Perth Radio: Afrikaans on air in a faraway land
Oppiestasie radio presenter Erika von Kaschke says people admit to crying when they hear Afrikaans on air in Australia
Soft-spoken and thoughtful, Erika von Kaschke looks like the wholesome girl next door. But she is living far from her Karoo origins in Perth, Australia, where she runs an Afrikaans radio station, Oppiestasie. The mother of three recalls that when she was a little girl growing up in the Tankwa Karoo, she used to say: "When I grow up I want to be a tannie wat op die draadloos praat." She never wanted to leave SA and, a decade ago when she was living with her conservationist husband in Cambodia and then in Australia, she was terribly homesick. "I used to think, ‘I have this love for my people, what am I doing in Australia? I don’t want to be here’," she recalls. "And I thought of the things I love and I made a list. One of the things was Afrikaans. "Afrikaans is so poetic, it is almost like a language of passion which people don’t always get. If you want to be driftig, Afrikaans is the language for it. If you want to say something really strongly, be quite fiery, then you can say it in...
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