THE STORY of afrikaans
The birth of the white Afrikaner nationalist movement was marked by the establishment of Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (GRA) in 1875. This was some 200 odd years after the language had been evolving as a bridging language amongst the European, mainly Dutch settlers, and the imported Malay, Indonesian and Malagasi slave population, as well as the local indigenous Khoi and Hottentot populations. At the start there was some resistance to the establishment of GRA from both English and Dutch speaking settlers, the latter taking particular offense to the abandonment of high Dutch as an official language as they considered Afrikaans to be a ‘hotnotstaal‘ - a ‘pidgin language’ reserved for communicating with the slaves and the lower classes.
There is a side to the Afrikaans language, the creole birth and coloured connection that has been overlooked in our collective South African consciousness. While the Dutch heritage cannot ever be denied in Afrikaans, it must be acknowledged that it was also shaped and molded by the influences of the Khoi and Malay slaves. An immense amount of research exists by scholars like Vernie February and Achmat Dawids on the specific contributions of early inhabitants of the Cape to the development of what we generally don’t know as Afrikaans. Important facts, such as the first Afrikaans school ever established was at a madrassa at 37 Dorpstraat in 1806, and that the first books ever written in Afrikaans were transcriptions of the Koran, one of the best examples is Uiteensetting van die Godsdiens, by a Kurdish imam, Abu Bakr Effendi in 1869.
The role of indigenous cultures and the slave population in forging the Afrikaans language has generally been excluded from our history books. The Apartheid era not only historically excluded brown Afrikaners, but also left the language with the stigma of being used as a tool of oppression by the former white minority regime. This has compounded the identity of brown Afrikaans speakers who to some degree are historically dispossessed from their own language.
September 30th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
You need also to acknowledge the contribution of those who lived on missionary stations, such as Genadendal, Mamre, Elim and all the others. The first Teacher Training College was established at Genadendal and they published a number of books in which the early traces of Afrikaans is clearly identifiable. This happened long before the GRA started to publish books in Afrikaans. Genadendal played a major role in education of the ‘coloured’ people, until the College was closed down by the colonial powers who were against the education of ‘coloureds’. Afrikaans is however reclaimed by many who’ve been subjected to second-hand citizebship during Apartheid, also those who now speak English, because they recognise it as part of the heritage and their unique identity.