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David Wanless
In a country like South Africa, several languages are dominant and many others are used by smaller communities. How is it possible to protect this diversity and to encourage the survival of wiords as ideas?
Most South Africans recognise Kole Omotoso’s face. He features as a somewhat shabby, but street-wise African in what is arguably the most successful recent advertising campaign in the country – for a cellular telephone service provider.
Far fewer know that the Nigerian born ‘actor’ is a Professor of English on the staff of the University of the Western Cape. In a recent article in Cape Town’s English morning newspaper (Cape Times - 27 July 1999), he lamented the popularisation of English as a global language. Professor Omotoso argues that, as English has increasingly stretched itself to become the language of science and technology, the less ‘it was able to handle human feelings without sounding fake, jaded or clichéd.’
His comments are timely, not just for the safeguarding of languages in the newly democratic South Africa, but also in the global arena where indigenous languages are in such marked decline. Perhaps more so than in many other countries, the whole question of language rights in South Africa is particularly fraught, given three centuries of intercultural confrontation which culminated in the heresy of apartheid.
Constitutional compromise
The early 1990’s were a period of negotiation which saw the ending of the hegemonic control of the apartheid government, whose members were predominantly white and Afrikaans speaking. This led, in 1994, to the country’s first free and fair election under universal adult suffrage, and the accession to power of the former liberation movement, the African National Congress.
During the negotiations, the ANC, together with some of the smaller political organisations, had proposed that, like Namibia, which became independent in 1990, English should be the sole official language. The National Party, along with other more extreme right-wing Afrikaans organisations, refused even to countenance the proposal, which would have ended the status Afrikaans had hitherto enjoyed, with English, as an official language.
The result was essentially a constitutional compromise, and consensus was reached that all eleven major languages spoken in South Africa would have the status of ‘official’. There are many who welcomed the entrenchment of language rights in the new constitutional dispensation that was agreed upon. In this way, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Siswati, Xitsonga and Tshivenda were elevated to the status of official languages. The protection of all eleven languages was given formal legal safeguard with the enactment, by Parliament, of the Pan South African Language Board Act (Act No 59 of 1995), which was amended on 23 February 1999.
There is a considerable body of opinion however, which considers this seemingly inclusive policy to be flawed. South Africa, with a population of over 42 million, has at least 1 million citizens of Indian and Pakistani extraction. No official status is accorded to Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and other languages of the Indian sub-continent. Neither the Constitution nor the Act offer any protection to the languages of the original inhabitants of what today is geographic South Africa – the !Khoi and the San, referred to in the past as the Hottentot and Bushman people.
Still others lobbied against the exclusion of South African Sign Language from the legal provisions of the Board. Requests for recognition were also received from the Baputhi Language Programme, the Northern Amandebele National Language Organ-isation and a group identified in the Board’s 1998 Annual report simply as Valovedu. From the outset, the sceptics had a field day, suggesting that the Board would have an impossible task ensuring that road signs were correctly displayed in all eleven languages. The potential for disorder was nowhere more acutely experienced than in the field of broadcasting.
From the inception of radio in the 1930’s and television in 1975, only the Roman Catholic and ‘mainline’ Protestant churches were allocated broadcasts. The only exception was the Jewish faith, whose major festivals were broadcast live from synagogues four times a year. Until 1994, the South African Broadcasting Corporation enjoyed a near total monopoly in broadcasting, and was firmly under government control. A process of transformation began in 1993, within which it was agreed that, as the public broadcaster, the SABC had a duty to give airtime to all major faiths.
Only the die-hard traditionalists had difficulty with the principle that each major faith community should be allowed broadcast rights in proportion to each membership, as reflected in the national census from time to time.
The practicality proved to be more difficult to implement than the theory had been to devise. Combining religious equity and encouraging language diversity produced a virtually insoluble conundrum. With the public broadcaster statutorily required to offer radio and television services that reflected the language demographics, the SABC maintained separate radio services for all eleven language groups.
The difficulty came in trying to decide, for instance, how many Jewish Xhosa speakers or Muslim Venda speakers there were, and how to allocate religious airtime equitably to each language group. Neither the SABC nor the PANSALB have been able thus far to establish a clear policy
A language policy for the whole of South Africa
The Pan South African Language Board, established under the Act, is charged with:
- ∑ creating the conditions for the development of, and equal use of, all official languages;
- ∑
- ∑ fostering respect for and encouraging the use of other languages in the country;
- ∑
- ∑ encouraging the best use of the country’s linguistic resources, in order to enable South Africans to free themselves from all forms of linguistic discrimination, domination and division, and to enable them to exercise appropriate linguistic choices for their own well being as well as for national development; and
- ∑
- ∑ developing the previously marginalised languages.
- ∑
- The Act laid down how the Board was to be constituted. It was to include practising language workers - an interpreter, a translator, a terminologist or lexicographer and a literacy teacher. It also provided for the appointment of three persons who were ‘language planners’; five persons with special knowledge of language matters in South Africa; and one expert with legal knowledge of language legislation.
If we allow that such bureaucratically restricting requirements are theoretically sensible and legally necessary, implementing the theory has once again proved problematic. In its 1998 Annual Report, the Board highlights that fact that it is under-resourced. All Board members serve in an honorary, part-time capacity. Its only income in the 1997-8 financial year was a government grant of 1.65 million South African Rands (equivalent at current exchange rates to 160,000 pounds sterling) – hardly a sufficient amount to carry out its extensive mandate.
