DA files HRC complaint against Blade Nzimande for classifying Afrikaans as a 'foreign' language
27 September 2021
The DA has today filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) against Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande over his hateful and unconstitutional insistence on defining Afrikaans as a “foreign” language in South Africa.
The DA’s complaint to the HRC follows from the Constitutional Court’s recent judgment in the Unisa language case, which codified into our constitutional law the fact that Afrikaans is an indigenous language. By continuing to defy the court on this matter, Nzimande is undermining the right to mother-tongue education and violating the rights of Afrikaans speakers to dignity and equality.
Earlier this year, the DA exposed the fact that Nzimande, in the new Language Policy Framework for Public Higher Education Institutions, excluded Afrikaans from the definition of indigenous languages. The policy only defined languages that “belong to the Southern Bantu language family” as indigenous. This incorrect, unscientific and hurtful exclusion of Afrikaans has already been used by Stellenbosch University (SU) to further its agenda of abolishing Afrikaans at the institution.
The DA had previously written to Nzimande demanding that the definition be changed to recognise Afrikaans as an indigenous language with status equal to all other indigenous South African languages. Nzimande ignored our request, and we have now forwarded that correspondence to the HRC to prove that Nzimande is willfully and deliberately discriminating against Afrikaans.