Professor Wim de Villiers Professor Wim de Villiers
Leonie Overbeek
Dear Prof De Villiers
As a former chair of the Institutional Forum of Stellenbosch University, may I congratulate you and your management team for finally recognising that the issue of language as an exclusionary tool will not go away, and any resistance to incorporating measures to address the issue simply adds to the perception of Afrikaans as the language of the dominator and of the former rulers.
Your statement regarding the use of English as a means of communication within South Africa for all other languages rings true, and I think that to use Afrikaans and isiXhosa as requested and as support for students offers a compromise that can work. Of course, the logistics will have to be developed, and I’m sure many teething troubles await you, but the first step has been taken.
Speaking as someone who now teaches English in South Korea, I could, of course, be accused of having a vested interest, but that is disingenuous. English, as a result of forces set in motion during colonial periods, and by the creation of the internet in an English-speaking country rules de facto.
Whether we should be happy about that can, of course, be debated. And it is true that there was a period in South African history when English (and the English rulers) forbade the use of Afrikaans in schools and public communications. There was, at that time, also suppression of Afrikaners by the colonial powers, and we all know the outcome of the resistance at that time – the Boer War and its aftermath.
And here I come to the main point I wish to make: as an Afrikaner, it has always struck me as madness that from being the oppressed and knowing how that feels, as a nation, we so quickly adapted to being the oppressors, and being better at it than our former masters.
We coined a word that has become an epithet for racism. We killed and tortured and deprived people in the name of that racism.
We imposed our language on people, and worse; we did not even do that in a way that would make them allies. Instead, we schooled them in our language, and only enough so that they could do the menial jobs.
We ignored those whose mother tongue Afrikaans was if they did not have the necessary race qualification, and excluded them from all privilege.
Ons as Afrikaners dra die skuld, al het ons nie self enige skote gevuur nie, of enige koppe gebreek nie. Ons het nie ons stemme toe verhef nie, en dit beteken ons kan rerig nie nou eis dat ons spesiale behandeling moet ontvang nie. Inderwaarheid is ons uitstekend behandel deur die wat ons al die jare onderdruk het.
So, vir al die’ wat julle nou as verraaiers uitkryt, sela!