Language Policy and Normalization in South Africa: Some Other Lessons

Author(s): John Trimbur

Source: JAC, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer 2002), pp. 646-657
Published by: JAC
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646 jac

Language Policy and Normalization in South Africa:

Some Other Lessons

John Trimbur

The scene is amen' s prison inKuruman, South Africa?one of the centers

of the recently closed-down asbestos mining industry in the Northern
MoffatMission. Founded in 1816by theLondon
Cape and thesiteof the
Missionary Society, theMoffat Mission was once an important outpost
of British colonialism, where Robert Moffat translated and printed the
Setswana Bible in 1857 (thefirsttobe published inAfrica) andDavid
Livingstonemade his firsthome inAfrica. Today, theMoffatMission
might be better described as an NGO, now under secular leadership, with
a range of programs to rebuild civil society in the new, post-apartheid
South Africa. One of these is the Phoenix Program, which conducts

voluntary art workshops and programs to assist the transition from

incarceration back into theworld for adult and juvenile prisoners. On the
day I visited, the threeworkshop facilitators had designed a sequence of
activities for adult prisoners to discuss stress?what it is, and how to
manage it.

South Africa and the Uses of Language

What I found so remarkable about the workshop was not just the

engagement of the twenty or so men and the skillful direction of the

facilitators but theway language was used. The men spoke freely and

unselfconsciously inEnglish, Afrikaans, and Setswana.1 They seemed to

pay intense attention towhat the facilitators and each other said, and they
seemed in general to understand, no matter what language was spoken.

Only once in two hours did someone request translation. Some prisoners
or Setswana,
spoke at times in English and at times in either Afrikaans
sometimes codeswitching in the same turn at speaking.
On the part of the workshop facilitators, Jane Argall made short
presentations in English. What was subsequently translated by Chalene
Pretorius into Afrikaans or Thenjiwe Manie into Setswana seemed
little
intuitively appropriate to themoment rather than systematic, with
on reproducing the exact words of the speaker. (The plan of the
emphasis
Phoenix Program is to have three facilitators, each of whose mother
Afrikaans, or Setwana?is one of the languages in
tongue?English,

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 Response Essays 647

use.) My sense was that Chalene and Thenjiwe were not so much

translatingfromEnglish as elaboratingthe themesof thediscussion in

Afrikaans and Setswana. And the same was true of their translations of
what themen said. As JaneArgall wrote me later, this strategy of language
use fosters "deductive powers and listening skills of participants and
facilitators?it promotes exposure to the other languages, therefore
aiding language acquisition."
English or either
The discussion, inotherwords, did not go through
of the other languages as a central relay point, to come out on the other
side as a rendered version. Instead, one or another language or a shifting
between languages emerged momentarily at the center of talk, only to be

replaced/by another language. The use of language was egalitarian in

status and distributive inmovement, with no trace of the hierarchical

unidirectionality I associate with translation inU.S. courts and medical

settings, where English, as the dominant language, is translated as the

official record. When itwas time to pass out worksheets, Chalene said to
give everyone copies in each of the three languages, for some of themen
might read one language, speak another, and write in a third.
My overriding sense of the workshop was one of languages in
multiple relations to each other, without a privileged language at the
center. The translation that took place had none of the character of a
temporary, transitional, stopgap measure until non-English speakers
have learned the national language, as is often the case in the United
States, where languages other than English are considered problems that
need tobe solved by elimination. In contrast, themultiplicity of languages
functioned as a resource, and theworkshop was composed by a circula
tion of languages, linguistic instruments to promote meaningful social
exchange.

Now, perhaps to note this particular use of language in theworkshop

is simply to acknowledge that South Africa is a multilingual society, in
which many of its citizens can speak or understand more than one

language. Setswana speakers at theMoffat Mission, for example, toldme

that they can "hear" Sesotho speakers but not necessarily speak the
language. A survey conducted by the Pan South African Language Board
(PANSALB) found thatmany South Africans can understandother
African languages, as well as patois, such as Flaaitaal and Isicamtho,
invented in townships and workplaces as bridges between language
groups. A PANSALB position paper estimates that isiZulu serves as a
lingua franca for seventy percent of the country's population (see
PANSALB's "Language" and "Position").

