Colonies built on erasing language
South Africans’ failure to learn the vernacular is rooted in an enduring attitude cultivated by colonial rulers that they are too difficult to learn, writes Hans Pienaar
Mark Sanders’s rich and subtle book, Learning Zulu, is a real feat of transforming snooze-inducing materials such as footnotes to trial records, backstage frenzies at a school play and designing language manuals into a fascinating examination of the South African psyche. A significant development went unreported in 2016, basically because it did not happen. Whereas in 2015, the Open Stellenbosch campaign was a key part of the student uprising, the language issue plummeted down the #FeesMustFall agenda in the following year. It could be that the realisation dawned that the horse had bolted several years ago, that Stellenbosch was a de facto English-language university already, a safe space for white English-speaking students fleeing the "black invasion" at English-language campuses. But a key aspect in the student call for decolonisation — an insistence on local-language tuition — could also have brought home the realisation that campaigning for English at the behest of opportunistic...
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