The Afrikaans Language and Afrikaans Literature

What would it mean to claim that a language, any language, is singular, in the sense I have sketched in earlier chapters? The singularity of any language would be evinced not by a unique lexicon and set of phonological, morphological and syntactic rules that set fixed boundaries but by the practice of a group of language users in a particular historical, geopolitical and social context, a practice that is constantly changing as that context changes. Singularity in this sense implies not resistance to translation but openness to translation: since the language has no unchanging essence and no fixed boundaries, it invites translation – and is in fact always implicated in translation, from dialect to dialect, idiolect to idiolect, old forms to new forms, indigenous terms to borrowed terms, and so on.

The language I am focusing on in this chapter is Afrikaans. Afrikaans is spoken as a first language by just under seven million people in South Africa, and a small number elsewhere (principally Namibia). The larger proportion of these Afrikaans-speakers would have been classified under apartheid legislation as ‘Coloured,’ that is, so-called ‘mixed race’ peoples, living mostly in the Western and Northern Cape. Somewhat less than half speakers of Afrikaans are ‘white’ Afrikaners, for the most part descendants of early Dutch settlers with an admixture of later German and French immigrants. A small number of indigenous Africans speak Afrikaans as a first language. This makes Afrikaans the third most common mother tongue in the country, after the indigenous languages isiZulu and isiXhosa, but ahead of English – though English is spoken as a second or third language by a very large number and is the dominant lingua franca in urban areas.

These figures alone might suggest a fairly significant reading public for literary works in Afrikaans. But a large segment of the Afrikaans-speaking population lives in considerable poverty and suffers from inadequate education; the number who read fiction is small, and the number who read ‘literary’ fiction even smaller.