The Centenary of Afrikaans as an Official Language: From Beacon to Bludgeon

IOL News

13-05-2025

IOL EFF MP Carl Niehaus slams Afrikaans at 100, calling it a fallen language of exclusion—not celebration—and urges a radical reclaiming of its lost dignity.
Image: File
By Carl Niehaus
This year, South Africa commemorates the centenary of Afrikaans as an official language, a milestone that ought to inspire pride but instead lays bare a troubling reality.
What was once a language of profound literary and cultural potential has been vulgarized, stripped of its intellectual and artistic depth, and transformed into something far uglier: a cabal exclusionist sjambok, wielded to beat down, abuse, and insult other cultures.
Far from being a beacon of cultural advancement and upliftment, Afrikaans has, in many contemporary contexts, devolved into a crude instrument of white supremacy, separatism, and exclusion—a language of the gutter, its once-vibrant legacy now akin to stinking sewer water seeping down the roads of our shared nation.
The Afrikaans of yesteryear bore the hallmarks of greatness. Writers like N.P. van Wyk Louw, D.J. Opperman, Breyten Breytenbach, and André Brink crafted works of staggering depth, their poetry and prose wrestling with the complexities of identity, history, and humanity.
Etienne Leroux's Magersfontein, O Magersfontein! stood as a literary monument, dissecting the Afrikaner psyche with wit and existential gravitas.
This was a language that could transcend race and culture, its music and literature capable of stirring souls across divides. Afrikaans was once a vehicle for universal truths, a medium through which the human condition could be explored with elegance and empathy. Today, that legacy feels like a distant memory.
The cultural output of modern Afrikaans has largely abandoned sophistication for banality, pandering to the most simplistic and base instincts of its audience. Popular music, exemplified by the likes of Kurt Darren's Hop, Hop, Spinnekop—with its repetitive three-word chorus and rudimentary rhyme—lacks the ambition to inspire or endure.
Literature and art, too, have lost their intellectual rigor, replaced by creations that prioritize accessibility over depth, amusement over meaning. The Afrikaans cultural scene, once a crucible of creativity, now revels in its coarseness, its offerings devoid of the transcendence that once defined them.
This vulgarization is not merely a cultural decline; it is a betrayal of what Afrikaans could have been. Worse still, the language has been weaponized, twisted into a tool of division and domination.
Instead of fostering unity or advancing shared cultural ideals, Afrikaans has, in many instances, become a vulgar racist instrument, used to swear at, insult, and demean fellow South Africans. It is no longer the kombuistaal—the 'kitchen language' spoken by ordinary people, workers, and communities with a shared sense of humanity.
Today, it often feels like a language of the gutter, its words dripping with the venom of exclusion, separatism, and white supremacist undertones. The sjambok of Afrikaans is brandished not to uplift but to lash out, to assert dominance over others, and to entrench division in a nation already scarred by its past.
This transformation is deeply striking, a wound to the soul of what Afrikaans once represented. The language's potential to bridge divides has been squandered, replaced by a rhetoric of cultural self-determination that often masks a desire for isolation and superiority.
Figures like Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roets advocate for the protection of Afrikaans and Afrikaner culture, but their vision seems to protect little more than a hollow shell. What is there to safeguard when the language's modern expressions are so often crude, divisive, and devoid of intellectual or moral substance? Dololo—nothing. The Afrikaans they defend feels like a relic, its vitality drained by a refusal to evolve, to embrace inclusivity, or to reclaim the universal aspirations of its literary giants.
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Where is the Afrikaner intelligentsia in this moment of crisis? Have they, too, abandoned their language, repelled by the rudeness and crudeness of its contemporary manifestations? One cannot blame them entirely.
The Afrikaans of today, in its worst incarnations, is a far cry from the language that once produced works of global significance. Its descent into a tool of racial and cultural exclusion has alienated those who might have carried its torch forward.
The intellectuals, the artists, the thinkers who could have revitalized Afrikaans seem to have retreated, leaving the language to be defined by its loudest, most divisive voices.
The centenary of Afrikaans as an official language should have been an opportunity to celebrate a living, evolving culture—one that uplifts, unites, and inspires. Instead, it serves as a requiem for a language that has lost its way.
Afrikaans could have been a beacon, illuminating paths toward mutual understanding and cultural richness in a diverse South Africa. Yet, in its current state, it often feels like a sewer, its potential drowned in the muck of prejudice and pettiness.
To reclaim Afrikaans, to restore its dignity, requires a radical reimagining—a rejection of its role as a weapon of exclusion and a return to its roots as a language of humanity, creativity, and connection. Without such a reckoning, the centenary is not a celebration but a lament, a reminder of how far Afrikaans has fallen from its once-lofty heights.
Carl Niehaus is an EFF Member of Parliament (MP)
* The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.