The Higher Education ministry has dismissed a complaint made by the DA against Minister Blade Nzimande.
The ministry issued a response to the complaint on Tuesday morning, stating that Nzimande recognized Afrikaans as one of the country’s 11 official languages but that he can’t allow Afrikaans to be used as a means of exclusion and oppression nor as a means to pursue a racist Afrikaner nationalist agenda.
“Afrikaans should and must be located in a democratic South Africa and be rescued from a white right-wing agenda. This should not be viewed as being in conflict with promoting mother tongue instruction in a democratic South Africa,” said Minister Nzimande in a statement.
The DA lodged a complaint with South African Human Rights Commission, stating in their complaint that Nzimande’s insistence on defining Afrikaans as a foreign language in South Africa was hateful and unconstitutional.
The DA’s, Leon Schreiber said that Nzimande’s classification of Afrikaans as a “foreign” language was contained in the language policy framework for public higher education institutions dated October 2020.
“The framework only defines languages that ‘belong to the Southern Bantu language family’ as indigenous, thereby directly excluding Afrikaans from the definition of indigenous. Nzimande’s insistence on discriminating against Afrikaans and the people who speak it simply cannot stand. It is untruthful, unscientific and unconstitutional,” Schreiber said.
This follows after a recent Constitutional Court ruling that Unisa change its language policy to include teaching and learning in Afrikaans by the start of the 2023 academic year.
Nzimande said that he will study both the Constitutional Court judgment and the DA’s complaint and that he wanted the department to use all SA languages for transformation the post-school education and training sector as a whole by enhancing the status roles of previously marginalized languages.
“We are, however, more than determined to defend our language policy in higher education and we are prepared to engage anyone with a genuine desire to tackle inequalities in language use and development in our country. In consultation with my legal team, I will communicate further on the implications of the Constitutional Court judgment on the entire post-school education and training sector,” Nzimande said.
The department’s statement added that: “The DA has forever been narrowly preoccupied with Afrikaans only, with very little to say about the important matter of the development of the nine other official languages that had been suppressed and deliberately underdeveloped under colonialism and apartheid.”
Sources: Sowetan LIVE, EWN
Follow FiND iT on Facebook here.
ALSO READ: ANC asked to clarify if Afrikaans speakers are considered ‘foreign’ in SA
