Ampie Coetzee
“The protest of the ‘Sestigers’ also became mine.”
My mother‘s parents were impoverished farmers, and my mother migrated to the city. She became a seamstress in a factory, and then she married my father, a mine worker and one of the poor white Afrikaners of the 1930s. I was born in 1939, and grew up in a working class environment.
With the aid of a bursary from the Department of Education I could study at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I specialised in South African Literature, particularly Afrikaans literature, which had then reached a peak of creativity, during the 60s. This generation of poets and prose writers became known as the ‘Sestigers’ (sixties). They were modernists in literature, and laterbecame post-modern – about the same time as post-modernism was the fashion in art and literature in Europe.
My political awareness came with the increasing knowledge of literature and philosophy. The protest of the ‚Sestigers‘ against apartheid and dictatorship also became mine. Although not a creative writer but as literary critic my involvement was quite close to the major Afrikaans writers of the time: André P Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, Etienne Leroux, John Miles, Jan Rabie etc.
Breyten, however, became my best friend. He lived in Paris, but came to South Africa in 1975 on a secret mission for an organisation attempting to overthrow the Nationalist government with its apartheid policies. He was arrested and sentenced for 9 years as a terrorist. He served 7 years. Some of us were involved at the beginning but not as dramatically and sad as Breyten, I was appointed professor at the University of the Western Cape, which was then an Afrikaans university of which students were the ‚Coloured‘ students of the Western Cape, whose mother tongue was Afrikaans. It was a radical university. Before I retired in 2004 this university was transformed into an English language university – and then my loyalty to that placed died; for now the poor people of the Cape Flats and the Boland – the high region of the interior – would have nowhere to go. In these parts of South Africa Afrikaans is the dominant mother tongue.
While still at UWC I was one of the Afrikaners invited (in 1987) to meet the ANC in Dakar (Breyten had been one of the organisers of this meeting). We were overwhelmed, happy and positive: these people were going to save us from apartheid and the National Party. During Nelson Mandela‘s term of office from 1994, it seemed that democracy had at last liberated us.
But when Mandela went the hope of a democratic South Africa died. The story of corruption, greed, incompetence is now well-known. The gap between rich and poor has became wider than ever before in this country. Education suffered; and the greatest sufferers were black learners. One of the main reasons for this deterioration is the fact that instruction in the mother tongue has not been encouraged. The Constitution of South Africa states that there are 11 languages in the country, and that they all have equal rights. But this has never been made into a law. The situation has arisen that English is the favoured language; that English has become the national language. Practically all the previous Afrikaans universities will become English – at the expense of the other 10 African languages. The majority of the population of South Africa will be forced to become English-speaking. If language is understanding, if language is identity, if language is communication there can be growth and one nation. But this will not be so in this country until people are educated in their mother tongue for at least the primary stage of education.
Mother tongue instruction has now become a passion in my life. I will become one of a group of activists, Afrikaans speaking Africans (black and brown and white), who will attempt to seek solutions so that tertiary education will become a reality for all languages. Afrikaans has developed an impressive literature and has the sophistication of other developed languages; and the challenge of reaching that level – especially in the most spoken languages such as Zulu and Xhosa – will be taken up. But there will be no support from a unilingual, broken-English, Government – excepting for the clichés of ‚one nation‘.