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Kunapipi
XXIV: 1&2
SIMON LEWIS
If the Zoot Fits, Wear It: The Democratic Potential of Demotic Language
in Twenty-First Century South Africa
Post-apartheid South Africa is emerging politically
and economically as a kind of go-between — a relatively poor link
to the richer nations of the West (or North, or First World — however
one formulates them), and a relatively rich link to the poorer nations
of Africa. As such, there are at least two major forces operating on it:
forces pushing it to integrate as a player in a global capitalist order,
and forces driving it to lead a specifically African Renaissance. These
forces are not new, exactly; rather, they are exemplary of the problems
of all newly independent African nations caught between the rock of global
power and the hard place of national autonomy. In almost all cases, the
economic and political forces are reflected culturally by forces affecting
languages, forces that, on the one hand, draw African nations and individual
Africans to adopt `international' languages as their official language,
and forces that, on the other hand, draw African nations and individual
Africans to promote and preserve indigenous languages. In the latter category,
no one has more eloquently and passionately set out a case for using indigenous
languages as the tool for cultural assertion and ultimate liberation
than the Gikuyu Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong'o.1
However, while the economic and political forces operating
on newly independent South Africa may be similar to those operating in
Kenya and elsewhere in Africa, the linguistic battle in South Africa is
complicated by the presence of an indigenous hybrid, Afrikaans —
an indigenous hybrid with a long history as a written language, to boot,
producing both literature and laws, and thereby associated with the internal
colonialism and racial domination of apartheid. Although it might seem
counter-intuitive, this paper suggests that the best chance there might
be for a national language of the new South Africa might be deracialised
Afrikaans, a further creolisation of the language into what I am calling
`Zoot Afrikaans'.
* * *
There is an intriguing moment in Mickey Dube's 1998 film
of Alex la Guma's 1962 short novel, A Walk in the Night, where
the film-makers have conflated two scenes concerning language and foreignness
in South Africa.
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