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648 jac

Forme, the linguistic resourcefulness of the improvised codeswitching

at the prison workshop confirms the strategic importance of a wider point
thatNeville Alexander makes about the relation between the language
question and national unity. According to Alexander, although the
common understanding is thatnations are groups of people who speak the
same language, the "crucial question" is "whether they have to speak to
one another in one particular .
.. All
language in order to be a nation.
that is necessary is thattheybe able to switchto themost appropriate
languagedemandedby a particularsituation"{Language 9). The problem
Alexander helps toclarifyhere isnot thediversityof languages inSouth
Africa (which, as we've just seen, can serve as an enabling linguistic
resource) but the dispensation of languages in a social order where

English is the language of power and less than half theAfrican language
speaking population can understand it.English has a long history of being
an official language in South Africa, but it has never been a national

language spoken, read, and written by themajority of the population.

I could see signsof thislinguisticgap between thepeople and a ruling
bloc thatis currently usingEnglishmainly as the languageof theSouth
African state and legal system at a meeting of the Asbestos Interest

Groups (AIG) held at theMoffatMission a few days afterthePhoenix

Program workshop. The AIG is a grass-roots organization in theKuruman
area concerned about the environmental pollution and the epidemic of
asbestos-related diseases (mesothelioma, asbestosis, and lung cancer)
leftby a cruelly exploitativeasbestosmining industrythatknew the
health risks tominers and their communities long before theywere forced
to shut down. At themeeting, Lundy Braun, aNorth American academic
working with the AIG, presented the results of village surveys on
respiratory complaints and employment histories conducted by theAIG.
Then James Sutherland, from a team of lawyers initiating a compensation
claim againstGencor, a holdingcompanythatowned someof themajor
asbestos mines, presented background information and a legal strategy
for pursuing the case. Both spoke in English, and their remarks and the

questions and answers that followed were carefully translated, over the
three hours of themeeting, into Setswana by indefatigable interpreters.
Those who attended themeeting were, tomy mind, invariably patient
and courteous while translation took place. appeared to
Their demeanor
confirm PANSALB's finding that "goodwill... prevents a greater level
of frustration in situations of language contact." South Africans, for the
most part, are "fairly flexible and generous in their reactions at the

language interface" ("Position"). Everyone at the meeting seemed to

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 Response Essays 649

acknowledge that therewas no alternative to translating the language of

power?of the academy and the state?into Setswana. And therewas no

question that translation served the interests of the local African lan
guage-speaking community. In the four months following themeeting,
with goodwill on both parts and the extensive use of interpreters, the

lawyers and the community negotiated the "language interface" to

produce thirty-five hundred warrants for the case against Gencor in

English, the language of the courts. Nonetheless, I could not help but note
at the time how the use of language at theAIG meeting differed
dramaticallyfromtheprisonworkshop in termsof therelationsamong
languages?the vibrant multilingualism compared to themonolingual
habitus of the state.

Richard Mar back's "Language Rights inSouth Africa"

These two instances of language use?the linguistic resourcefulness of
the prison workshop, on one hand, and the persistent traces of linguistic

imperialism at the AIG meeting, on the other?have influenced my

reading of Richard Marback's "Language Rights in South Africa: Les
sons for theUnited States." I agreewithMarback thatit is crucial for
North Americans to learn the lessons of South African
language policy,
but the lessons I draw differ in certain respects from his. These differ
ences hinge forthemost parton thedegree of confidenceeach of us is
willing to investin languagerightsconstitutedthroughthe legal system
and the discourseof law in South Africa. Along with Marback, I consider
constitutionallanguage rights an enabling framework. Such rights, how
ever, without active language planning that treats language as much as a
resource as a right, are inadequate to the task of
building a multilingual
nonracial South Africa.
Inmy view, language policy in South Africa is important as part of
a larger struggle against social inequality. The
anti-apartheid movements
of the 1980sarenotable fornonracialism,thedepthofmobilization of the
popular forces, and the relative influence of Marxism in cultural and
The tradeunions played a key part in the struggle
political formations.
against apartheidand accordinglyproduced a generationof politically
sophisticated militants with socialist dreams and class struggle instincts.
What Anthony O'Brien aptly describes as "visions of economic and
political democracy deeper than ballot box democracy, parliamentary
representation, liberal capitalism, cultural pluralism, and the Enlighten
ment discourse of rights" took hold in the liberation
struggles of the 1980s
and continued through the transitional years of the 1990s, with the

