Creolisation and Purity: Afrikaans Language Politics in Post-Apartheid Times

Abstract

Language politics about the Afrikaans language are at the heart of struggles over transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. Opposing claims and practices over standard Afrikaans and Kaaps, a vernacular spoken mostly by coloured people, emerge in the tense language debate at Stellenbosch. Contrary to the idea of a fixed and pure hegemonic standard language, the notion of creolisation has recently been drawn upon by coloured Afrikaans-speakers to express disaffection with nationalist and white imaginations of Afrikaans. From a historical perspective, ethno-nationalist mobilisation and racist exclusivism are related to a formerly dominant Afrikaner identity and the standard (white) form of Afrikaans. After the loss of Afrikaner political control, the language struggle at Stellenbosch University as part of a ‘Third Afrikaans Language Movement’ is represented as the defence of Afrikaans language and culture, driven by white language activists. In contrast, the non-ethnicised practice of language, particularly Afrikaans, but also English, among the coloured population, surfaces in academic debates, meetings, literature and the arts, such as the Afrikaaps musical theatre production and the 2009 Roots academic conference and cultural festival. A core question is then what the notion of creolisation signifies in this context. I agree with the Caribbean scholar Édouard Glissant that creolisation as ‘Relation’ may turn out to be an important heuristic resource for a progressive and inclusive cultural strategy. This implies that white cultural hegemony in the politics about Afrikaans and its relation to socioeconomic inequalities needs to be addressed.

Keywords:

• creolisation
• Afrikaners
• Afrikaans
• Kaaps
• language politics
• Stellenbosch University
• Afrikaaps

Notes

Social categories based on racist classification persist in the ‘new’ South Africa.

Afrikaans is shared between coloured and white speakers of the language. The standard form of Afrikaans, spoken by whites and middle-class coloureds, differs in important ways from the vernacular, mainly unwritten language (known as Kaaps) of the working-class coloured population, especially in South Africa's Northern and Western Cape regions.

A tertiary education institution in South Africa's Western Cape province historically associated with Afrikaner nationalism.

While a grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF) has made this research possible, the work is entirely my own responsibility.

‘Vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar that are at variance with a received “standard” are regularly dismissed, and a great divide is thus perceived between such a standard and all other “substandard” forms’ (Edwards 2009:65).

Edwards argues that ‘… “language movements” are energised by the symbolic and identity-carrying aspects of language, and very rarely by the language per se’ (2009:101).

Breyten Breytenbach had already expressed his critique of the link between apartheid and Afrikaans in 1973 by stating his rejection of what he called ‘Apartaans’. Other critics of apartheid also expressed their views on the matter, for example Johan Degenaar, the Stellenbosch philosopher who saw the need for Afrikaans becoming a language of liberation (Nash 2000).