The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 5 Part 8 pps

English in South Africa Huguenot refugees. By 1795 the Company claimed control of an area of about 170,000 square kilometres, most of it held in fact by a small and widely dispersed Dutch population. Along the eastern border Dutch frontiersmen were already in contact with the 'Caffres', that is, the AmaXhosa, a branch of the Nguni- speaking group which includes the Zulu and Swazi peoples. Contact with people of the Sotho-Tswana groups north and east of the Colony had been relatively slight. Within the Colony, the original Khoikhoi population (' Hottentots') had for the most part by 1795 been reduced to servitude or near- servitude, though the 'Bosjemans, or Wild Hottentots' (Somerville in Bradlow 1979: 25) still held out in desert or mountain areas against successive strafcommandos ('punitive expeditions'). Between white frontiersmen and the authorities at the Cape there was, by 1795, considerable tension, particularly over the treatment of indigenous peoples. There was already a considerable body of writings in English on the Cape. 1795-1838. This period spans the British occupation of the Cape from 1795 (with a brief return to Dutch control in 1803-6); the arrival of the English 1820 settlers, frontier warfare with the AmaXhosa, the emancipation of the slaves and the resultant exodus of Boer frontiersmen and others northwards and eastwards known later as the Great Trek. The Cape Colony 'Population Return for 1818' (Bird 1823: 107) reflects roughly 43,000 'inhabitants' (including 1,900 'free blacks'), 23,000 Hottentots, 1,300 'apprentices' and 32,000 slaves, a total of about 101,000. {Inhabitants seems normally to have meant 'whites'.) Perhaps 5,000 of the 'inhabitants' at the time were English-speaking (Watts 1976: 42). In 1820 the English-speaking population was roughly doubled when between four and five thousand 'settlers' were helped by the British government to establish themselves in the Eastern Cape. This brought up the total of mother-tongue speakers of English permanently resident at the Cape to about 10,000 at a time when there were perhaps 35,000 Dutch-speaking whites (Watts 1976: 43-4). 1839-69. The economy remained largely agricultural. This is the period of the foundation of the ' Dutch' Republics of Natalia, the Orange Free State and Transvaal, and in these of what might be called the Volksraad style of government. Article 9 of the Transvaal Constitution (1858) 433 William Branford states explicitly: ' The people will permit no equality between coloured people and the white inhabitants, either in Church or State. "Het volk wil geene gelijkstelling van gekleurden met blancken ingezetenen toestaan, noch in Kerk noch in Staat"' (Eybers 1918: 364). A small English settlement in Natal dates back to 1824. In 1843 the British annexed the short-lived Dutch republic of Natalia, from which many Trekkers moved further north. In 1849—51, between four and five thousand British immigrants settled in Natal:' They were drawn largely from the middle or upper-middle classes, and the Midlands, Yorkshire and Lancashire regions were strongly represented' (Norton 1983: 5). In 1860 the first indentured Indians were brought in to work the sugar plantations in Natal, and the Indian population has since increased steadily. 1870-1910. This period spans the mineral/industrial revolution as- sociated with the discovery of diamonds and later gold which doubled the white population. In 1867, the year of the discovery of the first South African diamond, whites numbered about 330,000 with perhaps 65,000 speakers of English as LI (Watts 1976: 42-3). It has been calculated that the 'mineral revolution', whose great foci were Johannesburg and Kimberley, brought over 400,000 immigrants to South Africa between 1875 and 1904. Tensions between British and Transvaal authorities built up gradu- ally. The first Anglo-Boer war (1881-2) left the Transvaal Republic independent, but disputes over Transvaal citizenship for white im- migrants led ultimately to a second war (1899-1902), followed by the consolidation of former ' Dutch' Republics and ' English' colonies into the Union of South Africa (1910). This period also saw the final subjugation of most of the African peoples and the beginnings of passive resistance by the Natal Indian Congress and other bodies. The step-by-step transference to white ownership and control of the ancestral lands of the African peoples relegated most Blacks to locations and reserves, which by 1913 had been reduced to about 13 per cent of the Union's territory. Blacks had little or no part in national (or municipal) decision-making. 