A contentious South African education law has drawn furious condemnation from politicians and campaigners who claim it is putting Afrikaans education under threat while evoking for others an enduring association of the language with white minority rule.
The Basic Education Laws Amendment Act was signed into law on Friday by the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who said he would give dissenting parties in his coalition government three months to suggest alternatives to two sections that give provincial officials the powers to override admission decisions and force schools to teach in more than one of South Africa’s 12 official languages.
The provisions have meanwhile been welcomed by those who say they are necessary in order to stop some government schools using language to racially exclude children.
The controversy has tapped into multiple sensitive political topics in South Africa: forcing children to learn in languages they don’t understand, the enduring association for some of the Afrikaans language with apartheid, persistent racial inequalities and the parlous state of many schools.
“We have seen cases of learners being denied admissions to schools because of their language policies,” Ramaphosa, the leader of the African National Congress, the country’s largest party, said before signing the bill, which was passed before May’s elections. “The bill is part of the states’ ongoing effort to build an education system that is more effective and more equitable.”
The Democratic Alliance (DA), which gets the majority of its support from white voters and is the second largest party in South Africa’s coalition government, threatened legal action if mother-tongue schooling was not protected after the three-month negotiation period.
“Afrikaans-medium schools constitute less than 5% of the country’s schools,” said the DA’s leader and agriculture minister, John Steenhuisen, referring to schools that teach only in Afrikaans. “Their existence in no way contributes to the crisis in education, and turning them into dual-medium or English-medium schools will not help improve the quality of education for South Africa’s learners.”
Afrikaans evolved from the Dutch settlers around Cape Town, as well as African and south-east Asian enslaved people, local Indigenous people and their mixed-race Cape Coloured descendants. Some of the first texts in Afrikaans were written in Arabic script by Cape Malay Muslim scholars in the early 19th century.
Language and education have a tortuous history in South Africa. When the Boer war ended in 1902, Afrikaans became a form of resistance among white Afrikaners to British colonial rule and English education.
After Afrikaner nationalists took power in 1948, with policies including intentionally making segregated black schools worse, the language became identified with white minority rule. In 1976, hundreds of children were shot dead by police in the Soweto uprising when they marched peacefully against the imposition of Afrikaans tuition in schools.
According to census data, the number of South Africans speaking Afrikaans at home rose from 5.9 million in 1996 to 6.6 million in 2022, with the majority of speakers non-white. But by share of the population the figure has fallen from 14.5% to 10.6%, and some Afrikaner rights groups argue they are losing their language, culture and identity.
“For our cultural community it’s essential that we have schools where there is Afrikaans education, it’s used as the language of tuition and that it should be monolingual schools,” said Alana Bailey, the head of cultural affairs at Afriforum, which she said campaigns for minority rights, rejecting accusations of racism.
Since apartheid ended, many black parents living near the limited number of good historically white schools have tried to send their children there. In some cases this has resulted in officials trying to force Afrikaans-only schools to also teach in English, with legal battles reaching the constitutional court.
“There were historically quite a few Afrikaans schools that were not full to capacity and would use language provision as a way to create barriers to access,” said Brahm Fleisch, a professor of education at the University of the Witwatersrand, expressing his support for the new law as a safeguard. “When schools are full and there’s no evidence of discrimination on the basis of race … schools are not compelled to change their language policy.”
South Africa’s constitution guarantees the right to education in an official language of choice where “reasonably practicable”. But Marius Swart, a language policy expert at the University of Stellenbosch, said the lack of state capacity meant mother-tongue education in indigenous languages was still a distant dream for many children.
Meanwhile, most of South Africa’s children continue to struggle in school. In 2021, a survey found that 81% of 10-year-olds could not read for understanding.
“We still, to a very large extent, have a stratified school system with a relatively small elite of rich schools,” Swart said. “With relatively rich children from relatively rich families attending them and then many, many children who are in … poorly resourced schools and who really struggle.”
