikaans. In the richer northern suburbs and at the exclusive girl’s school she attended, only English was spoken, and not having any farming friends, or knowing anybody working on the mines where its use was widespread, the need and opportunity never arose.
Now, years later, after the country became successively a Republic, a semi-Fascist dictatorship, and then, after undergoing a miraculous transformation of power from a dominant minority-party state to a multiparty democracy, Afrikaans, its people, its language and its traditions, is fighting for survival.
Certain provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal (colloquially known as the “last bastion” of English Colonialism) have always been English-speaking, whilst the Cape Province has enjoyed a preponderance of a form of Afrikaans ‘patois’ very different from the purer Free State and Transvaal versions of the language.
The new ‘dispensation’ has many in-built reasons for disliking Afrikaans and all it represents in domination and subjugation of the black peoples, and a concerted effort is being made nearly eleven years after the change of power, to obliterate all Afrikaans names and associations, as well as remove anything which could possibly be linked to past history, or associated with subjugation of those deemed inferior to the white races.
Hence, we stand to see many of our historical names and associations swept away. Pretoria has already become ‘Tshwane’, Durban may change to ‘iTekweni’, hundreds of street names and public buildings with names politically affiliated with the last government are up for change, and there is even talk that the name ‘South Africa’ will become ‘Azania’ – such an ugly word and so harsh on the ear!
We have already lost ‘Transvaal’ which has become ‘Gauteng’, Orange Free State, which changed to ‘Free State’, and Natal which inevitably had to acknowledge it being the home of the Zulus by being re-named KwaZulu-Natal. The Eastern Transvaal, home of the world-famous Kruger National Park is now known as Mpumalanga, and nearly every other place name with Afrikaans connotations or anything considered demeaning to ethnic peoples, is now up for review and change.
The cost of these sweeping changes is enormous at a time when there are thousands of more urgent and vital calls on the public purse and endeavours: millions of people need adequate weather-proof housing, more millions need social security, education, medication for the overpowering flood of dread diseases and most important of all, employment, but these factors seem to be swept aside and overlooked in the over-powering desire to sweep away the past, and wipe clean the pages of history.
And in the process, Afrikaans is one of the victims, together with its long history and culture, its earthy and colourful language, which in a flash can change to one of poetic beauty and grace … sic transit gloria!
