“Nothing wrong” with banning “exclusionary” Afrikaans, says SU management
7 September 2021
The DA today reveals new evidence which indicates that the management of Stellenbosch University (SU) secretly feels that there is “nothing wrong” with prohibiting Afrikaans students from speaking their mother language in residences and on campus.
At the same time that SU rector Wim de Villiers was trying to do damage control after the DA originally revealed the prohibition on the use of Afrikaans in residences and on campus in early March, the director of student affairs, Pieter Kloppers, was telling student leaders at the Minerva residence that there was “nothing wrong” with the prohibition on the use of Afrikaans.
The DA obtained this latest information after we submitted a request in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) to access a report by Deloitte into the alleged ban on Afrikaans. The report indicates that Kloppers met with members of Minerva’s house committee on 9 March 2021 after first-year students complained about being banned from speaking Afrikaans in the residence, in their rooms and even on park benches.
According to the Deloitte report, Kloppers told student leaders during this meeting that they “were not doing anything wrong” by enforcing an English-only policy. Following this admission by Kloppers, members of the committee were reportedly “upset that, despite knowing that Minerva had not done anything wrong” by banning Afrikaans, “SU had not come out to support [them].”
On the same day, first-year students were also told that, during the so-called “welcoming period,” there was “an expectation that English would be spoken, and that SU expects that English would be spoken.”
The report further reveals that student leaders at Minerva already decided on 4 March 2021 to instruct first-year students that they should “pack their bags” if they spoke “an exclusionary language.” According to the report, Afrikaans first-years were repeatedly threatened that they would be excluded “to promote inclusivity.”
It is also striking that the Deloitte report explicitly recommends that “students should be advised of the language rights enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, including the fact that all official languages should enjoy parity of esteem and equality.” In a statement about the Deloitte report, SU management however chose to ignore this recommendation entirely, which obviously indicates that they are not planning to implement it.
This recommendation by the Deloitte report is also in line with the DA’s demand that the SU must make it clear in their revised language policy that no person may under any circumstances be prohibited from speaking the language of their own choice. SU has thus far refused to make this commitment, which serves as further evidence that the management is not interested in protecting the language rights of non-English-speaking students.
The DA believes that the SU’s decision to ignore this evidence and recommendation further erodes the legality of the SU’s proposed new language policy because it aims to simply perpetuate the practices of the 2016 language policy – which led to a range of violations against Afrikaans-speaking students. The DA continues to prepare for possible litigation against this transparent effort by the SU to eradicate Afrikaans at the institution.
Issued by Leon Schreiber, DA Constituency Head: Stellenbosch, 7 September 2021
