Judge Sisi Khampepe has just delivered a report, after an inquiry was commissioned by Stellenbosch University, to investigate allegations of racism against the institution, when an Afrikaner student was filmed urinating on the study desk of a black, African student earlier this year and this went viral and subsequent to that, during the month of October, another Afrikaner student urinated inside the room of two black students.

All of this rightfully caused an uproar, with black students openly calling for an end to racial discrimination at Stellenbosch University.

In accepting the outcomes and recommendations of the Judge Khampepe report, Stellenbosch vice-chancellor Wim de Villiers openly acknowledged that there are indeed racial problems within Stellenbosch University, with most black students and academics expressing sentiments and lived experiences of being unwelcome and unaccepted at the institution and he has committed the university to taking action to rectify and remedy this, in line with recommendations from the Khampepe report.

I was reflecting on all this and just thinking to myself, “why the heck do darkies not just build their own institutions and stop subjecting themselves to all this?” Twenty eight years into democracy, we should surely have been able to build African language schools and tertiary institutions that are centres of excellence in preserving, developing, and promoting African cultures in this country as well as primary custodians and enablers of the decolonisation and transformation of South African society quest.

To quote the words of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “Language as communication and culture are then products of each other. Communication creates culture, culture is a means of communication. Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.”

In my view, instead of trying to “de-Afrikanerise” tertiary institutions such as Maties and Tukkies or schools such as Affies and Grey Bloem, blacks should be building their own, African language tertiary institutions and schools, which are just as excellent, if not even more, and which can advance the transformation agenda much more effectively and efficaciously than what we are currently witnessing.

I mean, of course there should be no aspect of South African society which is exclusive in advancing the language and culture of a certain people group, to the extent of being discriminatory against people from other ethnicities who may want to immerse themselves in that culture, but there should be nothing wrong with an institution being clear that it is built to advance, develop and promote a certain culture(including Afrikaans folks), obviously within the broader ambit of nation-building and aspirant “Rainbow Nationism”.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o argues that African governments should be deliberately, systematically including African languages in learning institutions as a mode of preserving, developing and promoting African cultures and I would take the argument even further and say that within South Africa, government should be building and developing African language schools and tertiary institutions, to the extent that they also become globally competitive centres of excellence, research, knowledge production, sporting excellence and cultural as well as economic advancement, the same way this has been done by the likes of Maties and Tukkies et al for the Afrikaans culture and its people.

Ultimately, the end goal is to make African languages also languages of commerce, as Africans themselves become more affluent and upwardly mobile economically, because in truth, unless a language can become a language of commerce, there is no incentive for anyone to study using it, because whatever output they produce using that language will not be able to assist them to advance economically. Of course, this is a chicken and egg situation in light of the argument that I am endeavouring to advance within this piece.

Not too long ago, Solidarity built a whole tertiary institution to advance Afrikaner interests, Sol-Tech technical training college in Pretoria, with a budget of R300 million, but it was built under budget and finished even earlier than planned nogal. Solidarity accomplished this using monthly contributions from their members, which begs the question for me, with all these organisations that have been formed to supposedly advance transformation for the benefit of the black majority in South Africa in existence, what is preventing we darkies from doing a similar thing? Why can’t we just build our own stuff and in doing so bring about real transformation of South African society?

Without the development of African languages, African cultures will become even more marginalised and at greater risk of going the way of the dodo and the quagga within our society and without the different cultures, our diversity as a people is lost and all pretensions of “Rainbow Nationism” are exposed as mere “Alice in Wonderland” type fantasies.

To quote Ngugi wa Thiong’o again, “if you know your mother tongue and add it with all other languages, that is empowerment” or as Frantz Fanon so aptly and succinctly puts it, “to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”

Mugabe Ratshikuni works for the Gauteng provincial government; He is an activist with a passion for social justice and transformation. He writes here in his personal capacity.

Blacks must just build their own stuff – OPINION | Politicsweb