Apartheid

236
quelling a riot. 559
Language commonly becomes one of the main battlefields of the liberation struggle
against apartheid. The Soweto uprising (‘riot’) of 1976 was sparked by the apartheid
government decree to increase the use of Afrikaans in schools, making it the mandatory
language of instruction in at least half of all classes. In Egypt, similarly, we know that many
Egyptians did not learn Greek. And we know that the Greeks mostly suppressed the Egyptian
language, although it was to some extent, for practical reasons more than anything else, also a
tolerated kind of resistance, in which the oppressed were occasionally allowed to let off
steam. Linguistic, religious and cultural strength of the oppressed masses are obviously less
disturbing to an oppressive ethnic minority than military, political, or economic strength
would be, but they are still disturbing. 560
8.2. What Sparked the Soweto Uprising
The official languages were Dutch (later replaced by Afrikaans) and English, all white
languages, until the liberation in 1994. South Africa today has eleven official languages, of
which Afrikaans and English are only the third and fourth most spoken languages at home,
respectively. (English is obviously the most widely spoken language overall, i.e. as a first,
second, or third language.)
In retrospect, it is a small wonder that the indigenous African languages were not
wiped out, like the ancient Egyptian tongue was, or at least made into marginalized minority
languages, similar to the surviving Native American tongues in the Western Hemisphere
today. On the other hand, African languages have picked up a great deal of European,
especially English, vocabulary. And the Khoisan language family as a whole was in fact also
on the verge of being wiped out under white rule. The linguistic diversity of South Africa has
no doubt suffered severely due to the coming and the staying of the Whites. They added two
new languages to the pre-existing mix, but they wiped out many more. Perhaps, then, a
millennium of apartheid in South Africa would have achieved what it did in Egypt.
The early white pioneers in South Africa and elsewhere in the world during this period
– a period still referred to by many conscious or unconscious eurocentrics as the ‘Age of
Discovery’ – embarked on the important task of renaming all aspects of the landscape in their
own tongue. They ‘effectively prised non-European people away from the land which they
inhabited, and once they had been textually removed from the landscape, it was easier to do so
physically [and morally] as well.’ 561
Obviously, language cannot be ranked alongside physical violence or repopulation as
an equally important factor of apartheid. But due to the complexity of human behavior and
human social structures, oppressive behavior with regard to language can be contributing
causes of apartheid and other kinds of ethnicist violence. Not only the names of landscape
features play important roles in such a process, but nearly every aspect of symbolism, as the
following comment, on the British oppression during the 19 th century of the Tswana people in
today’s South Africa and Botswana, bears testimony:
Colonizers in most places and at most times try to gain control over
both the material and semantic practices through which their wouldbe
subjects produce and reproduce the very bases of their existence,
no habit being too humble, no sign too insignificant to be implicated
in the battle. 562
559 Ibid: 231
560 Bowman 1996 (1986): 126
561 Gregory, D.: Geographical Imaginations, 1994: 30, quoted in Lester 1996: 10, words added by Lester.
562 Comaroff & Comaroff: Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, 1992: 236