Look back in languor: A South African Jew visits the languages of his childhood |
I was born into the South Africa of the apartheid era, where every white child was educated in two spoken languages – English and Afrikaans. The latter was a language which unfurled itself from its Dutch origins at the beginning of the twentieth century to bask in its distinctive, not to say unique cultural and literary identity.
Afrikaans is spoken nowhere else in the world and I have come to cherish it with the sentimental pride of someone who has acquired a rare but useless piece of bric-a-brac. The few novels and books of poetry in that language which I still have serve only to remind me of a lost world, just as my father used to peruse the Hebrew books in his collection which returned him to his childhood in Lithuania.
In my day, white parents had a simple choice to make. They could either enrol their child in a state school where every subject was taught through the medium of English, or in one where Afrikaans was the prevailing medium. In either case, the other language ranked a poor second.
Despite their Yiddish-speaking origins, my family conducted their everyday business in English. This was the language to which I was attuned from birth, so when it came to making the choice of schooling it was a ‘no contest’ that I would land up in an English medium school.
Black South........