Where did this story that Afrikaans is a white person’s language come from?

My Athlone High School geography and English teacher Pat Wagner once (in the late 1960s) made the memorable claim that “a language belongs to those who speak it.”

Although institutional entities played a major role in adding value, language does not belong to those who fund the dictionaries and other means of codifying and documenting the etymology of words, or to the poets and writers of fiction, or to the non-fiction authors and journalists. No, by Wagner’s reckoning, language ownership is vested in not just some but in all those who speak it, and we must surely concur.

Born in Paarl, my first language is, unsurprisingly, Afrikaans. My mouth may open in English, but I tend to think in Afrikaans. I am told that on the rare occasion when I get angry, or want to make a really wicked joke, I staccato in Afrikaans. I love to listen to and really enjoy someone who speaks Afrikaans really well (and for that I miss Jakes Gerwel). I may even dream in Afrikaans, I cannot recall.

As Neville Alexander used to say, one’s mother tongue may get rusty, but it never leaves you. New York City, where I currently live, is a place of many languages but not Afrikaans, and I miss hearing it there.

I teach health security and diplomacy to graduate students at Columbia University, an elite Ivy League research university based in New York City. My students are surprised when I tell them that Afrikaans is not a white person’s language. That is not what they have learnt.

Recent research undertaken by the SA Institute of Race Relations confirms that over 50% of Afrikaans speakers are like me (of Indian slave, Malaysian and European descent), while 40% of speakers are, or think they are, of European descent. A significant number of Afrikaans speakers are black. Visit the Free State, the North West, or the North-Eastern Cape, and you will understand what I mean. Then read former Mpumalanga Premier Mathews Phosa’s poetry.

So here is the question: where did the story that Afrikaans is a white person’s language come from? Not a language historian by any means.

I recently gave an amateur account to colleagues from the UK and Canadian governments visiting to participate in two conferences on biosecurity and biodefence recently held in Cape Town. I took them to my hometown Paarl and, after explaining why Charles Darwin came all the way in June 1836 from the Beagle docked in Simon’s Town to stand on Paarl’s geologically world-famous granite outcrop, I directed their gaze to the architecturally peculiar Taalmonument as a backdrop to my story.  

I was proud to be from a town that published the first ever newspaper — on 16 January 1876 — in the Afrikaans language called Die Patriot. It was a major effort to steer the Afrikaans language away from what was pejoratively referred to as “kitchen Dutch” and drive it towards a refined and more literary destiny.

The people who did the driving called themselves Regte Afrikaners (Real Afrikaners), they were all white, and they saw their task as purifying the language by stripping out corrupting influences. No person of colour was included in these efforts, and how could they be? The pride was not to be shared. This was early clutching ethno-nationalism at work.

I told my UK and Canadian colleagues that the kitchen in kitchen Dutch was likely a slave one. The kitchens and households of the Dutch settlers and proto-Afrikaners were run by Javanese and other slaves picked up (as my maternal great-great Indian grandfather was) from the coastlines of Malabar, East and southern Africa, including as far south as Mozambique (remember the Mozbiekers from Pniel?).

Because of this history, Afrikaans has a significant Malaysian vocabulary (here is a sample — piesang for banana, blatjang for chutney, piering for saucer, baklei for fight). Certain words like trammakassie (thank you) you would only encounter in sub-communities of Afrikaans-speakers, mostly Muslim. These words, along with borrowed words from English and French, were considered impurities.

The Regte Afrikaners used Die Patriot to elevate Afrikaans and while there was nothing wrong in doing so, they racialised the effort along the way.

Kitchen Dutch is what coloured people spoke. It was looked down upon as a lesser Afrikaans, spoken by a lesser people. From the slave-run kitchens, Kitchen Dutch spread as a lingua franca into the coloured townships of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein and Johannesburg, and the many rural towns, especially in the Western and Northern Cape.