1910-48. This period was one of steady economic and population growth: of Anglo-Afrikaner co-operation in the establishment of many of the basic institutions of the ' apartheid society' which followed it, the rise of the African National Congress, the consolidation of the National 434 English in South Africa Party as a party of the Afrikaner people, and of South African participation in the First and Second World Wars. 1948-89. This period saw further economic and population growth; the election victory in 1948 of the National Party, which has governed the country ever since; removal of' coloured' voters from the common roll; secession from the Commonwealth; the renaming of ' apartheid' as 'separate development' and the attempt to establish for the African people homelands, some of which became 'independent'. South African forces became involved in long and costly operations against guerrilla forces in Namibia and elsewhere. ' The struggle' - resistance, initially passive, to white supremacy by the African National Congress and other bodies, notably the Pan- Africanist and Black Consciousness movements, despite ' bannings' and worse - gathered steady momentum. The Soweto uprising of 1976 was only one of many surges of black 'unrest'. 'The armed struggle' — sabotage and occasional attacks on civilian targets - was initiated by the military wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Strive, 'spear of the people', familiarly 'MK' in the Black press. The 1980s brought, nevertheless, some substantial moves towards desegregation and a more integrated society, for instance in some areas of industry, public and corporate life, and in the opening of a number of 'private' schools to all races. The year 1985 saw the first Tricameral Parliament, with separate houses for 'coloureds', Indians and whites, in which Africans remained unrepresented. The new stance of the government of F. W. de Klerk, the ' un- banning' of the African National Congress early in 1990, Namibian independence and the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners have initiated political processes whose consequences cannot at present be foreseen. At the beginning of this century there were four major English- speaking groups in South Africa. There were the ' English' of Cape Town and the Western Cape, many with close contacts with bilingual 'Dutch' families; the largely rural community of the Eastern Cape inland of Port Elizabeth and East London; the ' Natal English'; and the English of the cosmopolitan mining and industrial centres of the Transvaal. This last group came from many parts of Britain, notably Ireland and Cornwall, and included refugees from eastern Europe with strong traditions of Yiddish. 435 William Branford The 1820 settlers had come from several dialect areas: nearly 1,900 from London and its environs, over 450 from Ireland and over 300 from Lancashire and Yorkshire (Morse Jones 1969 [1971]: 5-6). In the period 1819-20, about 300 came from Scotland. Scots were influential out of proportion to their original numbers; they were later recruited both as schoolmasters and from the Church of Scotland as ministers of religion for the Dutch Reformed Church. Nearly a century later A. G. Kidd (1910: 157) was to remark: 'As there are so many Scotch teachers in South Africa their influence must affect in time the average of English pronunciation.' A small sidelight on this is that a number of early borrowings into Xhosa (e.g. tichela for teacher) show traces of an original with post-vocalic /r/, possibly Scottish (J. S. Claughton, personal communication). The 1820 settlers were of mixed social background. Pringle (1835 [1966]: 13) remarks: 'I should say that probably about a third part were persons of real respectability of character but that the remaining two- thirds were for the most part composed of individuals of a very unpromising description — persons who had hung loose upon society.' Given the operation of English justice about this time, the lower levels of settlers as described by Pringle may have differed but little, in point of social origin, from many of the Australian convict population. Lanham & MacDonald (1979) trace certain prestige variables in South African English pronunciation to Natal origins, though the so-called 'private schools accent' is a class manifestation with several points of origin. The general mobility of the South African population has done much to obscure regional differences. 