The report notes, inter alia, that ‘Due to lack of staff, the sub-committee could not implement its plans for a national language awareness campaign and a week-long festival’. It does, however, reflect genuine attempts to interact with official bodies such as the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. It has also actively co-operated with the Department of Education, in promoting home language instruction in the school system.
The Board organised a Consultative Meeting on Translation and Interpretation on 11 & 12 June 1998. It was attended by over 250 delegates, including resource persons from Kenya, Malaysia, Australia and Sweden. A sub-Committee has been formed to establish a database and liaise with tertiary institutions on the status and development of African language programmes.
It is in this area that the Board’s greatest challenge and potential for endeavour lie. Although not yet dealt with formally in its structures, two anecdotal incidents can highlight the enormity of the problem.
Newspapers and academic journals occasionally report the fact that the languages spoken by South Africa’s earliest inhabitants – the !Khoi and San - are threatened with extinction. Researchers in the Kalahari desert area are engaged in a process of recording the lexicography of one particular !Khoi dialect, of which there is only one surviving speaker, whose estimated age is in the 90s. A group of San, whose origins in the !Xu and Khwe tribes of southern Angola are lost in the mists of time, have been caught in the changing political dispensation of southern Africa.
They supported the Portuguese army during the colonial years in Angola. The group then aligned themselves with the South African army during its campaign against the then liberation movement SWAPO, which fought for the independence of Namibia. Unable to remain in Namibia after independence, they are now settled on land within South Africa, 18 kilometres from the diamond-mining centre of Kimberley. The Johannesburg newspaper the Star, in its edition of 13 July 1999, reports that the Bathlaping tribe has lodged a claim to the land. It quotes an expert on San culture, one Major Charles Hallet, as saying that they are ‘a tribe staring extinction in the face as modern values absorb tribal customs. Their complex language with 2,000 sound combinations will also eventually disappear.’
The report further indicates that 2,000 young people out of a total population of 4,400 ‘are part of the Nike and T-shirt era. This is very worrying to the tribal elders, who fear absorption by other cultures and the extinction of an ancient people. It is a form of ethnic absorbing rather than ethnic cleansing’ Hallet concludes.
The death of ideas
The author’s wife was a junior schoolteacher at the Red Cross Children’s Hospital School in Cape Town. In the process of teaching short- and long-term patients, she had to give instruction in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa. She was not particularly disturbed at the use of English by the children learning computer literacy. In addition, Afrikaans is a language that developed from the original Dutch and has, over three centuries, diverged from the original due to the incorporation of many African and English words.
A worrying trend for her was that Xhosa speaking children regularly, and seemingly without thinking, did not use the Xhosa words, but rather indigenised English words to denote common objects. Thus, instead of using the word for fish – ‘intlanzi’ – they would refer to a picture in a lesson book as ‘iFish’ or ‘iLion’ instead of ‘ingonyama’. In addition, they, along with speakers of other languages who are part of the McDonald’s generation, consider ‘thru’ as the correct way to spell through. The extinction of Xhosa is a long way off compared to the situation of the !Khoi and San languages referred to earlier, but the same process is at work.
Ultimately the problem is not simply one of words, but of ideas. As Eugene Nida noted some years ago: ‘Words are symbols, par excellence.’1 When we consider the disappearance of ancient languages, we are grappling with the possible death of the ideas that words, as symbols, convey.
South Africa’s then Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki, understood that truth well when he addressed Parliament on the occasion of the adoption of the country’s Constitution:
‘I am an African’, he said. ‘I owe my being to the Khoi and San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape – they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen. I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new life in our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me. In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mpephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom’.
He continued: ‘I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image.’2
South Africa has embarked upon a process of re-discovering its rich history and the diversity of its people, their languages and ideas. The Constitution acknowledges that we will refuse to accept that our race, colour, gender or historical origins shall define our Africanness. We are committed to celebrating our diversity, and the establishment of a Language Board to safeguard and promote linguistic diversity and heritage is just one small step in that larger process.
In this age of globalisation where English, and in particular the Americanised version, is being so widely disseminated by film, television and radio, we need to retain our ideas which are clothed in other symbolic words. No one language can ever wholly capture the totality, or smallest nuances, of the human experience.
Professor Omotoso’s words in his critique of English are salient. He posits the thesis that ‘English has abandoned religion, spiritualism, truth – human concepts which used to be understood before the arrival of Western civilisation.’ Those who promote the universalistion of one tongue ‘forget that the languages we are asked to abandon are not just words but the bearers and containers of knowledge. Knowledge from which the world should benefit. What faiths and languages of value have controlled our earth till now? And next, since their gods have failed, may ours not yield forgotten ways that remedy?’
The words of a traditional San song come to mind:
‘The day we die
A soft breeze will wipe out
our footprints in the sand.
When the wind dies down,
who will tell the timelessness
that once we walked this way
living in time?’
David Wanless is an ordained minister who has worked professionally in the media. He was announcer/producer for the SABC English radio service for four years and has broadcast on radio and television in South Africa and Zimbabwe for over 25 years. He is former director of communication for the South African Council of Churches (SACC), editing its publications Kairos and Ecunews. He is currently co-ordinator of the Ecumenical News Network southern Africa and media officer of the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa.
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