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landscape we career through, and our language dynamics reflect all the hopes and hazards, and the contradictions, discords and harmonies that characterise our “rainbow nation”.
In 1996 the Constitution of South Africa accorded official status to eleven languages: nine indigenous Southern African languages spoken within the bounds of the country; isiNdebele, Sesotho, Sepedi (or Sesotho sa Leboa), siSwati, Xitsonga, Setswana, Tshivenda, isiXhosa and isiZulu, as well as two languages of settlers from Europe; Afrikaans, derived from Dutch, and English. The Constitution states that everyone has the right to use the language and
participate in the cultural life of his or her choice, and with reference to the indigenous languages, it states that “Recognising the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of these languages” (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, No. 108 of 1996, Chapter 1, Point 6).
Arising from the Constitution, our Bill of Rights ensures that speakers of all South Africa‟s official languages have equal language rights. These rights could be exercised by, for example, an employee insisting that she receives communication from her employer in her own language, or by students rightfully expecting to learn in their home language, or someone in need of services rendered by state offices requiring to be spoken to in a familiar vernacular language.
In practice, although indigenous African languages are spoken in the homes of 78% of the population (Statistics SA, 2001), their speakers almost never claim the right to have their home languages used in public spheres. In this phenomenon we follow in the wake of previously decolonised African countries, where “indigenous African languages remain confined to the cultural domains, much as they were in the colonial era” (Kamwangamalu, 2010, p. 4). Therefore, even though only 2 million of the total population of 50 million are of British descent2, English continues as the dominant language in the business world, politics and education, and prevails in the hubs of big business activity, particularly in and around Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town. Here, the dominance of English is massive, and indigenous languages are being displaced. First-language Zulu students at UKZN (the University of KwaZulu Natal), who garnish the Zulu they speak liberally with English terms and expressions, claim that they cannot understand what they call “deep Zulu,” the form used by people who live in rural areas remote from towns. By “deep Zulu” they mean a form relatively free from the influence of English, and rich in idiom and terms that most of the
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students consider archaic and inaccessible. The consensus in a class of approximately 30 post-graduate students (the B.Ed. Honours class of 2010) was that that this form of Zulu has come to be associated with poor, rural, unsophisticated people, and has therefore become stigmatised. Similarly, Heugh found (2009) that Xhosa students regard “deep Xhosa” as unattractive, and regard its use as restricted to rural people and academics (Heugh, 2009).
Afrikaans is the next most dominant language after English in influential discourse,
particularly in parts of Johannesburg and Cape Town, and in the towns and cities established by Dutch settlers when they fled English domination in the Cape and moved into the interior two centuries ago. Today, almost all Afrikaans speakers can speak English, and there is a shift in Afrikaans communities toward speaking English (Gough, 1996), but white English speakers, as self-assured as ever in our sense of distance and superiority, refer to Afrikaans areas as “behind the boerewors3 curtain”. Ironically, the Afrikaans community are the only language group who tend to claim their constitutionally guaranteed rights; it is from them that the bulk of complaints has been received by the Pan South African Language Board (Pienaar, 2008).
Given that, in the years when the apartheid government restricted the vote to white people, it could not have retained power without the voting support and tacit approval of a substantial portion of English speakers, it is unfair that Afrikaans was labelled so unequivocally as the language of the oppressor. English should share that label. However, perhaps because the worst aspects of apartheid were associated with Afrikaans-speaking politicians and state officials, and because in the famous 1976 school riots children demonstrated primarily against being forced to learn some subjects through the medium of Afrikaans, it alone carries this tag, and English is accepted the post-liberation lingua franca. The use of English by the ANC in exile, partly because exiled members came from different language groups, may have set a trend for this, but the social status of the language relative to other languages in South Africa makes it eminently acceptable as a language of power. This ready acceptance is frequently demonstrated, for example, by President Jacob Zuma, who, in spite of having styled himself as a “100% Zulu boy” in his political campaigns, continues parliamentary tradition by giving his state of the nation address at the opening of Parliament in English, with asides in Zulu, Sesotho and Afrikaans.
Part of the reason for using English is practical. Although many Black South Africans
understand only one indigenous language, across the country more people understand English
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than any other official language. Also, as de Klerk (1999, p. 316) suggests, the use of English as a lingua franca “disadvantages all indigenous language groups equally”. This might sound bizarre, but our lamentable track record in intergroup violence in the last few decades gives her statement perspective. Hence, as in many ex-British colonies that spanned territories of more than one indigenous language group, public communication is in the language of the ex-coloniser. The resource- and time-saving advantages of avoiding multiple translations is clear. However the irony of a previously repressed and exploited people not only readily accepting the colonial language, but according it high status in their liberated country, and thus, in Phillipson‟s words (2008, p. 6) “perpetuating the subordination of colonial times into the present”, remains.
