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Mind your language — Kaaps to debut at Columbia University in New York City this year

Mind your language — Kaaps to debut at Columbia University in New York City this year
Chase Rhys. (Photo: Shelley Christians)
Karin Schimke
By Karin Schimke
26 Jan 2024
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Author Chase Rhys will be introducing the Cape-based language to students in New York City. 

Chase Rhys has a big job ahead of them: they are taking Kaaps to Columbia University in New York City this year.

Rhys, writer of the novel Kinnes and author of a collection of columns from Rapport newspaper titled “Misfit”, is one of a handful of writers who has claimed the once maligned and mocked language of their family and given it a literary status that was unimaginable in the previous century.

Now, they will take up a position as adjunct professor at the writing school at Columbia’s School of Arts. Rhys is a recipient of a six-week international fellowship through the Jakes Gerwel Foundation.

Kaaps has a long history. According to Adam Haupt, director of the Centre for Film Studies at the University of Cape Town, Kaaps is more than 500 years old and developed in encounters between indigenous African (Khoi and San), South-East Asian, Dutch, Portuguese and English speakers. The language was first taught in madrassahs and was written in Arabic script.

Kaaps is spoken widely in Cape Town, with most of its speakers concentrated in Mitchells Plain (though Rhys is from Ocean View near Kommetjie on the South Peninsula). It is most like Afrikaans, but it is not the language of white Afrikaners. It mixes freely and adapts from other South African languages, mostly Afrikaans and English; it elides and tweaks consonants, and easily forms new words.

Rhys’s identity lies squarely within the culture of Kaaps and the humour that is inherent in the language.

Chase Rhys Chase Rhys. (Photo: Shelley Christians)



“If I think of sitting in an auntie’s living room having tea with her and she’s telling me a story, even if it’s a terrible story, there is humour in it. It feels so natural. The humour is in the language and in its rhythms, and it’s embedded in the culture, so it is embedded in my work. Humour is part of my arsenal because it’s part of our arsenal as coloured people to just exist, to just survive, to be laughing.”

Another aspect of identity that is invariably remarked on is the choice to use they/them pronouns for the individual self. “I use they/them pronouns because I am agender. I understand gender, I know what gender performance is supposed to look like on the outside, but I don’t know what it feels like. When I look inside myself, I simply don’t find any natural sense of gender.”

Rhys’s pitch when applying for the programme at Columbia was titled “Narrative resilience: writing authentic stories of resilience and identity in diverse communities”.

One of the kinds of resilience Rhys has developed over the years is a chameleon’s ability to adapt to their surroundings. One of the markers of social flexibility is the ease with which an individual can inhabit a register in language.

Having been one of the first coloured children in a previously all-white school taught Rhys early that how they spoke where was critical to survival in divided communities. “I have had to split myself in two since I was five years old, but I’ve now built a career around translating worlds and spaces, especially in the Cape Town I occupy, and how those spaces collide and don’t integrate.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Finding one’s tongue: Why the compilation of the world’s first dictionary of Kaaps matters

“I have built this skill over a lifetime, translating these worlds to one another, being a bridge to the other. I have always said that I write very specifically and the more specific I am, the more universal it becomes.

“Going to New York and dealing with a truly universal group of people will give me a chance to test myself and see whether my work really is as universal as I claim. I’m going to be trying to translate the Cape Flats and my style and my voice to that community. It’s going to be an interesting challenge.”

Rhys’s life has been eventful in recent years. They were in the first Brussels to Karoo residency, run by the Jakes Gerwel Foundation with the Passa Porta Dialogue Programme for Writers, in 2019, a year after their debut Kinnes was released. Misfit appeared in 2022. Last year, their short dialogue Pil was performed at the Suidoosterfees.

Rhys is currently writing episodes for an international streaming series based in South Africa, while also still writing their column for Rapport.

“I was delusional before about making a living as a writer in South Africa. This is why I do all the things.”

Around the same time as hearing that they would be going to New York, Rhys announced on Instagram that they were a recipient of one of the 2023 Prince Claus Seed Awards that “celebrate[s] emerging socially engaged artists and cultural practitioners who harness the transformative power of culture to create lasting positive change in their local communities”.

“This is the life I live. An unbelievable life, now that I’m saying it, because I did not imagine myself to be a writer in 2017. For my life to be here now – to be talking to you — it’s all very bizarre.” DM

Karin Schimke is a writer and editor. She is a winner of the prestigious Ingrid Jonker Prize.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R29.

DM168 front page

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