By Tswelopele Makoe
GENDER activist and author Rita Mae Brown once exquisitely said: “Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.”
The conversation around language has been a deeply contested one, since President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Bill, which aims to amend certain sections of the South African Schools Act (SASA).
The BELA Bill essentially gives the government complete oversight and ultimate authority over the official school language and admission policies.
This means that the ultimate decision-making authority over a school’s language policy will no longer be solely controlled by the School Governing Body (SGB).
Afrikaans schools in particular have been the centre of the dissension surrounding the BELA bill. They have arduously claimed that the bill is a governmental attempt on the erasure of the Afrikaans language and culture. In response, the government has maintained that the Bill will actually make education far more equal and accessible.
Our society, in particular, has a history steeped in racial and linguistic tensions. During the rule of the heinous apartheid regime, indigenous languages were systematically excluded and deemed inferior, and Afrikaans was forcefully imposed as the exclusive lingua Franca.
In the post-apartheid era, English, Afrikaans, and all of the other official languages of our society were underscored as equal before the eyes of law and entrenched in our nation’s Constitution.
However, this does not mean that there has not been the exploitation and malicious use of language policies by schools in our democratic society.
The relationship between language and power continues to be widely felt across societies, particularly where admission policies, the language of instruction (learning), and linguistic resources are concerned.
Schools and universities in post-apartheid South Africa continues to impose an imperialistic system of exclusion and discrimination, driven by language policies that have been – until recently – left in the hands of school governing bodies.
Essentially, in Afrikaans medium schools, these exclusions have tended to present themselves in the form of prompt rejections of non-Afrikaans speaking learners, and outright punishments for the use of non-Afrikaans languages - both inside and outside of the classroom.
Sans Souci High School for Girls in Cape Town penalises their learners with a range of demerits (negative credits) and various other offences, if they are caught speaking isiXhosa, or any other native language.
Stellenbosch University (SU) has been widely criticised for decades, for their discriminative language policies.
SU, a historically white Afrikaner institution, has been spotlighted for their exclusive use of Afrikaans, despite the school claiming to uphold a combination of Afrikaans and English languages.
This means that numerous non-Afrikaans speaking students are forced to learn in a language that they neither speak nor understand.
In my own personal experience, growing up in a non-Afrikaans speaking household meant that I was forced to attend crèche (pre-school) over 20km from my home, even though there were over 10 crèches within 5km of my home – all of which were exclusively Afrikaans-speaking.
This is the harrowing experience of hundreds of thousands of children across the nation, both then and now. This type of language barrier and system of exclusion is exactly what is being addressed by the BELA Bill.
President Ramaphosa and the government should be applauded for addressing this pertinent issue in society.
Afrikaans schools and their school bodies have been scrambling in light of the BELA Bill, claiming that the bill is an attempted erasure of their language and culture within society. This, however, is a multilingual, multicultural, and multi-ethnic society.
Though we are forced to maintain the English language as a medium of communication, solely for practicality’s sake, it is high time that we defend the 10+ other indigenous languages with the same ferocity that has been given to English and Afrikaans.
It is vital that we acknowledge the diversity of languages within our society and address the amalgamation of these languages at a fundamental schooling level.
Every year, approximately 2.7 million children (under the age of 6) enter crèche, or some kind of early learning programme. Roughly 1 million others, within the same age group, do not attend any type of early education, particularly those in impoverished areas.
The most significant challenge faced in schools is the issue of language. Children coming from various cultures and households are often not familiar with outside languages, particularly at an early stage in the schooling system. This creates a multitude of problems.
Outside of proper comprehension of the curriculum, this can negatively affect cognition, communication, confidence, creativity, and social cohesion.
In fact, in recent years, a disturbing dilemma has come to light - that 81% of grade 4 learners are definitively illiterate, meaning that they cannot read, write, or meaningfully comprehend the content of their curriculum.
Dr Robyn Tyler, a senior researcher at the University of the Western Cape, stated that the “majority of African language speaking children in South Africa learn in their home language for the first three years and then switch to learning in English in Grade IV.
Children have hardly had the opportunity to establish literacy skills in their home language when they are forced to learn in and through English.”
This year alone, SA recorded the highest matriculation pass rate in over a decade, standing at 82.9%. However, this fails to highlight the 490 000+ learners who never made it to matric.
Our nation, one of the most unequal societies in the entire modern world, has been naive about the importance of language in driving education and empowerment. In fact, the issues of language in education are deeply rooted in the political and economic systems that continue to drive inequality across the nation.
This issue of language and its relationship to literacy has always been a dire issue. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o discerning asserted that language is “the most important vehicle through which that [colonial] power fascinated and held the soul prisoner”.
Nelson Mandela reflected this sentiment when saying: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
It is vital to ensure that, in a nation of 12 official languages, language is used as a means of access, not exclusion. The implementation of the BELA Bill is undeniably addressing a long-standing challenge in our education system, rooted in the abhorrent practices of the apartheid systems.
Any exclusionary practice within education must be done away with. We have a responsibility to confront the challenges that face our society today, and to address them swiftly and effectively.
If there is any sort of exclusionary practice within our education system, it is not only a societal problem, but also an issue that directly opposes the spirit of inclusivity and access, that is enshrined in our country’s Constitution.
It is therefore incumbent upon the government to redress any defects that lie in our systems, no matter when they are realised.
The implementation of the BELA bill is an attempt at levering the playing field and ensuring that school governing bodies do not play hopscotch with the lives and futures of our future generations.
Frankly speaking, nobody should be opposed to this bill, and the challenging of the rambunctious racial and lingual exclusions that are still pervasive across our society.
A truly ethical educator will always speak to the power of inclusion and equality, driven by language in our education systems.
The education system in South Africa continues to need a revamp, in all parts of the structure. This bill will be beneficial to ensuring the acknowledgement and inclusion of various languages within schooling systems.
In a multilingual society such as South Africa, languages are not only a deep aspect of our identities, but they are also a hub of knowledge deeply rooted in our history and heritage.
For far too long, we have undermined the value and power of indigenous languages in our society. When everyone understands something, and can adequately express themselves, no matter the language, it will always make it easier to empower individuals and advance meaningfully in our society.
American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior once eloquently accentuated the importance of language in education, asserting that “language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and, out of which they grow.”
* Tswelopele Makoe is a Gender & Social Justice Activist and the Editor at Global South Media Network. She is a Researcher and Columnist, published weekly in the Sunday Independent, Independent Online (IOL), Global South Media Network (GSMN), Sunday Tribune and Eswatini Daily News. She is also an Andrew W. Mellon scholar, pursuing an MA Ethics at the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, UWC. The views expressed are her own.