Does Nzimande and the ANC regard the diverse speakers of Afrikaans as “foreign” to South Africa?
28 September 2021
The DA stands firm in defense of the truth that Afrikaans is an indigenous language following the latest cowardly attack on the speakers of the language by Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande. Responding to the DA’s complaint filed with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) yesterday, Minister Nzimande today defended his department’s Language Policy Framework for Higher Education, which hatefully and unconstitutionally classifies Afrikaans as a “foreign” language.
In a disgraceful manner, Nzimande went on to imply that the DA’s quest to rightly recognise Afrikaans as an indigenous language alongside other South African languages was somehow “racist” and would lead to “exclusion and oppression”.
Nzimande’s blind insistence that Afrikaans is “foreign” despite the indisputable scientific fact that the language developed in South Africa and is spoken almost exclusively in this part of the world begs the question of whether Nzimande thus regards the speakers of the language as “foreign” to South Africa?
Nzimande is clearly guilty of propagating that which judge Steven Majiedt warned against in his unanimous judgement reinstating Afrikaans at Unisa, whereby Majiedt struck down the “misconception that [Afrikaans] is ‘the language of whites’ and ‘the language of the oppressor’” as “an iniquitous portrayal of the language and its true roots”.