EFF WELCOMES THE DECISION BY UFS TO ADOPT ENGLISH AS A SOLE MEDIUM OF INSTRUCTION
15 March 2016
The EFF welcomes the decision of the University of Free State Council to adopt English as the sole language of instruction. There is no doubt that this decision did not come out of the wisdom and benevolence of council members, but students’ pressure through protests. Students have held demonstrations demanding that the institution abandon its dual language policy of English and Afrikaans, in favour of english.
Nothing marks the step towards transformation at UFS than this decision to abandon Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. This is because within the institutions of higher learning, as well as in many public schools in South Africa, Afrikaans has maintained segregation and racial privileges. As an institutionalised language, it has kept alive white supremacist cultural practices and given license to white right-wing groups to think it is legal and legitimate to be racist.
We commend all the students whose protests have brought the question of the language policy sharply into the university agenda such that it could not be postponed any more. We further call on universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria and UNISA to heed to the call that Afrikaans Must Fall as a step towards transformation of the university.
In addition, all colonial and apartheid statues in our campuses across the country must be removed, including symbols such as names and insignia. Our campuses must be freed from being centres that celebrate colonialists, mass murderers and their associated racist ideas. The insistence to keep Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, along with colonial statues and symbols, is a direct legitimisation of white supremacy and anti-black racism.
The EFF believes that a truly inclusive South Africa cannot be achieved with segregated class rooms in our universities, masquerading as promotion of languages. Any attempt to keep students separate from each other on the basis of language at a higher education and learning level is anti-intellectual, feeds to an oppressive pedagogy and results in one-dimensional beings who only know their cultures. There is no doubt that Afrikaans as an institutional practice has kept alive white supremacists who have culturally reproduced each other even at university levels.
A healthy learning environment is one where students and teachers meet each other beyond the worlds of their cultures to be challenged and to challenge others. The human spirit must never be imprisoned to any past, its cultural creativity must always evolve for the betterment of humanity as a whole. Afrikaans as a medium of instruction traps white students in cocoons of racism, dumbing them to believe in exclusive identities without being challenged.
The universities must also begin to consider curriculum transformation by redirecting research to questions that affect our country and the continent. Curriculum transformation will only be realised when the experiences of the continent are prioritised in all human and scientific research because out of these will arise new knowledges, disciplines and expertise.
Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, 15 March 2016
