Napoleon in rags and the language that he used

We South Africans take great pride in our cosmopolitan makeup. Well, most of us do. We have 11 official languages. What does that actually mean; an official language? Doesn’t it strike you as something a PR marketing committee came up with? We’re awesome, we can swear and complain in 11 distinct sounds. Though the average South African is only fluent in 2 or 3 of these sounds, with English being the most common one. I recently read somewhere that the only official language is really English. It’s the default language that members from different cultural backgrounds revert to when they try to communicate. Who says British imperialism didn’t have a silver lining?

Everyone understands English. The only difference is the grasp of vocabulary and wielding of the tongue, but you don’t have to be Shakespeare to get your point across. We’ve learnt to adapt and use our imagination to fill in the blanks and infer certain archetypal meanings where words fail. We like to make fun of politicians, who use the language with the finesse of a bull in a china shop, but we get what they want to say. We invent words and incorporate words from other native languages (such as Eish, Ayoba, Lekker etc.) to add certain emotive connotations to what we’re saying. So, in this makeshift way we succeed in communicating with each other. Granted, there are certain things at the fringes of the language barrier that still escape us, but in the broad spectrum we’re managing fine.

There’s just one cultural group that is a bit resistant to assimilate in this melting pot of diverse opinions and mother tongues; the Afrikaners (which is my historical cultural group). Afrikaners feel strongly about their heritage and culture. Afrikaans is made out to be one of the indigenous languages, when in actual fact it’s basically a collection of blended European languages bottled in South Africa. To be fair, it is a beautiful language. I defy anyone to listen to the words of Breyten Breytenbach, Koos Kombuis and more recently the likes of Toast Coetzer and Co., and not be moved. Our writers have won international prizes and there are PhD students from Eastern Europe who major in Afrikaans. But it’s just one of the official series of distinct noises we make, and it’s made by a considerable minority.

If you however look at the corporate world you’d be forgiven to think that we only have two official languages, namely English and Afrikaans. This is true save for a few exceptions, and also for the educational system to a large extent. It will probably change in the future, but as Jack Kerouac said, walking on water wasn’t built in a day. We live in a post-modern world where anything is seemingly possible. If we can video-chat with our antipodal expatriate friends, fixing a language barrier is something we’ll sort out over our generational lunch break.

All the improvements to our lives in this post-modern age have come at a cost. This is especially apparent where technological improvements have made personal human contact superfluous. It enabled companies to shrink their workforce and consequently also their expenses. An example of this is the much dreaded call centre. A boxed-in collection of parrot-like sadists trained to make your life just that little bit more difficult. Even though they probably have nightmares of people shouting at them in broken English and have to be kept on a 24/7 suicide watch.

It is with this institutional form of communication that the Afrikaner has difficulty. Normally they won’t do the person at the other end of the line or counter the courtesy of switching to the English default. Some do so grudgingly, but with the air of a pouting schoolboy about them. In my experience most are adamant about being served in Afrikaans. Fine… the client may always be right, but I’ve never come across anyone insisting on being helped in Zulu. People understand that due to certain legislative stipulations the workforce of a company has to represent a certain demographic. Therefore the people being employed don’t use Afrikaans as a first language. These days most of them don’t speak Afrikaans at all. Bantu education is a thing of the past. So ideally yes, a client should be served in the language of his or her preference. Unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world. You’ll be hard pressed to someone who is fluent in all 11 languages that would be willing to work for minimum wage answering telephones.

An argument can be made for the point that a significant portion of the client base is made up of Afrikaans speaking people, which might be true seeing as most of the economic power is still in the hands of white people, although the balance is rapidly shifting with the emergence of the tenderpreneur. Here again we have to do with the ideal world / real world dichotomy.

The real issue is not the communication difficulty, is it? Everyone watched Egoli where all the characters in the scene spoke a different language and everyone understood each other. This frantic knee-jerk reaction is in response to what the white Afrikaner male sees as his disenfranchisement, his invalidation and outright attack on his heritage. It’s this almost a paranoid-schizophrenic discourse they employ to anything basically. Take a listen to how the callers on a RSG radio show can turn a discussion, on anything from sheep wool to church dogma, into an anti-government tirade. For many years the great white emperor ruled over the land with impunity and good neighbourliness. After the fall of the empire each man remained king of his own castle and receded behind its walls. There in the darkness he sat shut off from the outside world in self-imposed imprisonment. It saddened him greatly each time he switched on his television or picked up his phone and noticed how much his beloved empire has changed. He sometimes rages and shouts from his steeple, but no one pays attention anymore.

When an insane asylum is depicted in movies there’s always a guy with one hand stuck inside his shirt and a funny hat on his head. It has almost become synonymous with insanity and it made me think of this rather fitting Bob Dylan line: “… Napoleon in rags and the language that he used…”