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650 jac

elections in 1994 of the first democratic government in the history of

SouthAfrica and thedeliberationsthatled totheconstitution of 1998 (3).
This sense of radicalpossibilitypersists in theyears followingthe
watershed election ofNelson Mandela. The national government is still
based on thealliance of theruling
AfricanNational Congress (ANC) with
theCongress of SouthAfricanTrade Unions (COSATU) and theSouth
AfricanCommunistParty(SACP) thattookover at thefallof apartheid.
South Africa in flux, in the process of nation-building,
remains the
outcome of whichremains to be seen. But time is running out, and the
forces of "encroaching globalization," as Marback puts it, are exerting
powerful pressures, from within and without the ANC, to normalize
relations of linguistic and economic dependence on the capitalist world
system(356).
For this reason, Iworry thatMarback's emphasis on constitutional
frameworks, language rights, and legal culture falls for what O'Brien
calls the "hypnotic normalizing effect of the commonsense present" in
South Africa?that it succumbs a
to myth of transformation thatmakes
the overthrow of apartheid and the institution of electoral politics,
constitutional government, and parliamentary democracy the end of

struggle(6). This isnot todeny thesignificanceof thegeneral increase

in personal freedom, civil rights, and the rule of law in the new South
Africa, as well as the reforms to provide healthcare, housing, electrifica
tion, and water supply that have taken place since 1994. What Imean is
that, in the area of language policy, to take at face value the fact that eleven
official languages are sanctioned in the South African constitution misses
the telling fact that the state,which used both English and Afrikaans under
apartheid, now operates for themost part inEnglish only, with few signs
of effectively developing theAfrican languages. As Neville Alexander
andKathleen Heugh put it,"The de factouse of English has become
apparent in virtually all government work both in its internal and external
communication"(30).While itis truethattheconstitutionalstatusof the
eleven official languages offers an enabling ground for language plan
ning activists, themasses of African speakers in the townships and rural
areas are limited in their access to the language of power?and thereby
limited in their access to public influence and economic opportunity. So
the opening lesson I draw from the experience of South Africa is that

languagepolicy shouldbe tiedtopopularparticipationinnation-building

as well as to a legal culture of language rights.
Furthermore, to draw lessons, as Marback does, from a comparison
of SouthAfrica and theUnited States (thoughcertainlya legitimate

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 Response Essays 651

strategy for understanding their notable differences and similarities) can

leadus tomiss thecriticallessonofhow thetwonationsand theirpolitical
economies are connected to a world system. In an important sense,
languagepolicy and nation-buildinginSouthAfricawill be determined
by how the country meets the political dilemma of post-independence
Africa, where repeatedly anticolonial struggles have resulted inneocolo
nial relations of linguistic and economic dependence. Pierre Alexandre
describes the linguistic situation in postcolonial Africa thisway:

On theone hand is themaj orityof thepopulation, often compartmentalised

by linguistic borders which do not correspond to political frontiers; this
majority uses only African tools of linguistic communication and must,
. . . have recourse to themediation of the
consequently, minority to
communicate with thismodem world. This minority... is separated from
the latterby thatmonopoly which gives it its class specificity: theuse of
a means of universal communication, French or English, whose acquisi
tion represents truly a form of capital accumulation. But this is a very
special kind of capital, since it is an instrumentof communication and not
one of production. It is nevertheless this instrument,and generally this
instrument alone, which makes possible the organisation of the entire
modem sector of production and distribution of goods, (qtd. inAlexander
and Heugh 16)

