Fourteen years after the strict segregation regimen ended in South Africa, the autochthonous peoples of this country continue to fight for their cultural and linguistic rights. The speakers of Bantu languages (who sum up all together more than three fourths of the total South African population) witness how their own languages have still not obtained the long deserved equality with the two European origin languages spoken in South Africa (English and Afrikaans, a language which branches from Finnish). The educational system is essential and things are changing little by little. Just recently, the Zulu community obtained an important victory when a judge sentenced a century old secondary school in Durban (e Thekwini in Zulu) for discriminating against its students for using their mother language in the school.

(Map: territorial distribution of the principle languages spoken in South Africa. The domination of Zulu is due to the characteristics of the KwaZulu-Natal province. Image: Wikipedia)

The accusations were presented last year by Ntombenhle Nkosi, president of the PanSud-Africana Languages Board (PanSALB), a government based organization in charge of promoting all of the spoken languages in the country. Nkosi argued that her son, a student in Durban High School (DHS) and native speaker of Zulu, was not offered the opportunity to assist a higher-leveled class in Zulu because the educational system only offered basic Zulu lessons to non-native Zulu speakers. However, DHS does have programs offering higher level classes in both English and Afrikaans, despite the fact that Durban is the main city of KwaZulu-Natal province, in which Zulu is the primary language (80% are native speakers) while Afrikaans is used primarily by 1.5% of the census population (granted that in the central neighbourhoods of Durban the former language prevails).

On September 30 2008 the Equality Court of Durban concluded that Nkosi was right. In the judgement, the courts confirmed that "offering Afrikaans as a higher levelled class superior to Zulu [...] constituted discrimination" against students in the 8th and 9th grades (which are the first classes in the secondary educational system of South Africa) whose native language is Zulu. Following this case, the courts made it mandatory that the government supplies the necessary resources so that all of the KwaZulu-Natal schools can offer the same quality and level of education in Zulu that is offered in Afrikaans or English.

One step forward on a rocky path

It isn't odd that local languages have a slim future among students. Reported this November in South Africa's newspaper The Times: In one of Johannesburg's high school, only one student in his last year of high school chose Zulu as his second language. Worst of all, one professor teacher admits that she advises those students beginning high school to not study Zulu and instead Afrikaans, since in the latter language the materials and resources are much better.

The current situation demonstrates how decades of horrid political discrimination against blacks the black majority continues to weigh down on South African society. It is important to note that South Africa's educational system, during the apartheid regimen, was designed to maintain white supremacy and never bothered to supply South African blacks with a higher education. Much less were the South African segregationists interested in cultivating and standardizing the local languages of the country. On the contrary: In 1976, the government passed a bill which forced half of South Africa's high school education to be taught in Afrikaans, a language without any traditional roots among most of the black population. The change from a system like the one mentioned above to a system based on respecting multilingualism is proving to be very difficult.

A rich linguistic panorama

Since 1994, following the end of the apartheid era, South Africa has had 11 official languages, two of them with European origins (Afrikaans and English) and 9 local languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Northern Sotho, Tswana, Sotho, Tsonga, Swazi, Venda and Ndebele). Theoretically, the constitution obliges the government to "heighten the status and increase the usage" of these African languages and also it forces that both the central government and the provincial governments use on a regular basis at least two languages. English maintains its status to a greater advantage above all other languages. Afrikaans, on the other hand, continues to be significant among the white community and is spoken by 13% of the the country's total population, while among the local languages, Zulu is the most predominant (24% of the population's mother tongue or 10 million people, according to the 2001 census).

In fact, Zulu, Xhosa, Northern Sotho and Tswana all have more native speakers compared to English, which is left with an 8.2% of speakers, keeping in mind that English is used also by all those who have had an education. Since 1994, English has established an important foothold as a language in the South African community, with the advantage that it is not associated with the Apartheid era, unlike Afrikaans. It's predominance in both commercial and science fields is very considerable. South Africa's mission is to combine the command of one of the most powerful languages in the world with its internal linguistic diversity: In South Africa, in addition to the eleven official languages, you can find eight other unofficial autochtonous languages, as well as the other dozen that have been imported by both European and Asian immigrants.

Further information:

• Mail & Guardian: Durban school taught 'kitchen Zulu', court told
• City Press: Parent wins school language battle in court
• The Mercury: Department praises language ruling
• The Times: White schoolboy chooses to learn Zulu over ‘dying language'