The Voet'Tsekkers fly while Afrikaans turns 100

The Citizen

20-05-2025

Perhaps the most unforgivable part of the Great Trek 2025 edition of 49 Afrikaner refugees (five more than Charlize Theron's...
Newly arrived South Africans during welcome statements by US officials in Dulles, Virginia on May 12, 2025. Picture: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images North America / Getty Images via AFP
Perhaps the most unforgivable part of the Great Trek 2025 edition of 49 Afrikaner refugees (five more than Charlize Theron's 2022 census), clad in their down jackets and toting their bespoke luggage on a chartered flight to freedom in the US, was that the clamour last week overshadowed a far more important milestone.
On Thursday, 8 May, it was 100 years since the great writer CJ Langenhoven introduced a Bill in parliament for Afrikaans to be recognised as one of the country's two official languages.
It's still an official language to this day, albeit with 11 others. Afrikaans' trajectory from kombuistaal to an official language used to defend academic theses and highly complex legal arguments has been a benchmark for all indigenous tongues.
The language has been robustly promoted and protected by white speakers throughout its history, but they only make up about 40% of the people who actually speak it as a first language.
It's South Africa's third-most used language, spoken by almost 13% of the population and when you look at its representation in literature, film, culture and advertising, it's second only to English which, ironically, is the mother tongue of less than eight percent of the population, ranking sixth in the official language table.
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Afrikaans has been a success story by any metric, much like white Afrikaners themselves.
In terms of their representation in the formal job market, ownership of businesses, directorships and, of course, agriculture, they have proven – as so many African nationalists have said over and over – how affirmative action can really benefit a group of people, so many of whom were unemployable, unskilled and poverty stricken when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, which continued to weigh heavily upon the minds of their leaders well beyond the end of World War I – and definitely after 1948.
In 1960, Harold MacMillan rattled white South Africans when he told them in no uncertain terms about the Wind of Change blowing through Africa.
Three years before, MacMillan had shocked Britons when he told them they'd never had it so good.
It's a truth that quietly resonates for all the Afrikaners who remain here, just as it does for all their other white compatriots who aren't leaving.
That's why 187 years since Piet Retief left Makhanda for freedom, the 49 now have their own name from those they left behind; the Voet'Tsekkers. God bless Afrikaans.
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