An increasingly bitter debate is developing in South Africa over language policy at the country’s universities – notably Stellenbosch, the Alma mater of almost all cabinet ministers, prime ministers and presidents during the apartheid era.
The cudgels have now been taken up on behalf of Afrikaans by one of the country’s best-known historians, Professor Hermann Giliomee. He claims that a policy to teach some courses in Afrikaans and English at Stellenbosch, backed by a $3.7m teaching and language development programme, heralds the death of Afrikaans and will undermine Stellenbosch’s status as a “predominantly Afrikaans university”.
The South African constitution recognises 11 languages, including English and Afrikaans. It has been estimated that 13.3% of the population use Afrikaans as their “home” language and 8.2% English.
The country has 11 “traditional” universities, of which four are popularly thought of as English, three as Afrikaans and four as “black” (including the “coloured”, or mixed-race University of the Western Cape).
Stellenbosch’s vice-chancellor, Professor Russel Botman, defended the university’s dual-langauge policy, saying that it would help it to compete on a “globalised playing field”.
Writing a week after Giliomee’s piece was published, Botman acknow ledged the level of concerns about the greater use of English but said that the aim of the university was to promote Afrikaans as an academic language in a “multilingual context”.
“We want to make Stellenbosch more accessible to undergraduate students who are not first-language speakers,” he said, adding that the university had set aside $3.7m to support language training for teachers and students.
The racial overtones of the debate at Stellenbosch have been compounded by its coincidence with an incident at the predominantly Afrikaans University of the Free State.
Amid outrage the university’s new black rector, Jonathan Jansen, marked his appointment by dropping charges against four white students who had fed urine to five black members of staff as an initiation stunt.
Describing his decision as a gesture of toenadering (reconciliation), Jansen said the students, who had been suspended and charged, would be invited back to complete their degrees.
Almost overlooked in the fuss was the detail that Jansen also announced the introduction of compulsory courses in Sesotho for white students at the university – Sesotho being the predominant indigenous language in the Free State – as well as compulsory Afrikaans for blacks.
Source: Guardian