9.1.2 Languages in government and education Until 1795 the language at the Cape both of government and of such education as was given was naturally Dutch. Early British governors interfered only mildly with the status quo, but in 1822, a proclamation decreed inter alia that from 1 January 1827: 'The English Language be exclusively used in all Judicial Acts and Proceedings either in the Superior or Inferior Courts in this colony' (cited in Eybers 1918: 23). This was repealed just in time, on 13 December 1826. For the complex history of later discrimination by British authorities against Dutch in the 'colonies' and by the Republican authorities against British in the Transvaal the reader should consult Malherbe 436 English in South Africa (1925, 1977). There, were, however, many counter-currents of'open- ness'. Thus one of the principal Transvaal newspapers, Die Volkstem ('Voice of the people') was for many years bilingual, and English teaching in much of the Free State was of a high standard for several generations. The Act of Union (1910) laid down in an entrenched clause that' Both the English and Dutch languages shall be the official languages of the Union, and shall be treated on a footing of equality and possess and enjoy equal freedom, rights and privileges.' 'Afrikaans' replaced ' Dutch' in this clause in 1925. There is no reference in the Act to African languages. The distancing of Afrikaans from Dutch and the conversion of Afrikaans from a language of'hearth and home' to one fully capable of satisfying the requirements of a modernised society are largely beyond the scope of this chapter (but see also section 9.5.2). So is the enforced use of the Afrikaans medium in African schools (since abandoned) which was a major cause of the Soweto uprising of 1976. From quite early in the century most white children learned both English and Dutch or Afrikaans as school subjects, though it was only in 1946 that both became compulsory examination subjects in the Transvaal. From 1911 onwards there was strong support by government for dual-medium instruction in 'white' schools. Malherbe (1966: 15) notes that in the Cape in 1924 the media of instruction were Afrikaans for 27,000 children, English for 37,000 and both for 69,000. Of the dual- medium group, many are likely to have grown up as competent bilinguals. The National Party victory of 1948 was followed by a long period of Afrikaner dominance in education, the phasing out of dual-medium instruction and an increasing shortage of English-speaking teachers in provincial schools (Malherbe 1966: 14-17). Thus schools have often provided even English-speaking children with more extensive exposure to Afrikaner teachers speaking English as L2 than to teachers whose LI is English. 9.1.3 Bilingualism and' language gaps' The principal agent in language contact is the bilingual speaker (Weinreich 1953: 72), a key figure in the interpenetration of languages 437 William Branford reflected in South African English. But bilingual in South Africa has typically meant 'bilingual in English and Afrikaans'. Shuring & Ellis (1987) estimate from census figures of 1980 that in that year 92 per cent of whites ' did not know' a Black language. Census figures indicate a steady rise in the proportion of whites returning themselves as able to speak both English and Afrikaans. In 1918, for those over seven years of age this was 42 per cent, in 1936, 64 per cent, and in 1951, 73 per cent (Malherbe 1977: 33). Shuring & Ellis (1987) calculated from the census returns of 1980 that nearly 80 per cent of whites reported themselves able to read and write both English and Afrikaans. Estimates of those claiming to use both languages at home vary considerably. In 1938 a survey involving over 18,000 white school pupils in three provinces indicated that 43 per cent were from homes ' bilingual in varying degrees' (Malherbe 1977: 57-9). Later, in a report on a stratified sample of 659 English-speaking informants, Watts (1976: 79) found that' Fifty-eight percent said that they could speak Afrikaans "freely and fluently" while four-fifths said they could "personally understand it".' To the question ' State the language(s) most commonly spoken at home' in the census of 1970, 18 per cent of the white population responded 'Both Afrikaans and English'. (For further details see Malherbe 1977: 65-7.) Intermarriage, furthermore, is often likely to produce competent bilinguals. On his 1976 survey, Watts reports that 'Fifty-two percent of the sample have Afrikaans-speaking close relatives or family members, while 36% had Afrikaans-speaking ancestors' (Watts 1976: 78). Shared work and military experience - the latter in particular since the conscription measures of 1957 - have involved men of both language groups in months of close contact. While the ' social distance' between English and Afrikaners is often still considerable, many factors and situations have favoured the emergence of competent bilinguals in significant numbers. 