Afrikaans an endangered tongue in the new South Africa

South Africa's Afrikaans language is perhaps best known for the term "apartheid", but for a new generation of Afrikaans-speakers the most important word in their lexicon is "jol" - to party. Tens of thousands of Afrikaners flocked to the Western Cape town of Oudtshoorn for a week-long celebration of their language at the Little Karoo National Arts Festival.

Now in its 11th year, the festival has become one of the most important events in South Africa's cultural landscape, offering a range of shows, from rock music to theatre, art, public debate and opera, all in Afrikaans.

Even the works of Shakespeare and Federico Garcia Lorca have been translated into the language that gave the world the phrase "slegs blankes" - whites only.

Not that all Afrikaans-speakers are white. The language is also the mother tongue for most of South Africa's 4 million-strong "coloured", or mixed-race, community, which is increasingly staking its claim to the language.

But most of the festival-goers were white Afrikaners and there was plenty of evidence that this was an ethnic minority that feared for the survival of its language and its identity. From being the dominant force in South Africa for much of the past century, imposing the system of racial segregation known as apartheid (separateness), South Africa's roughly 2.5 million Afrikaners have seen the tables turned.

Eleven years since the country's first all-race elections, South Africa's Afrikaners now complain they are denied jobs because of their skin colour and some are locked in a bitter struggle with the black-led Government over the right to educate their children in their mother tongue.

Afrikaans, derived from the Dutch of the first white settlers and influenced by the Malay spoken by imported slaves, was for decades promoted by the Government as the main language of white officialdom.

It sparked political outrage in 1976 when schoolchildren in the black township of Soweto protested against the forced teaching of Afrikaans in schools. The Government's response, in which police shot and killed one Soweto student, spurred escalating urban unrest which eventually persuaded South Africa's white rulers to abandon their power monopoly.

Now one of South Africa's 11 official languages, Afrikaans remains politically fraught. Some Afrikaners complain it is being replaced by English in schools and universities and on radio and television as part of a plot to eradicate it altogether, while indigenous languages such as Zulu and Xhosa benefit from government programmes designed to encourage their use.

At the Little Karoo festival, Afrikaners demonstrated a range of reactions to the new reality. Author Rian Malan, whose memoir My Traitor's Heart is one of the most widely read books about modern South Africa, made his debut at the festival as a song-writer with an ironic take on the plight of his people.

Audiences cheered Renaissance, a song named for President Thabo Mbeki's vision of economic prosperity in Africa, which describes the trials of a white man looking for a job in a country where it is official policy to promote opportunities for the "previously disadvantaged" - blacks.

"Afrikaans has become a lot more attractive now that it is no longer the property of the NGK [Nederlandse Gereformeerde Kerk, a conservative religious denomination] and the Nats [the former ruling party]," said Malan.

The waning influence of the straight-laced, conservative Afrikaner old guard was apparent in the popularity of a rash of irreverent Afrikaner rock bands.

Many Afrikaners feel they have much to apologise for, given the misery apartheid meant for the black majority, but are trying to divorce the language from its links with apartheid architects.

"There are still two factions [in Afrikaans]," singer/author Koos Kombuis said. "One faction wants to go back to before the Great Trek [the 17th-century migration of Afrikaners into the South African interior]. That won't work. We must build bridges."

But right-winger Dan Roodt, who heads an organisation called the Pro-Afrikaans Activist Group, said in a radio interview that the Mbeki government was waging a type of "ethnic cleansing" against Afrikaans. "We see it in the reduced role of Afrikaans in education and in the changing of the names of our cities," he said, referring to the scrapping of names, like Pretoria and Pietersburg, that celebrated Afrikaner heroes.

But other Afrikaans-speakers argued that rethinking the connection between Afrikaans, Afrikaners and Africa might prove the language's salvation.

"Who came up with the bad idea that Afrikaans belongs to white people?" coloured writer E.K.M. Dido asked at a public discussion. "This living flowing, flexible language with all its facets is mine, yours and all of ours," she said.

- REUTERS