Last week The Mail & Guardian published a lengthy article from the respected South African scholar Hermann Giliomee defending Afrikaans-medium instruction at Stellenbosch University.
From the concluding paragraphs:
The university has made no real progress on transformation and has left the coloured Afrikaans-speaking community in the lurch. It runs the risk of alienating both its alumni and the government. The real beneficiaries are lecturers, who do not have to repeat lectures, and those English-speakers who don’t want to learn Afrikaans.
Afrikaans — and an effective form of instruction, particularly for students at risk — is the casualty. It is a great cultural tragedy that is unfolding. Not only the university but all of South Africa will be immeasurably poorer if Afrikaans is fatally weakened at Stellenbosch.
I do not disagree that Stellenbosch ought to be able to teach in Afrikaans. At the same time, one can understand the wariness in some circles. In the minds of many, Afrikaans was the language of white supremacy. And Stellenbosch provided the intellectual foundations for Apartheid. One need look no further than the precipitating causes of the Soweto Uprising to understand what Afrikaans instruction meant to a generation and more of young people. Furthermore, one wonders how Stellenbosch will ever be able to claim the mantel of being a world-class university if it limits its instruction to a language with a tiny population pool, thus limiting its potential applicant pool. In the end, Giliomee fears the death of Afrikaans as a living language. This is fair enough. But the problem with Stellenbosch trying to claim victim status is the university’s historical role in butressing Afrikaner Nationalism and the white supremacist policies that came from it. Perhaps this characterization is unfair, but one reaps what one sows. The university’s Afrikaans boosters are going to need to play the political game well to prevail.