Friday 24 June 1994
It gives me great pleasure to address you, comrades and friends, this evening, at your annual general meeting. As you may know, human rights issues are very close to my heart and language is, of course, fundamental to human rights in this country. So the work of the National Language Project in its efforts to rehabilitate the status of African languages and thereby influence the emergency of democratic language practice in South Africa is of great interest to me.
Our work at the Kempton Park negotiating forums has resulted in far reaching changes to language policy. The new constitution has significantly extended the rights of the nine African languages which took a very poor second place to English and Afrikaans under colonial and apartheid governments.
I emphasise that the new constitution extends existing rights. The old South Africa had already established that the nine African languages were used in restricted domains. These languages are now raised to an equal and official status at national level. The application of this new status effectively means that whilst neither Afrikaans or English may be diminished in status anywhere in the country, African languages may be elevated to official status at provincial and local levels where this is appropriate.
The constitution did not stop there. The languages of the other communities have also been given a special status. It is the responsibility of the Pan South African Language Board to protect and develop languages such as Hindi, Portuguese and Tamil. Community languages may even be proclaimed official at local levels. It is conceivable that Arabic could become an official language in certain local authorities within the Western Cape if so desired by those constituencies.
The new provisions for language policy were very much part of the ANC’s commitment toward ensuring that the South African society move into a pluralist phase in which the languages, cultures and religions of our many communities be given equitable recognition.
For example, at both the funeral of our much beloved Chris Hani last year and at the inauguration of the new State President this year, we called upon a broad range of religious leaders to pray according to different religious traditions as well as in different languages ranging from Xhosa through Arabic, Hebrew and Hindi.
These are public signals that we take the language question very seriously indeed, in order that strong messages are sent out to every corner of the country that the ANC and the new government intends to include all people, their communities, their customs and beliefs. No longer will the marginalisation or exclusion of people be permitted upon the grounds of race or any other equivalent in the domains of gender, creed or language.
You know as well as I do that language features as a central point of control in all sectors of both civil society and the state. Previously both English and Afrikaans acted as prohibitive gatekeepers, denying the majority of our people access to power as well as basic human rights in the legal system, in the health care sector, in education, in the economy as well as in the state bureaucracy.
The new constitution provides us with an opportunity to find effective mechanisms for the implemen- tation of the language policy. For instance, I am deeply concerned that the question be addressed in the legal system as speedily as possible. For too long have ordinary citizens been subject to the terrifying ordeal of dealing with the court situation where magistrates and public prosecutors neither understand nor speak African languages. The paltry and inadequate provision of under-resources court interpreters has made a mockery of the judicial system for the 87% of people who need interpreting in our courts.
It is for this reason that the new government welcomes the newly established South African Court Interpretation Officers and Allied Workers Union, in order that a strong lobby can insist that court interpretation acquire its rightful status. Only then will it be possible for adequate provision of interpreting services to be effected. In the past, interpretation and transition services were left to the State Language Services division of the Depart- ment of National Education. This body, in line with apartheid hegemony only concerned itself with the provision of translation and interpretation between Afrikaans and English, serving then only 30% of the population.
If we look at language in the health care sector it becomes only too painfully apparent that since the majority of doctors do not speak African languages and the state has never provided any effective interpreting services in this domain, the health care which does actually reach a small portion of our population is likely to be inadequate even for this small group. I understand that this question is being researched by the NLP and I am certain that your findings in this regard will be of great value to the new health care ministry.
Education has always been a visible site of controversy about language issues. Educational matters are naturally crucial to development far beyond the educational sector. If we want to change the fabric of our society and allow it to take on the process of democracy, we need to have the right conditions for the nurturing of a democratic environment. All children, thus, need to feel that they are equal when they enter the formal educational arena. They need to feel that their languages, their religions, their home environments, their home customs, and their parents’ occupations are all equally important. Then can they all thrive in the school environment and then can they share their knowledge’s equally and then, finally, might we be able to ensure equity for our children.
Obviously, this means in the immediate context that the hegemony of English and Afrikaans must be addressed. Your work in the NLP together with the language work of other NGOs, like the Early Learning Resources Unit (ELRU), The English Language Teachers Information Center (ELTIC), and Use Speak and Write English (USWE), amongst others, is really important in this regard. The valida- tion of African languages as important vehicles of communication can only be effected if they are taken seriously through the development of sound language and learning programmes in these languages. The state run departments of education under the previous governments clearly had no commitment in this regard. However, the transformative education work emanating from the NGO sector can now come into its own and must articulate with that of the present government.
Naturally the validation of our African languages in education will only be successful if it is supported in the economic and private sector. To this end, the South African Airways may need to reconsider its recent decision to adopt a predominantly English language profile. It was not the intention of the negotiators at Kempton Park that the private sector and parastatals take a soft and mainly monolin-gual option on the grounds that 11 languages cannot be used in practice. Creative thinking can turn around blind hegemonic practice quite easily and the 11 language policy can work in just about any sphere. With regard to the SAA decision, I understand that one of your trustees, Neville Alexander has suggested that on domestic aircraft, the languages of the region from which the flight originates be used. So that for example if a flight originates in Durban, Zulu and English might be used for that flight. In addition he has suggested that the aircraft safety procedures be video taped in the 11 languages and that passengers all have a choice of tuning their earphones into the appropriate lang-uage channel. What are you saying to people who don’t understand English if you don’t explain to them how to survive in the event of an aircraft mishap? If we don’t start looking at flexible language options the new language policy is going to remain little more than a statement of intent.
The head of the SABC board, Dr Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri announced this week that provision must be made for television news broadcasts in the 11 South African languages. Initiatives such as this will do much to change the practical status of African languages and this will have a positive spin-off effect on the real status of speakers of these languages.
We need to develop our trading partnerships with the rest of Africa and a reliance upon English as our language of trade is not going to be sufficient. A quarter of the African continent speak Arabic, another sizable proportion speak Swahili, whilst another large proportion live in Francophone Africa and the economies of two of our closest neighbors operate via Portuguese. So we are going to have to look seriously at another dominant languages of Africa as we fit into our rightful place amongst these countries. The narrow focus on English and Afrikaans is entirely anachronistic both from a domestic point of view and from an international one.
The new government has already made it quite clear that it is supportive of strong structures in civil society and particularly in the NGO sector. You have an important role to play in assisting the imple- mentation of the new policies set out in the constitution and you are in a position to act as creative generators of new possibilities for the rebuilding of our country.
I was heartened to not that at the recent conference of the Pan South African Language Board in Pretoria, the NLP, amongst others, placed language planning squarely within the framework of the Reconstruction and Development Plan. RDP is an economic and social plan which will allow NGOs, communities, business and government to work together to build a country strong enough an free enough to lead Africa into the 21st century.
For RDP to be successful we must address the question of linguistic accessibility. I can assure you that my ministry, which must work in both rural and urban areas, will be doing its part to assist in recon- struction and development, and language will be an important consideration.
Ladies and gentlemen, comrades. Thank you for the opportunity to share in you AGM. I wish you good luck with your venture.