Does Linguistic Diversity Unite South Africans, or Divide Them?
In 1994, after decades of Apartheid, South Africans rebranded themselves a “rainbow nation.” Paradoxically, though, racial unity came hand-in-hand with shattering any idea of linguistic uniformity. Today, South Africa has twelve official languages. The national motto is in an extinct one, to avoid giving offence to anybody alive. Linguistically, they make Switzerland look like France. But what does that actually mean in a country still defined by difference?
On a practical level, South Africa does have a uniting language. It has served as a lingua franca since Great Britain seized Cape Town during the Napoleonic Wars. For Dutch-descended Afrikaners it was easy to learn; for native Africans it was neutral, identified neither with rival tribes nor with the Afrikaners, with whom they had long and complicated relationships. As with everywhere else on earth, globalisation and modern media have helped English infiltrate every level of society.
However, less than 10% of people speak English as a first language. The most common languages spoken at home are Zulu and Xhosa (pronounced “kohsa” in English, or “!hosa,” with the ! representing a click), closely-related languages of the Niger-Congo family. They claim about 24% and 16% of the linguistic pie. In the states of KwaZulu-Natal (“KZN”) and Eastern Cape, respectively, they are the dominant languages of society. They are also by far the easiest native languages to use throughout the country.
But outside KZN, even a Zulu speaker would have a much harder time than speakers of a language with half as many speakers. Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch, having diverged in the centuries since the East India Company first started parcelling off sunlit plots outside Kaapstad (Cape Town) to retiring sailors, around the same time Englishmen first washed up in America.
At the time, South Africa (at least that part of it) had few native inhabitants. The ancestors of the Zulu and Xhosa were only just arriving themselves; as a nation, the Afrikaners have roots as deep as anybody else. The only exception would be the Khoi-San, small tribes who retreated into the Kalahari Desert, but whose idiosyncratic clicking was adopted by the Xhosa and Zulu and became a famous stereotype of African languages.
Today, Afrikaans holds the interesting distinction of being probably the easiest language for an English speaker to learn. It is a close West Germanic cousin, and generations of hardy Boers (Dutch for “farmers”) dropped frills like grammatical gender, verb conjugation, and word order complexities (a similar process befell Old English in the Middle Ages). Dutch, like English, distinguishes between wij, “we,” and ons, “us;” Afrikaners are always ons.
Today, Afrikaans speakers can pretty easily understand Dutch, but it is harder the other way. My Dutch friend told me she could understand about a third of what locals say. There are also cultural distinctions. Dutch is known in linguistics for having a profane vocabulary oriented around disease. But a Boer would not think to use kanker (“cancer”) as a term of derision, or tell someone to krijg de tering (“get consumption,” roughly equivalent to “f*** off”). By contrast, religious deprecations that hardly offend modern Dutchmen have shock value in rural South Africa.
The language has also been shaped by the African environment. Where English speakers might refer to “the tip of the iceberg,” Afrikaners see “the eyes of the hippo.”
Afrikaners make up about two-thirds of white South Africans, and they dominated the government in the Apartheid era. For four decades, they strove to impose Afrikaans as a national language. This went over fine with the coloured (i.e., mixed-race — it is not an offensive term in South Africa) community, for whom it is also the first language. But the black majority bitterly resented it. The 1976 Soweto Uprising, which got the ball rolling for massive global condemnation of Apartheid, began with students protesting a new requirement to learn Afrikaans alongside English.
Although Afrikaans saw its official standing diluted with the advent of multiracial democracy, it is still the country’s second language. Signage and public services are readily bilingual throughout South Africa; especially in rural areas, many people of all races are more familiar with it than English.
Its status may even improve, as its speakers make up a growing share of white South Africans. Unlike Anglos, who tend to have readier access to capital and backup passports, Afrikaners have no other country to call home.
South Africa still enjoys a veneer of well-ordered prosperity that sets it apart from the rest of the continent. Upscale waterfront neighbourhoods look like a nicer version of modern Southern California. But this unique good fortune is threatened by growing poverty and ethnic division, both of which are exacerbated by language differences.
In the last election, disgraced former president Jacob Zuma broke away from the African National Congress (which has ruled the country since 1994) to found a new party, uMkhonto weSizwe. The name, which means “the Spear of the Nation” in Zulu, was deliberately co-opted from that of the ANC’s terrorist wing in the Apartheid era. At that time, the party united blacks of all ethnicities. But as Mr. Zuma drew his support exclusively from his fellow Zulus, other Africans wonder which “nation” the name refers to.
The old government maintained minority rule in part by dividing black Africans, going so far as recognising major tribes as independent nations. Racist though they may have been, they knew their country. The former “Bantustans” coincide with today’s official languages. The genius of the ANC was to bring black South Africans together, but after three decades, the country shows signs of regressing to the sort of tribalism that is the norm in the rest of the continent. If you cannot even talk to your fellow citizen, do you really have much in common?
In times of economic hardship, it is natural for people to try and grab scarce resources for their own community. Germans and Greeks live much more comfortably than the average Zulu or Basotho (or Afrikaner), but the 2012 debt crisis nearly tore the Eurozone apart. If unity within and among racial groups breaks down, the result could tear the country apart.
The Xhosa and Zulu have their own kings, and each dominate a major state. The Basotho and Batswana (who speak Sesotho and Setswana, and of whom individuals are known as Mosotho and Motswana) each have closer ties to citizens of neighbouring foreign countries than they do with other South Africans. Lesotho and Botswana exist because the British sided with their chiefs against Boer interlopers, but lines on a map did not alter ethno-linguistic reality.
The obvious solution would be for everyone to learn one language. It is possible: for all their problems, pretty much everyone in neighbouring Mozambique speaks Portuguese. In Johannesburg or Cape Town, no one has a problem with using English as a lingua franca. But people (very much including the Afrikaners) bristle at the idea of relegating their cultures.
Trying to privilege one African language as a national one would be even more of a non-starter. With the exception of Tanzania, campaigns to do that have been at best ineffective, and at worst disastrous. Today, the vast majority of South Africans can theoretically access public services in their native tongues — but good luck getting help turning your electricity back on, even if you ask in English. Sometimes, a dysfunctional status quo is better than prising open Pandora’s box.
A cacophonous populace can be a problem, but it does not have to be. People from Switzerland to India are happy to live together, despite not sharing a language. In spite of its mounting problems, South Africa is not Zimbabwe, nor Yugoslavia.
The most useful word I learned in Afrikaans is lekker. In Dutch, it means “delicious,” but the boers have broadened it to apply to pretty much anything good. You can bid someone good night, for example, by wishing him or her lekker slaap (“lekker sleep”). No one can really predict the future, nor know for certain the best path forward, especially for a situation as complicated as that which South Africa faces today. But thankfully, one of their languages offers sufficient vagueness for us to wish them a lekker toekoms — a good future, whatever it may be.