9.1.4 Population: English as minority language The figures of Bird and Watts quoted in section 9.1.1 suggest that after the settlement of 1820 speakers of English as LI numbered about 10 per cent of the total population of the 'Colony'. For South Africa as a whole, this proportion seems to have remained fairly constant. An 438 English in South Africa informed estimate of the total South African population for 1987, including ' homeland' citizens, is 35-2 million: African 26-3 million (747 per cent); Coloured 3-1 million (8-7 per cent); Indian 0-9 million (2-6 per cent) and White 4-9 million (14 per cent) (Race Relations Survey, 1987-8: 11). Of these, speakers of English as LI probably number about 10 per cent (3-5 million). Unfortunately there are no reliable contemporary census data for languages. For the ' white' languages K. P. Prinsloo's extrapolation from the census data of 1980 gave 4*9 million for Afrikaans and 2-8 million for English in a' total' population for that year of 24-5 million. This figure excludes several million African citizens of 'independent' homelands, and is ten years out of date. Among those reporting English as their mother tongue in 1980, whites numbered about 1*76 million,' coloureds' about 0-32 million and Indians 0-7 million, with about 77,000 Africans. Thus in 1990, of people calling themselves 'English-speaking South Africans' probably at least one in three is not 'white'. Rough estimates for 1988 for African languages in the Republic and its associated territories place Zulu first with 6 - 4 million speakers and Xhosa second with 6 - 2 million, though speakers of the languages of the Sotho-Tswana group together totalled 7 million. 9.2 The vocabulary: overview 9.2.1 South African English ? Let us first consider briefly which vocabulary items 'count' as South African English or not. Some critics of Branford (1978) and subsequent editions of her Dictionary of South African English (particularly Afri- kaners) have complained that too many entries are for Afrikaans words which do not properly belong to South African English. But in the South African situation the borderlines between languages may not be easy to draw. Loanwords (e.g. gaar [xa:r], 'cooked' or, usually, 'not sober'), common in the English of many speakers, may be unintelligible to many others. Donaldson (1988) reports a similar problem in deciding which of many English loanwords used in Afrikaans count as ingeburger ('fully assimilated') or not. Some borrowings, of course, are nonce-words, others marginal. Among loanwords in South African English, those most fully assimilated are probably items like smous ('pedlar', from South African Dutch). Such words 439 William Branford 1 have a history of use in English over a long time and from many different sources: the Rhodes Dictionary Unit has 116 contexts for smous from eighty-four different texts, from 1786 ('a species of old-clothes men') to African writers of the 1980s; 2 are regularly used in English texts on their own, without glosses, (as is smous); 3 where appropriate, are regularly used with English affixes (e.g. smouses and smousing). Smous, significantly, was not replaced by English pedlar, though their meanings are similar. As in many other cases, the established local word has here lived on and been fully assimilated into English; perhaps often as a kind of gesture of solidarity with speakers of Dutch/Afrikaans (cp. Trudgill 1983: 103). It would serve no purpose to claim South African origin for words or senses that have become distinctively South African despite non-South African origin and use in other varieties. Assegai is from Berber al- %agayah, 'the spear', of which a reflex appears in Chaucer. Bioscope ('cinema') first appeared in Britain about 1901, but lived on in South African English long after it had vanished from British. Dropper, 'a batten stapled to fencing wires to keep them apart' (Baker 1966, cited in J. Branford 1987: 93) seems to have appeared almost simultaneously in Australia and South Africa about 1897 (Ramson 1988: 214; Silva & Walker 1976: 275). Assegai, bioscope and dropper are typical of words with special associations with South African experience which simply cannot be counted out of South African English. Some more 'marginal' words are of major historical or social importance: for example, amaphakathi, the inner circle of councillors of a higher chief, the plural of Nguni umphahathi 'councillor'. This in South African English texts, usually glossed, dates back to 1829 or earlier. Modern African writers, such as Matshoba (1979), may use it unglossed. Its frequency and importance make it, perhaps, a 'marginal' item of South African ' English', though it is clearly beyond the fringe of what Murray might have called 'common words'. Amaphakathi, incidentally, illustrates a general property of the vocabulary. This is the