These relations
of linguistic dependence?where the majority must
depend on what Alexandre so acutely calls the "mediation of theminor
ity" (which we saw at theAIG meeting) and theminority on the colonial
institutions that produced them in the first place as a native elite?are
familiar features of aneocolonial class structure. They live out the effects
of a colonial hierarchy of language and a system of schooling that
assigned highest status to the European languages, giving them a taken
for-granted identitywith science, technology, and culture and generally
according toEnglish theroleof theglobal linguafranca.
While training
a smallblackAfricanelite inEnglish at thesecondaryand college levels,
colonial schooling limited the use ofAfrican languages as themedium of
instruction to the elementary levels.
As is true generally of African liberation movements, which drew on
metropolitan languages towage anticolonial struggle, theANC, from its
middle-class originin 1912 tothemass strugglesof the 1980s,alongwith
other black political has
long associated English with
organizations,
parliamentary democracy, reform, and civil liberties?a language of
rights compared to the segregationist nationalism of Afrikaans. At

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652 jac

decisive moments of struggle such as the Soweto uprising against

Afrikaans-medium instruction in the schools?the spark that touched off
the anti-apartheid movements of the 1980s?English figures as the
language of liberation. In turn, the underdevelopment of African lan
guages, carried out systematically from the colonial period through the
apartheidregime,hasmade itmore difficulttomobilize themultilingual
resourcefulness of Africanlanguage speakers and to tap, as resources for
nation-building, popular knowledges of science, technology, and culture
stored inAfrican languages.
I have indicatedthatthere is troublingevidence thatthede facto
monolingualism of theANC government reinforces relations of linguis
tic and economic dependence. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that
thewhile theANC tookofficeaftertheelectionsof 1994, itdid not seize
power.2 The anti-apartheid forces never captured the state. Instead,
through a negotiated settlement that was hotly criticized from some
sectors on the left, theANC inherited a colonial apparatus that remains
partly intact and continues in new forms to dispense neocolonial privi
leges to an English-speaking African middle class. The fate of language

policy in SouthAfrica will depend, inmany respects,on the struggle

against the normalization of a new version of racial capitalism in a
neocolonial setting under black stewardship. Though the ANC has
always been heterogeneous politically, with a sizable leftwing, its shift
inpolicy fromthepopulist goals of economic redistribution
and social
justice in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of
1994 to the neoliberal orthodoxy of privatization and structural adjust
ment intheGrowth,EmploymentandRedistribution(GEAR) programof
1998 is, on the one hand, a sign ofwilling accommodation to the pressure
of national and international capital and, on the other, a warning to the
SouthAfrican people thattheirsocial futureisbeingmortgaged to the
new world order.3
The discourseof languagerightsand "individualchoicesmade foror
against any one language" that you see inMarback's article and that, as
Kathleen Heugh notes, has become one of themajor languagepolicy
trendsin SouthAfrica, fitsall tooneatlywith thefreemarket ethos of
globalizing,pro-GEAR forces in theANC. Significantly, Heugh labels
this view of language as a human right a "laissez-faire . . .
approach
whereby all languages are accorded equal status in a declaration of policy
which is not accompanied by an effective strategy to implement the
rehabilitation of the status of African languages." The result, given the
prevailingpolitical economy,is that"Englishwill emergeas theeffective

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 Response Essays 653

language of high status, with the other languages afforded secondary

status." Without active language planning for functional multilingual
... of
ism, Heugh argues, "assimiliation Anglo-Western values" would
appear to be the inevitable outcome (331).
To counter the drift toward the normalization of English as a quasi
official monolanguage and the continuing underdevelopment of African

languages, language planning activists likeAlexander, Heugh, and others

associatedwith thecommunity-basedNational Language Project (NLP),
whichwas foundedbyAlexander in 1986,and theProject fortheStudy
ofAlternativeEducation (PRAESA), whichAlexander currently directs,
have presented proposals for language planning from below that seek to
reconfigure the relations among languages in South Africa.4
Central to these proposals is the acknowledgment that English, as
Chinua puts it, holds an "unassailable
Achebe position" in the former
British colonies in Africa, much as it does in India, Hong Kong, and
elsewhere. The task accordingly ishow tomake English a useful "linking

