Language and South-African Literatures

Andrew Black has a very interesting post up on Southern Cross, in which he outlines his own list of definitive works of South African literature, and also comments on the ways in which apartheid worked to warp the contributions of different groups in literary terms.

I don't think Andrew's point about the stifling effects of the Afrikaners' identification with the goals of apartheid can seriously be disputed; a state of contentment with the way things are is hardly the most conducive mindset to the creation of work that spans both time and place. Apart from André Brink and Breyton Breytonbach, I can't think of any major literary figures who've chosen to write in Afrikaans as their preferred medium. Athole Fugard is at least half-Afrikaner, but despite his heritage, English has been his preferred medium; J.M. Coetzee, though of thoroughly Afrikaner antecedents, and in spite of his fluency in the Afrikaner taal, cannot plausibly be described as anything other than an English writer. All that said, it remains to be seen whether the new and (for Afrikaners at least) more interesting* era of black majority rule will act as a spur to an outburst of literary creativity amongst a people suddenly shorn of what seemed their God-ordained place at the top of the South-African heirarchy. Is Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf a harbinger of greater things to come?

Black South African hostility to Afrikaans as a language is also something that is very noticeable even today, and it's a feeling I can certainly empathize with. I know that I wouldn't be too eager to learn a language myself if it were as closely identified with the oppression of my people as Afrikaans is in the minds of South Africa's black citizens. As a factual matter, one consequence of reading William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as a teenager was that I developed a strong aversion to learning German which took many years to overcome. In a way, this proved to be a good thing, as I would probably never have bothered to study Japanese had I been interested in learning German earlier on, but I've come to believe that such an attitude is very much mistaken, whatever its appeal on an emotional level. Even if one continues to despise a people for wrongs its members have done to one (as will likely be the case to some extent for most human beings), the bottom line is that, barring genocide, said group is unlikely to go away, and so it pays to learn what one can about their language, even if only to better understand what the "enemy" is thinking. For example, despite being surrounded on three sides by millions of hostile Arabic-speakers, Israelis would be foolish indeed to neglect the study of Arabic simply because it is the language of the other side, so foolish, in fact, that the "despite" I used near the beginning of this sentence really ought to have been a "because." (And what does it say about the Arab world that so few Arabs residing outside Israel's borders display the slightest interest in learning Hebrew, or anything about Israel other than what little can be gleaned from Al-Jazeera's inflammatory broadcasts?)

White Afrikaans-speakers aren't about to disappear from the South African scene in our lifetimes, and if anything they're less likely to emigrate than those of their compatriots who are primarily English-speakers. What is more, if the example of other formerly officially privileged minorities elsewhere in the world is anything to go by, the Afrikaners' influence over South Africa's economic life will likely continue to be far out of proportion to their raw numbers for the forseeable future, whatever Thabo Mbeki may dream about black "empowerment" through aggressive affirmative-action and government-mandated firesales. As much as I identified with the black South African cause during the 1980s, I didn't actually live under apartheid myself, so I'm not in much of a position to preach emotional detachment on such an issue to those who did; even so, I'd still urge against a blanket refusal to learn anything about Afrikaans. It likely will prove a useful language to know for the foreseeable future, not just because of its usage by the majority of white South Africans, but also because it is the primary language of the "Coloured" population, amongst whom the ability to get along in English cannot be so cavalierly presumed as with white users of Afrikaans.

One thing that Afrikaans does have going for it is that it really isn't a difficult language to learn if one already knows English. As with English, and unlike all of the continental West-Germanic languages, nouns in Afrikaans have no gender; pronouns make no distinctions between case, nor do nouns have number distinctions; and in general, the grammar is a lot more regular than that of Dutch or (horror of horrors) German. Another good thing to be said for Afrikaans, and which also happens to be true of German, is that things are usually pronounced as they are spelled, which isn't all that true of Dutch, and far too often untrue of ye** olde Englishe language.

*In the sense of the apocryphal Chinese curse, that is.

**Actually, English never used "ye" for "the"; confusion arose on this issue only because "the" used to be written as "ðe", where "ð" is the archaic symbol for "edh", and is pronounced, as would be expected, just like the "th" sound in "the" and "weather." With the appearance of the printing press in Europe, typesetters lacking the "ð" symbol often press-ganged the letter "y" into service as a substitute, and the pseudo-archaisms to be seen on many a shop's signpost are just one more symptom of how badly English-language spelling has strayed from any correspondence with the manner in which words are pronounced.