English is common ground for us all

MANDLA RADEBE of Norkem Park writes:

This was a thought-provoking question from Ma van Birchleigh (“Waarom so min Afrikaans in EXPRESS”).

Firstly, I am not writing from a social media standpoint, where people rip each other off because of the language they speak. I do hope to express myself positively, as a South African whose environment has modelled him to embrace diversity or be left behind.

Kempton Park is a wonderful community, even more so today that it is as diverse as South Africa is. My mother being Zulu, I naturally speak that language fluently. However, diversity has introduced me to BaSotho, which I embraced to the level of marrying one of them.

That’s not all: amaXhosa are also in my blood through my father’s side and I speak that language too. Gauteng being the way it is, I started meeting BaTswana and the BaSotho Ba Leboa with whom I had to communicate as well.

Tshivenda and XiTsonga are two completely marginalised minority language groups that I am trying to learn too.

Today, through church, I am interacting with English- and Afrikaans-speaking people more frequently than ever in my life, in their languages. The experience feels wonderful.

Unarguably this is daunting and a lot to take in, but not too much, not if you love people. English, for some reason, is a language that most people understand. At school it was easier and it was my medium of instruction, which is a story of most South Africans.

Any media that is trying to reach as many people as possible will use a language most people understand. Kempton EXPRESS has communicated a lot of crucial community news in English and I am sure that most people, including Ma van Birchleigh, were able to read and understand those, if they did.

Suppose those were communicated in Afrikaans, a majority of people would have been left out because of lack of understanding. For example, a few months ago, an article about a remarkable personality of Kempton Park, Wynand Marais, was published in Afrikaans. I felt a void in my heart because I respect the mark he made as a community member that came before us, but I could not read the contents of the article with understanding.

Disadvantageous, don’t you agree? But do Afrikaans-speaking people feel like that reading English? I doubt it.

I am not for the death of Afrikaans. If anything, I have defended the right of Afrikaans before. It is a well-developed language and its death is impossible. However, for the ease of communication, English is a common ground for us all and we need to talk as a community.

We all need to realise that we need each other, which is why we have to communicate in a way that we can all understand.

While relating my South African language experience at the beginning of this letter, I realised that we all have lost something, because we were building bridges not boundaries.

If this article were written in isiXhosa, I would have lost most of us, including Ma van Birchleigh. Is that our goal?

Communication is a powerful tool. It shapes thoughts, builds bridges and trust and makes communities stronger. It makes sense therefore to do it in a medium through which everyone can be reached.

Yesteryear, I held the view Ma van Birchleigh espouses, but I realised that in a diverse community there exists more than just my reality. My point is, let us unite behind a broader purpose.