Afrikaans is Our Identity, Unfortunately

I may not be speaking for all but I know for sure that I am speaking for many black (urban) kids like myself – one of the main characteristics of our country’s identity is the fact that many people speak Afrikaans and they speak it very well.

Our neighbouring countries know us best for being a proudly Afrikaans-speaking nation. Afrikaans is still the language of superiority in our country.

My issue with Afrikaans began with the reality of having to learn it at school. To this day I still don’t get why pupils in a new and free Namibia were forced to learn Afrikaans. My thought is that those who designed the first post-colonial education system should have made a plan to include other ethnic languages from the start. I can see how complicated a process of this kind would be, especially because of our diversity.

I can recall that only few schools in Katutura taught some ethnic languages. The majority of the schools only had Afrikaans as their second language. Although it was not the medium of instruction, it was still the language of superiority in the school and community. Those of us who spoke it with broken accents and could not read and write it very well were made to feel inferior. This developed self-hatred of our own languages. If I am not mistaken, this is still the case for many urban and even rural school set-ups.

We would learn about the 1976 uprisings in Soweto and still fail to question the place of Afrikaans in our schooling.

Afrikaans has successfully suppressed a lot of things that we are. It has been a huge destruction in the evolution of many black identities. Many black children who grow up in urban areas have limited knowledge when it comes to their languages and ethnic cultures. Actually in most cases, they speak Afrikaans better than their ethnic languages. Afrikaans is spoken with utter pride.

I am not sure if this is something we can be proud of. I am conscious that there are many people whom have Afrikaans as a home language but as I have noted above, I am speaking for blackness. I am speaking for all black children whose identity is more than Afrikaans.

We cannot deny the fact that Afrikaans forms a big part of the black identity and that it creates a displacement on emotional, physical and spiritual levels. This is something that cannot be changed overnight.

Nonetheless we should not allow Afrikaans to continue defining and dominating the black identity. Those days are over.

Processes of de-colonising the human mind have to do with re-claiming what was previously taken away from us. Our black languages have a lot to teach us about ourselves and where we come from.

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