division, in almost every domain, between 'black' vocabulary and 'white'. Thousands of contemporary whites do not know amaphakathi and scores of other words of equal importance both in traditional and in more recent ' Black' culture, such as impimpi 'informer', kwe/a-kwe/a 'pirate taxi' and sangoma 'diviner'. Yet all four 44° English in South Africa of these are in regular use in English contexts today, for example in the columns of the widely read Drum, Pace, and Learn and Teach. And they are known and actively used by a large number of speakers of English as LI. Finally, examples in this text are not limited to the works of writers or speakers of South African birth. A treatment of South African English' which excluded, for example, Lady Anne Barnard, Thomas Pringle and Rudyard Kipling, would, as we have argued elsewhere (W. Branford 1976b; 1984) be excessively limiting. 9.2.2 Stereotypes and senses The popular image of the vocabulary, as late as the 1970s, was highly selective. In 1970 the magazine Personality sponsored a competition for the Rhodes University Dictionary Project for the best list of 'South African' words submitted by a reader. This drew 166 entries from all parts of the country and mostly from whites. Sixteen words each occurred in thirty entries or more. These are as follows, with the number of competitors citing each one: Ag (39); biltong 'dried meat' (44); braaivleis ' barbecue' (66); donga ' dry watercourse' (33); eina ' ouch!' Q3);gogga 'insect' (32);ya'yes' (39); koeksister, a kind of doughnut (37); kopje 'small hill' (44); lekker 'nice' (49); mealies 'maize, Indian corn' (41); ou 'chap' (39); spruit 'stream' (33); stoep 'verandah' (56); stompie ' cigarette stub' (32); vel{d)skoen ' rough shoe' (45). The image is one of informality, die lekker lewe ('good living') and the great outdoors. There is not one ' sociopolitical' word in the list, not one item of ' township' vocabulary, not one reminder of the racial tensions and ' iron laws' which concern such writers as Brink, Fugard and Paton. In 1990, after the Angola, Namibia and Soweto experiences, the stereotype has probably changed, and work in progress will be testing this. The real vocabulary is more diversified. This was shown in a study by John Walker, reported in W. Branford (1976a), of 1,006 items of relatively high frequency from the materials of the Rhodes dictionary project. Of these, predictably, most (868) were nouns or noun phrases; constituents of other kinds (e.g. adjectives and verbs) numbered 138. For the 868 nouns and noun phrases there were 1,021 'significations' (roughly: senses). Thus 'nouns of multiple signification were relatively few' though later work has revealed more of the semantic complexity of words like baas, boer, trek and veld. Walker made a rough analysis of the 441 William Branford senses in terms of semantic features. This began with the contrast of 'Abstract' (e.g. apartheid) vs 'Concrete' {minedump). 'Concrete' was subdivided into 'Non-living' {backveld) vs 'Living' {wildebeest), 'Non- living ' into ' Natural' {kloof) vs ' Material culture' {stoep),' Living' into ' Plant' and' Animate' and' Animate' into ' Non-human' {springbok) and 'Human' {predikant). Thus 'Non-Human' here implies 'Animate'. The results are summarised below: Noun-significations: N=1021 Abstract 21 I Non-living 490 1 1 1 Natural Material culture 123 367 I Concrete 1,000 I I Plant 97 I Living 510 I Animate 413 1 Non-human 144 I Human 258 Some comments are called for: 1 The analysis is of a sample of' common words' only; it excludes specialised terminologies, such as those of botany, mining or traditional beer-drinking. Some of these terminologies are very large; thus Smith (1966) has over 6,500 entries, but few of these are ' common words' in Murray's sense. 2 The exact figures are unimportant and would doubtless differ for a different sample or for different conventions of grouping. 3 The picture does, however, contrast sharply with the popular stereotype of 1970, reflecting 'a very extended and diversified engagement of words with experience' (Branford 1976b: 313). 4 Very few of the senses recorded are abstract, and about half of these are political, for instance apartheid and separate development. This point will be followed up in 9.5.2. Here it illustrates the dependence of South African English on the international standard for nearly all such terms as equality, civil, faith, justice, privilege, right and truth and the kinds of thinking they encode. The materials of the Dictionary Unit include some citations recorded from speech but most are from printed sources. However, many words 442 [...]