1976 Revisited

We all know that 1976 was the year that the Soweto uprisings started. The children, or as they are now known ‘learners’ (where on earth did that word come from?), refused to take instruction in Afrikaans. That was the start of the trouble.

Well, here we are in 2009 and those of us who speak what used once upon a time to be known as English, are now being subjected to similar and equally demeaning treatment – only that to which we are being subjected is more subtle, more insidious.

SABC TV’s channel no 3 has traditionally been reserved for English; from time to time there have been some fairly horrendous mistakes in pronunciation (but then you have to expect that when most of our continuity announcers come from another language background), and there have been a few times when programming left much to be desired. We have borne all those things with a certain amount of equanimity; after all, you can always turn off the TV if it gets too much or too bad.

However, in the last two weeks a new and worrying trend has, silently and almost imperceptibly, appeared. On Thursday nights we are now being treated to a really awful piece of programming entirely in (you guessed it) Afrikaans, and on Fridays we have the slightly more palatable De Kat (also in Afrikaans).

I would assume, therefore, that channel no 3 is no longer exclusively in English.
Come all you payers of licences and critics of the SABC, gird your loins, pluck up your courage, and in true South African fashion, lets burn down every government building we can find; lets lay waste to every school, every electrical appliance shop; lets turn over every police vehicle and march against the guns of the SABC. We have as much right to our language and heritage as those who demonstrated against Afrikaans in 1976!!!

Our rights are being violated. In popular terminology, we are ‘suffering’. Our language, our heritage, our very culture is being assaulted and belittled by those very people who found the enforced teaching in Afrikaans so unsavoury. We have a major bus strike in Johannesburg, the threat of a nation-wide strike of doctors, taxi operators threatening hellfire and brimstone if the bus rapid-transport system is introduced, political figures shouting unpleasant and defamatory epithets at our new administrator of the Cape (Helen Zille), and threats of legal action because a certain body does not recognise her right to choose her own cabinet as she sees fit – so lets do our bit and demonstrate against those in power at Auckland Park who see fit to quietly drop the occasional Afrikaans programme into our hallowed English station. GO GET THEM – VRYSTAAT!!