MULTILINGUAL FEATS ARE VITAL, BUT THEY ARE ONLY THE START
Jacob Dlamini

The Weekender - online
April 11, 2009

A BLACK student at Wits University once asked a white Democratic Alliance (DA) official canvassing for votes on campus what guarantee he (the student) had that the official would not, having won the student's vote, emigrate.

"How do I know that my vote won't be wasted on someone who's likely to emigrate at anytime?" asked the student. The official did not answer, as I recall.

It may well be that he knew that the student's question was neither sincere nor innocent. It was a gotcha question.

In truth, the student was a political partisan on campus and his question was intended to call into question the DA official's allegiance to SA. Behind the question was the prejudice that whites could not be fully South African and that their loyalties would always be to Europe.

I was reminded of this attempted set-up on Tuesday during a debate at Wits University on the future of opposition politics in SA - not, as some might think, by Jacob Zuma's recent clumsy take on the age-old soutpiel dispute.

The debate which reminded me of the gotcha question was hosted by Kaya FM and moderated by talk-show host John Perlman. It was attended by DA leader Helen Zille, Pan Africanist Congress president Letlapa Mphahlele, Rev Kenneth Meshoe from the African Christian Democratic Party and Mbhazima Shilowa, deputy president of the Congress of the People .

The ANC, being the ruling party, was not invited. However, there were many ANC supporters in attendance and they made sure everyone knew they were there.

Among the ANC supporters was a young woman who asked whether Zille spoke any languages other than English and Afrikaans. Now, if there was ever a perfect example of what happens when someone asks a gotcha question to which they do not already know the answer, this was it.

As anyone who pays attention to these matters will tell you, Zille is one of the few prominent white South Africans who take indigenous languages seriously enough to learn to speak them. Zille has chosen to learn Xhosa.

Not surprisingly, Zille could not wait to answer. In Xhosa. Boy, did she mesmerise the audience with her answer, throwing in enough self-deprecating jokes into the mix to neutralise anyone who might have been tempted to take issue with her halting pronunciation.

In fact, Zille did a far better job of speaking Xhosa than the patronising nonsense to which, as fellow columnist Xolela Mangcu has pointed out a few times, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel subjects us with each budget speech when he throws in one or two sentences in an indigenous language.

Zille was honest enough to say that Xhosa was not an easy language to learn but that she was making a real effort. It showed.

I do not mean to belittle the young woman's question. It bears asking and would, under different circumstances, be a more than fair question to ask - especially of the millions of South Africans who see nothing wrong with going through life without speaking at least one of the languages spoken by the majority of their fellow citizens. What kind of a national conversation do we expect to have when the terms of that exchange can be set only by those who speak English?

But that is not what the woman was getting at. She was not trying to raise substantive issues about South Africans talking past one another or speaking different languages. She was aiming, rather, for a gotcha moment. She wanted to embarrass Zille. But she was the one left embarrassed.

I hold no brief for Zille and do not for a second want to give the impression that I am mesmerised by any white person who speaks an indigenous African language. That's what we should all be doing - speaking as many languages as we possibly can, especially in a country as richly endowed with languages as ours.

But I also do not want us to make more of the question of African language proficiency among white South Africans than needed. The ability of a white person to speak an African language is not the be-all and end-all of our progress as a young nation. There is a lot more work to be done.

One only has to think of the white farmers, white government officials and white former security policemen who were fluent in African languages.

They spoke the languages, alright. But that did not necessarily mean they acknowledged the humanity of those whose languages they spoke.

If anything, they had some of the worst records on race relations. They took their facility with African languages to mean that they were experts on the "native question". They were not.

Zille will not get my vote but there is something to be said for a senior politician making the effort to learn to speak at least one of the languages of the people she needs to reach if she is to go beyond being a minority political boutique. Who knows, Zille may even get the young woman's vote one day. Now that would be a real gotcha moment.