This weekend the political reporter Adriaan Basson came to the defence of the much loved and hated Panyaza Lesufi, Gauteng MEC for education, and so prompted an important debate. Basson tweeted that he does not believe Lesufi to be racist, or that Lesufi wants to destroy Afrikaans mother-tongue tuition. Afrikaans parents and teachers need only “engage” Lesufi about their concerns.
For liberals who are sincere about creating a fair post-apartheid society, and cautious of how easily ANC and EFF politicians can depict us as the enemies of redress, this is a safe approach. But it won’t help much. And sooner or later folks who are not necessarily concerned about Afrikaans, or mother-tongue tuition, will have to decide whether to accept or reject Lesufi’s worldview, and its implications for how South Africa is governed.
It is a worldview that has predominated for most of our history albeit in different guises, and still informs public policy to this day. This is how it works. All of society, including public education, is evaluated on a scorecard of racial interests. Gains on the white side mean losses on the black side, and vice versa. Where coloured and Indian interests count is determined by expediency, a feature that will ensure that the racial scorecard survives shifts in demographics. The important point is that white privilege not only correlates with black deprivation, it causes it. There is no way to help in undoing the legacy of apartheid unless you subscribe to the racial scorecard.
In this worldview Afrikaans mother-tongue tuition counts as white privilege, even if most Afrikaans speakers today self-identify as either coloured or black. Parents who send their children to Afrikaans schools are responding to a racist incentive. Any argument for so-called language rights is just a fig leaf. So the destruction of Afrikaans single-medium schools, followed by the phasing out of Afrikaans tuition from schools altogether, becomes a moral imperative.
But sometimes facts cannot be bent to fit this worldview. Try as one might, they snap back and hit you in the face. This is what happened last year when the Hoërskool Overvaal thwarted Lesufi’s attempts to change its language policy, first in the High Court, and then in the Constitutional Court. The case shows that maybe SA society is not a racial zero-sum game, and that the public good will be better served if we discard the myths and shibboleths of racial nationalism.
Lesufi made clear his animus in an op-ed published by News24 shortly after his defeat in the High Court. “It is time”, he wrote “that our society identifies language policies as nothing more than crude forms of racism. Racism is pernicious, a behaviour which some may like to dress up as language policy but is, in fact, too low to be accorded that degree of respectability.”