Dark Clouds over the University of Stellenbosch

The scaling down of Afrikaans at the Five Historic Afrikaans Universities that existed before 1994 is a tale of deceit and duplicity. Those pushing for English to replace Afrikaans knew all too well that a major public controversy would erupt if they spelled out their intentions openly and defended their actions publicly. They preferred to do it by stealth.

Barnard Beukman, editor of the Afrikaans daily Beeld, formulates it well when he states that as was the case at other Afrikaans universities (Pretoria, Free State, Potchefstroom, and the University of Johannesburg) doing away with Afrikaans at Stellenbosch University (SU) as the main language of instruction was a tale of “flagrant breaches of public promises, coat turning and double talk.”

This is not purely an academic issue in both senses of the word. Universities, regardless of their language of instruction, played a vital role in the transformation of South Africa during the past century.

In the history of the Afrikaans-speaking community there is one very bright spot and one very dark spot. The very bright spot is the rise of Afrikaans as an indigenous language that arose out of the interaction of racially diverse peoples on the southern tip of Africa.

In the course of the twentieth century, it became the only non- European/non-Asiatic language in the world that initially was simply an informal, largely spoken language but that went on to gain full university status and came to be used in all branches of life and learning.[1]

In 1994 Lawrence Schlemmer, a respected academic, political commentator and pollster, described Afrikaans as the strongest language in South Africa in the way in which it was being used, formally and informally, in Parliament, state publications, universities, schools, television and radio, newspapers and journals. Naspers (originally Nasionale Pers) is presently the largest company in Africa. The largest literary production, measured by books published in South Africa, is in Afrikaans. The magazine Huisgenoot has the largest circulation in South Africa.

During the apartheid years, leading SU members of staff offered little or no criticism when coloured voters were removed from the voters’ roll or when coloureds lost their schools, churches and houses under the apartheid legislation. The university started taking in coloured students in the late 1970s but did so without generously welcoming them.

The society Verligte Aksie, which established a branch at Stellenbosch in the 1970, found that there was no public place in the ‘white town’ of Stellenbosch where a coloured black person could sit down to have a cup of tea.

I only full grasped the extent of racial discrimination in the town when I wrote my book on the history of the coloured community of Stellenbosch called Always been here: The Story of a Stellenbosch community. The book shows that Stellenbosch was not so much founded as a town of free burghers but of slave owners, whose material and security interests always had to come first. The slaves, and later the coloured community working in the town, and whose descendants are now called coloureds, had to wait patiently for their turn.

When the Afrikaans medium universities became desegregated ln the final years of apartheid the big question confronting the University of Stellenbosch was this: Do we stick to Afrikaans-medium, continuing our support for the development of Afrikaans, and seek to address the huge back log in secondary and tertiary education of coloured and black Afrikaans-speakers? Or do we step up our offer in English to attract people from across the world, try to climb up the international rankings of universities, and forget those left behind in the Afrikans speaking community?

No longer accountable to the Afrikaner community in the way it was under National party rule, SU started to act in a way that suited it best. It began to recruit large numbers of white and black students who first requested and later demanded English tuition. Those in control of the university seemed happy to compromise the Afrikaans character if the institution.

On 26 October 2005 Koos Bekker, who at that point was CEO of Naspers and a member of SU Council, wrote a strongly worded article in which he argued that there was a need for Afrikaans-medium universities such as Stellenbosch since there existed a surfeit of exposure to the Anglo-Saxon culture at the other universities in the region. In addition there was the urgent need to address the needs of the coloured community.

Bekker ended with the warning: “If SU becomes anglicized it chooses in my view the road of cowardice. It turns our backs on our roots in Africa and our brown brothers and sisters. What kind of community do we build in this way in the Western Cape?”

The SU authorities never responded to Bekker’s call. They refused to recognise responsibility as he defined it.

Under Dr. Wim de Villiers, who became SU Rector and Vice Chancellor in 2015, the university seems intent on relegating its association with Afrikaans to nothing more than a marginal facet of its history.

In the first draft of a submission the university made this year as part of a review process that government requires universities to undertakes every five years it referred to its language policy in a way that only can be described as a form of kowtowing. It went along with the government’s obtuse attempt to reject the consensus among academics that Afrikaans is an indigenous language. It was only after the Department Afrikaans protested strongly that the university revised its submission.