language" in South Africa, rather than the dominant language. For the
NLP and PRAESA, thismeans designingmultilingual education that
provides broad access to English as a language of wider communica
tion, while emphasizing home language maintenance. From works by
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Robert Phillipson, and others that analyze
the failure internationally of most English as a second language
programs togo beyond traininga native elite, theNLP and PRAESA
have taken the view that the spread of English toAfrican speakers will
be gradual and that it is of critical importance that English be taught
in a context of additive bilingualism that promotes continuing home
language use.5
The goal, in other words, is to replace the prevailing subtractive
bilingualism of unidirectional transition to English found inmainstream
ESL programswith a functionalmultilingualism thatmobilizes the
country's linguistic resources. To reach this goal, it is crucial that the
twentypercentwho speak English and Afrikaans, the longstanding
languages of power, learn African languages. And just as crucial is
maintaining instruction in African languages beyond the elementary
grades and extending their influenceby developing and circulating
instructional materials, books, and newspapers to schools, libraries, and
other public spheres. If anything, forAlexander, the "ideal solution" is a
"tri-focal one," inwhich students would maintain theirmother tongue,
learn a second language (English for African and Afrikaans
language
speakers and an African language for English speakers), and a third

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654 jac

regionally important language (whether Afrikaans or an African lan

guage, depending on the situation) (see "Language").

Toward a Functional Multilingualism

It is ironic,I suppose, thatthesereflectionson languagepolicyhave their
source at theMoffat Mission?a sign, no doubt, of the larger irony of
bothrelyon and
postcolonial SouthAfrica,where theforcesof liberation
struggle against the colonial legacy of language practices. The Moffat
Mission calls tomind theroleofmissionariesnotonly intraining
a native
elite but also in classifying African languages as separate linguistic and

political entities. The cultural authority of these linguistic divisions has

now been validated by the constitution and accordingly shapes corpus

planning activity in the post-apartheid period. From a language rights

perspective, this makes sense. Once eleven languages are officially
recognized, then itseems to follow that language planning should involve
establishing an orthodox lexicography to ensure the status of each

language. From the perspective of language as a resource in nation

building, however, current plans for eleven separate lexicography units
are, as Alexander and Heugh put it, a "logical extension of separate

development, not of a process which is attempting to knit together a

fractured society. ... At best itwould create a veneer of an elevated
status forAfrican languages. At worst itwill feed separatist and ethnic
division" (35).
As in other parts of the continent, British colonialism relied on a
divide-and-rule strategy in South Africa that laid the basis for the
ideology of separate development under the apartheid regime. The
British did not discover tribes inAfrica but in a very real sense fragmented
the indigenous population into colonial administrative units. Tribalism,
as Mahmood Mamdani puts it, is not just the result or the cultural
imaginaryof colonialismbut theactual formof indirectrule thatkept the
nativepopulationdecentralizedat thelocal level. InSouthAfrica, thisis
as evident in themissionary schools of the colonial period as in the
apartheid regime's Bantu education schemes that, as Marback notes,
"required that black South Africans be taught in indigenous African
languages as a way of preserving the languages of power, both English
and Afrikaans, for use by whites only" (356). It isno wonder thatAfrican
languages are associated with underdevelopment and restricted educa
tional and work opportunities. They have been employed cynically?for
example, in the apartheid regime's special language boards for each
African language?to disunify theAfrican masses by assigning peoples

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 Response Essays 655

and languages to separate homelands and thereby undermining wider

communication among Africans.
posemost sharplythe
The African languages,tomyway of thinking,
connection language policy and national unity in South Africa.
between
to expect that themasses of African speakers will be
If it is unreasonable
able soon to use English as a linking language, how then can language

planning draw on South Africa's multilingual heritage to promote mul

tiple languages of wider communication in order to expand popular

participation in nation-building? Perhaps themost controversial?and

audacious?proposal isAlexander's call to standardize thewritten (but

not spoken) varieties within language clusters, and in particular to
harmonizethelexicalandorthographic
developmentof theNguni (which
includes and isiZulu, the two most spoken African languages)
isiXhosa
and the Sotho language clusters by recognizing convergences that result
from language contact among varieties within the language cluster, as
well as with English and Afrikaans. In a sense, Alexander is looking here
to maximize in an economically feasible way the widelyapparent
linguistic resourcefulness of African language speakers in order to
develop literate means of communication for those currently isolated
from the colonial languages of power.
Part of the appeal of Alexander's proposal is that it shows how
language planning can overturn linguistic divisions imposed by colonial
ism, as has been the case with Standard Shona inZimbabwe and Standard
Igbo inNigeria. As Alexander and Heugh say, "The existing differences
between languages within the respective clusters, are partly an accident
of history in thatmissionaries from different religious orientations and
with differing levels of linguistic expertise were responsible for translit
erating different segments of the Nguni and Sotho speech continua
respectively, thereby creating what became 'standard' languages with
different centres of autonomy" (25). Instead of accepting these divisions
as fixed, as the approach of granting rights to and
preserving the eleven
official languages does, Alexander and his colleagues want to release
linguistic inventiveness as a way of unifying people across ethnic and

