INSIGHT: Lesson to be learnt from varsity Afrikaans debate

I am all for transformation. Starting tomorrow. No‚ starting today. Which is why I believe Stellenbosch University should remain Afrikaans.

I didn’t watch the Luister video posted on YouTube. I didn’t have to. I know all too well of the anger and frustration of black people in Stellenbosch.

I know what it is to take a black friend into a bar and see hairs bristling on the necks of white‚ Afrikaans patrons. Every time I go to Stellenbosch I am disappointed by an incident of naked racism straight from the old times.

I believe the fact that a plaque honouring HF Verwoerd was only recently removed from Stellenbosch University is a crime against humanity. I don’t understand why there still is a hall named after DF Malan.

Clearly Stellenbosch and the university still have a long way to go to eradicate the vestiges of apartheid.

But I also didn’t watch Luister because‚ as a journalist‚ I could not take its model seriously‚ especially when one of the makers declared they were foregoing “this texting thing” for social media.

Writing in the print media‚ one suspects‚ would have entailed getting some balance‚ also posting accounts about the many ordinary encounters people have in Stellenbosch where race simply doesn’t count.

Far better insight can be gained from the debate on Litnet‚ the Afrikaans literary website run from Stellenbosch. Participants pull no punches on the racism‚ also not the open anti-white sentiments expressed by Open Stellenbosch members.

Certainly‚ as a piece of activism Luister has been wildly successful‚ and has created a model for the future.

Instead of ineffectual Facebook petitions one should gather two dozen or so angry people‚ have them make statements for YouTube; cast this in a racial framework; allude to Afrikaans as a symbol of privilege, and you will have the ear of parliament.

Hopefully we can do the same with the nuclear debate (Afrikaners ran Pelindaba you know)‚ or fracking or saving the rhino (Afrikaner hunters hey).

Looking beyond the video‚ though‚ the demands that Open Stellenbosch blares out are not only wildly emotional and impractical‚ they are also taking the transformation debate into completely the wrong direction when they call for Stellenbosch’s full anglicisation.

What is it we want from transformation? Surely it has to be placed in the context of our crises here and now‚ as recently demonstrated by the figure that 66% of South African children grow up in fatherless homes. And surely one question should dominate the conversation: why is the key to lifting us out of the poverty underlying this calamity – education – in such a mess?

Many analyses have been written‚ but there consistently seems to be an avoidance of the one deep deficiency staring us in the face: language. Most teaching is being done in an English that much too often is utterly inadequate‚ by too many untrained teachers who have a disdain for their own languages.

The ruling classes keep on analysing SA in terms of dated and pseudomarxist class concepts‚ but I see a neat division between the suburban elite‚ of mixed race‚ from the rest who are overwhelmingly black and live in apartheid townships and former homelands. It is a deep‚ near insurmountable division established through a very simple mechanism: competency in English.

That English is less exclusive than Afrikaans is a fallacy. Read why in the book‚ Exclusionary Empire‚ edited by Cambridge professor Jack P Greene.

According to Greene’s book‚ the British empire’s colonial exclusions were often justified by the outsiders’ inability to adhere to a set of libertarian principles,  whatwe would today call human rights. Rights-based politics is the most democratic and most efficient but it can be used to exclude those who place a higher value on tradition‚ socio-cultural safety nets, the pleasures of ethnocentric life.

The Anglo-American empire began peaking from the 18th century‚ during which local peoples and cultures were systematically exterminated or subjugated into slave labour. In the 21st century‚ the knowledge economy is overwhelmingly Anglocentric.

The robotising global IT industry is sucking in technicians and others based in technology-driven disciplines who speak English. And that is why calls to Anglicise institutions‚ in South Africa and elsewhere‚ can be read as entrenching the global status quo.

Anglicising our education will only boost the stream of South Africans of all races leaving foroverseas. The good English provided by apartheid took nearly a million Afrikaners and their skills out of South Africa, not their Afrikaans.

There are people who do know how to promote local vernaculars: Afrikaners. Developing Afrikaans came with much sweat and tears‚ culminating in its acceptance as a language only in 1925.

How do we get Afrikaners on board the transformation train? Simple: bribe them. Not with monetary guarantees‚ but with cultural guarantees. Make a deal that you would allow the universities of Potchefstroom and Stellenbosch to stay Afrikaans in exchange for setting up institutions dedicated to building the linguistic infrastructure needed for local African languages to thrive educationally‚ using Afrikaans as the model.

Give them a little more money and then demand that they spend 10% of their total budgets on this.

Such institutions would help produce teachers to run schools in local languages where pupils are taught mathematics and all the other subjects in their mother tongue. I am willing to bet that hundreds‚ if not thousands of Afrikaners from all over the world would rush over to take part in such a project‚ both as a way to ensure the survival of Afrikaans

and to assuage the guilt that a great many of them do feel over apartheid.

Another part of the tradeoff could be to demand an initiatory programme to teach all students that Afrikaans is not a white‚ Eurocentric language as racist Afrikaners believe‚ but one created by black and Asian slaves and labourers.

However‚ I don’t see this kind of solution being pursued. Many in SA’s elite seem quite happy to lord it over a divided society where the non-English excluded are a reservoir for cheap manual labour.

And a government with South African Communist Party members in the advance guard‚ will always need the conversation to be in English‚ because their ideology can only be practised in a European language.

Meanwhile‚ Open Stellenbosch and its supporters’ linkage of race with language is herding Afrikaners into a new laager where racism will only end up being reinforced.

• Pienaar is a writer. His latest book is the novel My China. This article first appeared in Business Day