The SU has never been able to explain why it has not made a serious attempt to address the huge gap between white and coloured Afrikaans-speakers in the composition of the teaching staff and its students. The SU’s neglect of the needs of the Afrikaans-speaking coloured community is simply shameful.

A brief look at the figures for SU undergraduate admissions tells the story.

The reasons for the very low figures for Afrikaans-speaking coloured students, especially those from the rural areas, have to be studied carefully in order to formulate a proper policy, but SU has not even attempted to address this issue.

A few years ago I received an email message form Joan Kruger, an Afrikans teacher at the West Coast village of Paternoster. She was outraged about the poor offer in Afrikaans-medium teaching at SU. She knew how essential it is for improving the intake and success rate of coloured Afrikaans students.

Kruger wrote:

“For me it is of particular importance to put the emphasis on instruction in the mother tongue. Here at Paternoster we are involved in the development of the reading skills of fishermen’s children, What has happened at Stellenbosch University is to me a case of high treason perpetrated against the children of a rural community. Universities are there to serve communities. The university must not only teach them in their mother tongue; they must also empower them to serve the community in Afrikaans. Teacher, librarians, book keepers, nurses … Why is that so difficult to understand?”

In the quarter of a century after the transition to an inclusive democracy SU has made every mistake in language policy that it could make, if its intention was to safeguard Afrikaans.

It also did not target the backlog in the education of coloured Afrikaans speaking community, which is lagging furthest behind of all the communities.

To aggravate matters it chose a medium of instruction, which was the worst possible one for students struggling to make the transition from high school to university.

This was the infamous T-option (Tweetalige Opsie or Bilingual Option). This entailed switching between Afrikaans-medium and English medium in the same lecture without insisting on students becoming proficient in both English and Afrikaans. (Dr. Van Zyl Slabbert, who was a lecturer before he turned to politics, aptly called it ‘pedagogic nonsense’).

To make matters even worse the university’s language policy allowed each faculty to choose its own medium of instruction, which horrified language planners in European universities.

In 2006 I explained the language of instruction in SU policy to Jean Laponce, a French-Canadian widely known in the Western world as one the greatest authorities on language planning and language displacement. He replied: ‘I am sad and shocked’. He wrote to me: ‘Afrikaans will survive at Stellenbosch but only as a decoration.’ In 2016 that would become true.

In 2014 it looked briefly as if this fate could be avoided. In this year the university accepted a new language policy that recognised both Afrikaans and English as languages of instruction, and put them on an equal footing.

In December 2014, when Dr. Wim de Villiers was appointed as Rector of SU, and in April 2015, when he took up his post, he met several times with Danie van Wyk, a teacher in an Afrikaans-medium coloured school. Van Wyk was accompanied by some colleagues who also wanted to be informed about the offer that SU intended to make to students in Afrikans medium.

For Van Wyk’s group the matter was of critical importance, given the relatively poor performance of coloured Afrikaans school children and students. As a community, coloured Afrikaans people has both the lowest participation rate in university education and the lowest throughput rate.

Van Wyk and his colleagues strongly endorsed SU new language policy of Gelyke Kanse (Equal Opportunities) that aspired to give students who wanted to study in Afrikaans an Afrikaans and English an ‘equal chance with those who preferred English.[2]

Afterwards the teachers were strongly under the impression that an irrevocable offer in Afrikaans-medium instruction would indeed be made as part of a long-term arrangement.

Looking back on this in March 2021 Van Wyk, in an interview in Die Burger, stated that he felt that De Villiers had deceived him and his colleagues by soon reneging on his undertaking to stick to the 2014 policy, which treated English and Afrikaans on an equal basis as a media of instruction. Van Wyk stated: “I do not believe they were honest with me and my group.”

What happened was that the university authorities had capitulated in the face of militant Fallist demands, and in the process abandoned both the Afrikaans-speaking coloured community and Afrikaans as its main language of instruction.

In March 2015 radical students the University of Cape Town launched the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement with the aim of ‘decolonising’ tertiary education and having student fees sharply reduced. Protests and riots with black students in the vanguard soon spread to other campuses in the country and continued until deep in 2016.