... Dutch-Afrikaans English Bantu Other DSAE-.Hist 50 28 48 29 11 12 5 17 (1 988 ) Items of Khoisan origin were unfortunately counted only for DSAE: Hist., in which they numbered just over 1 per cent (included among 'Other' in the tabulation above) The two estimates agree quite closely, though the proportion of items of Bantu -language origin has doubled between the 1913 and the 1 988 samples For the 1 988 sample only, numbers... each of the six 'periods' outlined in section 9.1.1 In table 9.1 N indicates the number of items for each period The figures for each language or language group are percentages of this number (These were rounded to the nearest integer, so do not always add up to 100 Thirty- 443 William Branford Table 9.1 Languages of origin by period N Period Before 17 95 17 95- 183 8 183 8-69 187 0-1909 1910-47 19 48- 88 Dutch/Afrikaans... ispha^a, counterfeit The sharp contrast of black township and white suburb, the latter with its neatly separated erfs ('urban building lots', 181 2) is one of the most vivid symbols of apartheid The period 184 0 -80 saw the creation on a large scale of native reserves as rural areas set apart for blacks:' To segregate the black races from the whites is the whole object of the foundation of native reserves'... about 187 0 onwards, with a movement into the more impersonal relations of city and industrial life and towards stricter segregation It is as if by 187 0 the ' white' vocabulary had absorbed most of the basic items of African -language origin that white speakers needed But 1910-47 vs 19 48- 88 shows a reversal of this tendency; in 19 48- 88 the Bantu -language percentage rises from 7 to 11, and the number of new... of a Zulu uprising 'In Natal, the Kaffirs are up.' Many tribal names were of course well known They begin to appear in large numbers in 17 95- 183 8: Barolong, ST 182 4; Basotbo, ST 183 3; Bechuana, ST 180 1; Mashona, Ng 18 35; Matabele, Ng 18 35 and Zulu (Ng., in various guises - Zoola, Zoolah, Zooler, Zooloo) 182 4 Schapera (1937: 445ff.) lists over 260 of these for South Africa as a whole The extension of. .. as well as the people who spoke it The missionary Shaw records 'a sermon in Caffre' for 28 June 182 8 (cited in Silva & Walker 1976: 416) The first Grammar of the Kafir Language ( 183 4) was the work of W B Boyce Xhosa has replaced Kaffir in the titles of its modern successors Alongside the major Bantu languages of southern Africa are a number of pidgins and koines Kitchen Kaffir, a pidgin of white employers... estimate the relative frequencies of names in actual use; but major changes over long periods of time stand out clearly To the British at the Cape in (say) 181 4, there were five conspicuous ' peoples' in or near the Colony: those typically then called ' the Caffres' (variously spelt), 'the Dutch', 'the English' , 'the Bos/esmen' and 'the Hottentots' Four of these have since been renamed, and 'the English' ... African Dutch there is of course a grey area Only those 'Dutch' items of South African origin appearing in English before 18 75 will be marked 'South African Dutch', e.g 'Kloof (\12>\; SAfrDu.)' The year 18 75 is chosen as cut-off point as the date of the manifesto of the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaanders (see section 9.4.3) 9.2.4 ' Domains', oppositions and themes The outline of the vocabulary that follows... now figures of the past: for contemporary military vocabulary see section 9 .5. 3 45 English in South Africa 9.4 Peoples and tongues The term Caffer, like that of Hottentot, is entirely unknown in the language of the people to whom it is applied (Pringle 18 35 [1966]: 2 65) 9.4.1 Naming and renaming The ethnic diversity of the South African population and the social significance in South Africa of ethnicity... but each, in the South African context, has taken on values of its own They are tellingly collocated in ' She told them that we were agents of the system when her neighbours went to tell of the screams, the leaders said it was the work of the struggle' (Mathiane 1 989 : 7 -8) The definite article { 'the struggle') assumes the reader's familiarity with what is meant In 1 989 , a wide range of 'alternative . 9.1. Period Before 17 95 17 95- 183 8 183 8-69 187 0-1909 1910-47 19 48- 88 Languages of origin by period Dutch/Afrikaans N (202) (470) (219) ( 456 ) (426) (776) (%) 64 52 44 45 53 39 English (%) 23 21 27 34 25 35 Bantu (%) — 15 19 10 7 11 Other/unknown (%) 13 10 9 10 14 14 two. it, the rise of the African National Congress, the consolidation of the National 434 English in South Africa Party as a party of the Afrikaner people, and of South African participation in the. Cape. 17 95- 183 8. This period spans the British occupation of the Cape from 17 95 (with a brief return to Dutch control in 180 3-6); the arrival of the English 182 0 settlers, frontier warfare with the