Nzimande's reaction to Afrikaans: Lazy, condescending and destructive
29 September 2021
The Afrikanerbond noted with concern the unsolicited statement today by the Minister of Higher Education, Dr Blade Nzimande, about Afrikaans.
Although Minister Nzimande acknowledges that Afrikaans is one of South Africa's eleven (11) official languages, he cannot, according to the statement, "allow Afrikaans to be used as a means of exclusion and oppression, nor as a means of pursuing a narrow and racist Afrikaner nationalist agenda as under apartheid."
Minister Nzimande has the democratic right to respond to the Democratic Alliance's complaint to the Human Rights Commission. His disdainful attitude to Afrikaans, however, is again demonstrated in the statement that Afrikaans "must be saved from a white right-wing agenda”. Hereby he is once again, like Panyaza Lesufi, unnecessarily turning Afrikaans into an ideological toy and a cheap electioneering tool.
In our statement on 23 September on the Constitutional Court judgement against the Unisa language policy, we referred to Section 29(2), of the Constitution. This determines that everyone has the right to receive education in the official language of their choice in public educational institutions, which, according to the ruling, also includes higher education institutions. To ensure this right, the state can consider all reasonable educational alternatives, including single-medium institutions, as long as such institutions meet the requirements of equality and reasonable practicability and address past discriminatory laws and practices.
Minister Nzimande chooses to get stuck in the past rather than take responsibility. It also seems that Dr Nzimande is not keeping up with the realities of South Africa. Language diversity is not something that can be viewed through an ideological lens and summarily dismissed. We are reminded anew of similar remarks by Nzimande in 2014 about Academia and Afrikaans universities and then, with reference to NWU, terms such as “Volkstaat” and apartheid enclaves were also widely used by the minister. Again, this indicates an underlying, deeply entrenched dislike of anything that is Afrikaans.
The ideological Nzimande prefers to restrict Afrikaans in a lazy way through English colonisation rather than find creative solutions for Afrikaans and other indigenous languages. These solutions require commitment, adaptation and understanding of language and language diversity. However, it seems that these words are not in the minister's vocabulary, and that he would rather have the country's rich diversity anglicised and thereby excluded rather than contribute something constructive to the protection and promotion of indigenous languages, including Afrikaans.
In his current position, it would benefit Dr Nzimande instead to engage with the broad Afrikaans community to try to understand the community's needs. It does not help to act condescendingly and destructively towards a language community from ministerial heights and especially not to demonstrate his eternal aversion to Afrikaans in this way.
Issued by Jan Bosman, Chief Secretary of the Afrikanerbond, 29 September 2021