English has high status across all communities. We English speakers take its status for granted with our customary casual arrogance, Afrikaans speakers sometimes seethe against it with grinding resentment, and in black communities the status is accorded with ready
recognition of confidently spoken English as a marker of high levels of education and sophistication. This elevated status of English in the perception of ordinary people, and the linguistic capital it carries, is evident in language practices such as the use of English by Zulu politicians to address Zulu communities. At a political rally near Durban during the build up to a general election, some first-language Zulu politicians spoke exclusively in English, although they were well aware that Zulu would be understood by all attending the meeting, and English understood by only a few (Chili, 2007 p. 76). This incident is a mirror image of another referred to by Bourdieu, (1991, p 68), where a French-speaking official won the respect of a gathering by addressing them in their own local dialect, thus demonstrating token solidarity with them. Bourdieu describes this as “a strategy of condescension”, used to gain profit. In the Zulu example, the politicians used English to profit by underscoring the social distance between themselves and the gathering, which would be considered a triumph in a context where escape from poor, marginalised rural communities is prized. According to Chili, who is himself a member of this community, the politicians‟ strategy was effective, and, in spite of being patently unable to follow what was said to them, community members expressed a high regard for the speakers who addressed them in English. Thus they surrender, apparently willingly, to what Bourdieu would term the symbolic violence of this
demonstration of unequal power between them and the politicians they vote for, and believe in the paradox that because the politicians decline to truly speak with them, they are the best to speak for them.
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In this surrender we see economically and linguistically marginalised people engaged in what Bourdieu termed “active complicity”. In Bourdieu‟s terms, they are dominated by the
symbolic power of the legacy of their colonisers, and they support the legitimacy of this power as well as the authority of the people who can exercise it (Thompson, 1991). In South Africa this belief and support has not been engineered in a calculated way, but rather it conforms to the pattern delineated by Bourdieu, and “impalpably inculcated, through a long and slow process of acquisition, by the sanctions of the linguistic market, and which are therefore adjusted, without any cynical calculation or consciously experienced constraint, to the chances of material and symbolic profit which the laws of price formation characteristic of a given market objectively offer to the holders of a given linguistic capital” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 51). As noted by Rapatahana in the introduction to this book, “Power is pervasive and omnipresent and insinuative; insidious and insidiously self-maintaining.” Indeed.
The interplay described above between politicians and rural communities exemplifies a fast developing new South African divide between the recently empowered and enriched South Africans, and those whose lives have not improved since apartheid. This echoes a situation only too common in previously colonised countries, and pointed to by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong‟o in Kenya, where members of a post-independence elite, to whom he refers as “comprador neo- colonial ruling elements” (Ngũgĩ, 1986, p. 22), use English to maintain their domination. In South Africa the development of these power relations are a direct contradiction of an optimistic prediction by Master (1998, p. 723-724) that “... when non-English-speaking countries that currently rely on English for modernization ... become strong enough to continue that progress in their own vernacular languages, for example, by inventing new terminology, English will be displaced, as will all those in the population who identify with it, and power will naturally shift to those who know (and identify with) the vernacular”, and that “the dominance of English will gradually give way to reciprocity and fairness”. In making this appealing prediction, Master failed to consider that among the powerful few of those speakers of the vernacular, there would possibly be some who were more interested in establishing and ensuring their own power than in sharing it, and they find English a useful tool for doing so. As Master also notes, “at the level of linguistic dominance, the power to advance is contrasted with the power to hold back” (Master, 1998, p. 717), here used in a way that few of us foresaw – a distressing situation where ordinary people are discovering that promises of liberation can be bewilderingly turned inside out. Many people who are now in
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the government seem to have changed direction, and they have started to use the tools of the colonialists for their own elite advantage.
As long-time political activist and respected language specialist, Neville Alexander stated, with reference to an English-only or English-mainly policy in South Africa, that such a situation:
- prevents the majority of the people from access to vital information and therefore from full participation in the democratic political process
- undermines the confidence of L2 speakers and, even more so, that of the vast majority for whom English is effectively a foreign language
- smothers the creativity and spontaneity of people who are compelled to use a language of which they are not in full command, and
- at the economic and workplace levels, it causes major and avoidable blockages that can have significant negative impacts on productivity and efficiency.
(Alexander, 2006a, p. 251)