On SU campus the Open Stellenbosch movement forced the council on its knees before there was even a fight. Open Stellenbosch protested against what it called ‘the hegemonic white Afrikaans culture’ and the exclusion of blacks, coloured and Indians from the personnel and teaching staff. It demanded that no student should be forced to learn and communicate in Afrikaans; that the institutional culture should become multi-cultural and that SU should recognise its role in the conceptualisation, implementation and maintenance of apartheid.

In effect, the demands meant that a full offer had to be given in English medium. Knowing that giving extra classes without extra pay would have SU staff up in arms Council and the Rector capitulated. It is a shameful episode.

In late November 2015 SU Council resolved that the English offering could be expanded on condition that it should not be at the expense of the Afrikaans offer. The bi-lingual offer should be seen as a competitive advantage. These were hollow words in an attempt to save face.

Early in 2016 De Villiers announced that English, which he described mistakenly as the “common language of the country”, would become the language of instruction at the university.

In large classes (250 plus) Afrikaans-medium instruction would still take place as part of a parallel-medium offer. English would in future be the main language of official communication and of public communications in residences.

The announcement even thanked the Open Stellenbosch movement, which according to some sources had approximately fifty full-time SU students. The rector has ignored requests for a meeting from the chairman of the Convocation of SU, with more than 100 000 members. Nor did he meet with Adam Tas, a pro-Afrikaans student movement.

The ANC applauded SU move. A cartoon in Beeld newspaper depicted Dr Blade Nzimande hailing the vice chancellor with the words “Comrade De Viliers I presume” with a banner reading “Maties wil Engels wees”.

In 2016 SU management submitted a draft language policy in terms of which all lectures would be given in English, while Afrikaans summaries of lectures could also be used in a strictly circumscribed way.

In its submission the executive committee of the Convocation of Alumni, rejected this proposal and submitted its own language policy that made Afrikaans the main medium of instruction. I sent these two documents to J.M Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003, and asked for his support. Coetzee replied:

“My sympathies are all on your side. The crucial fact, for me is that the official “Taalbeleid” [language policy] document does not once use the word “kultuur”. The university management seems to conceive of language as an instrumental communication system without any culture bearing role.”

In its submission the Federation of Governing Bodies of South African Schools, to which the school boards of most Afrikaans schools are affiliated, asked SU not to diminish the use of Afrikaans as a medium in any way.  

SU’s management ignored these submissions. In 2017 it announced its new policy in which it committed itself to provide all instruction in English. Afrikaans would only be used if the majority of students in a course requested it and if a lecturer able to teach in Afrikaans was available

There were other controversies De Villiers’s helm during the first few months of this year. It came to light that the university, in the presentation of its policy to government that is required every five years, did not even mention the fact that Afrikaans is the only language in the Western hemisphere that in the course of twentieth century developed into a high culture language that can be used on all levels of public life, including in advanced courses in engineering and electronics.

Nor did it spell out the urgent need to address the education crisis in the Afrikaans-speaking coloured community and the need for proper Afrikaans-medium instruction to enable them to advance in tertiary education.

At some residences Afrikaans students were instructed not to speak Afrikaans to fellow-Afrikaans students if there were English-speakers in their company.

Afrikaans-speaking students were also ordered to switch to English at social gatherings or in informal groups when someone who did not understand Afrikaans had joined the group. University personnel or members of house committees berated those who objected. On a visit to the campus a Democratic Alliance delegation found reports of such incidents to be true.

The latest plan of De Villiers to accommodate Afrikaans is to establish some kind of language ghetto for Afrikaans. Lecturers would be asked to give a summary of the lecture in the last ten minutes of the class. This is so offensive that one does not even want to discuss it.

It is in any case not possible to implement. In the court case the movement Gelyke Kanse brought against SU in 2017 the university admitted that one fifth of its lecturers are unable to teach in Afrikaans,

This is one of the most critical issues affecting the university at present. Of all the universities which I attended here or abroad either as lecturer or a visiting fellow here or abroad I have never come across a mess as huge as the one SU authorities have made of the language of instruction issue. But it is more than a mess. As Danie van Wyk said it is an act of treason both to a rich cultural heritage and to a community.

The SU, the management team, and the University Council have lost all credibility on how they have handled the issue of Afrikaans, and the treatment of Afrikaans-speaking students. The Rector and Vice Chancellor and the Chairman and all members of the University Council ought to resign immediately.

Hermann Giliomee is a historian and political analyst who earlier in his career taught at both the University of Stellenbosch and the University of Cape Town.