linguistic borders.
The South African constitution, as Marback claims, is an important
instrument in the struggle to deracialize civil society and institute a rule
of law. While post-independence African countries, including South
Africa most prominently, have made important progress toward these
ends, they have not been so successful, Mamdani points out, indetribalizing
at the local level. The history of separate development and decentralized

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 656 jac

despotism weighs heavily on postcolonial South Africa, and languages

continue to be racial and ethnic markers. Combine the history of colonial
ism and over fortyyears of apartheid with the contemporary pressures of
normalization and you get a situation conducive to ethnic separatism and
inter-ethnic conflict for scarce resources. There are real dangers in the
new South Africa, but there are crucial countervailing forces, too,
struggling to connect language policy to the antiracist and antitribalist
One of thepressingtasksof languagepolicy, as
work ofnation-building.
Alexander, Heugh, and others have noted, is to develop a functional
multilingualism inorder to delink South African languages?English and
Afrikaans as much as African languages?from their former identifica
tions with racial and ethnic enclaves by increasing their circulation and
their number of speakers.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Worcester, Massachusetts

Notes

1. Setswana is the language of theTswana people in theNorthern Cape and

neighboring Botswana. Afrikaans is creolized Dutch spoken as mother tongue
by the population of the former Cape Colony classified under apartheid as
"colorerd," the descendants of East Indian and African slaves who intermarried
with indigenous Khoikhoi and San and others. Afrikaans is also, of course, the
language of apartheid and Afrikaner nationalism in politics and culture.
2. For this point, I am indebted toNeville Alexander's Some Are More
Equal Than Others, especially the chapter "Negotiations and Struggle for
Socialism inSouth Africa." Alexander is correct, inmy view, to emphasize how
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 restricted political possibilities in South
Africa.

3. For an importantcritique of theANC's neoliberal economics, seeMarais.

4. For information about PRAESA, visit www.uct.ac.za/depts/praesa/
index.htm.
5. For a good introduction to this critical analysis of ESL, see Phillipson.

Works Cited

Alexander, Neville. Language Policy and National Unity in South Africa/

Azania. Cape Town: Buchu, 1989.

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-. "The Language Question." Critical Choices for South Africa: An Agenda

for the 1990s. Ed. Robert A. Schrire. Cape Town: Oxford UP, 1990.
126-46.

-. Some Are More Equal Than Others: Essays on the Transition in South
Africa. Cape Town: Buchu, 1995.

Alexander, Neville, and Kathleen Heugh. "Language Policy in theNew South

Africa." Culture in theNew South Africa: After Apartheid?Volume
Two. Ed. Robert Kriger and Abebe Zegeye. Cape Town: Kwela, 2001.
15-39.

Argall, Jane. E-mail to the author. 18Oct. 2002.

Heugh, Kathleen. "Disabling and Enabling: Implications of Language Policy

Trends in South Africa." Language and Social History: Studies in South
African Sociolinguistics. Ed. Rajend Mesthrie. Cape Town: Phillip, 1995.
329-50.

Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the

Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.

Marais, South Africa: Limits to Change:

Hein. The Political Economy of
Transformation London: Zed, 1998.

Marback, Richard. "Language Rights in South Africa: Lessons for theUnited

States." JAC 22 (2002): 355-75.

O'Brien, Anthony. Against Normalization: Writing Radical Democracy in

South Africa. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Pan South African Language Board. "Language Use and Language Interaction
in South Africa: A Sociolinguistic Survey." Pretoria, South Africa, Sept.
2000.

-. "PANSALB's Position on the Promotion ofMultilingualism in South

Africa: A Draft Discussion Document." Pretoria, South Africa, Feb.
1998.

Phillipson, Robert. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

www

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