#fun fact since my maternal surname is portuguese there's a high chance that one of my ancestors is from one of the Portuguese colonies

[larktb-archive]

So I’ve talked a bit about how Afrikaans isn’t a colonizer language and is in fact an indigenous black African language but I feel like I haven’t explained why this is the case. There’s two main questions we have to answer: where did Afrikaans come from and why is it associated with the Boere?

Afrikaans has it’s earliest roots in the first indigenous people of South Africa to encounter the Dutch: the !Orana (the ! is a click and usually the word is spelled Korana but !Orana is more accurate) more specifically the Goringhaikona and Goringhaiqua clans who lived on the coast and had made contact with several other non-African groups prior to 1652, including the Dutch. This meant that some members of these clans had basic knowledge of some of these languages, most notably Autshumao, Nommoa and Krotoa. 

This version of Dutch spoken by the interpreters would slowly be spread to the rest of the !Orana as the Dutch began to permanently settle unlike the previous traders who had arrived at the Cape, displacing them and forcing them into the European society; usually as slaves.

At the same time that this was happening the Dutch began to import slaves from across the colonized world, primarily: The Portuguese African colonies; Madagascar; India and Bangladesh; and the Malay peninsula. These peoples would work with the !Orana slaves which is what led to the creation of “Cape Dutch” which would later be called Afrikaans (literally African-ish). It was a creole language akin to Patois, Michif, Pidgin or Haitian Creole and if you wouldn’t say any of those languages are “colonizer language”, you should probably apply that to Afrikaans.

Now there is something which complicates this; white people. Everyone knows that the Boere forced Afrikaans on other indigenous peoples and it was very much a language associated with the colonizers because of that. However the people we call “Afrikaners” (which is a whole other can of worms that I could open) did not always speak “Afrikaans”. In fact up until the late 19th century, the Boere spoke what they called “High Dutch”, which was literally just Dutch.

This was to separate it from Afrikaans or Cape Dutch which was spoken by the “mixed” descendants of the various slave groups and was looked down upon. 

Afrikaans was even referred to as a “Hotnotstaal” meaning “hotnots language”. Hotnot being a slur for “Coloured” people (i.e. the descendants of those slaves but that’s another another can of worms) which derives from “Hottentot” which was a slur for the “Khoena” ethnic group (which includes the !Orana as well as the Damara and the Namaqua in Namibia). The other term for Afrikaans is “Kitchen Dutch” which most likely refers to it’s usage in the kitchen by female slaves.

It was only during the late 19th century that a nationalistic fervour around the language began to be whipped up due to a three reasons: a) to prove that they had more right to the land than the British South Africans b) as a massive fuck you to the Dutch for not helping them during the Boer War and c) much of the lower classes had already adopted Afrikaans so shifting towards it seemed reasonable considering the last two reasons.

This form of Afrikaans was soon codified and made a lot more stringent than the mostly spoken form of Afrikaans that “Coloured” people at the Cape had knew for centuries at this point. Imagine if white people started speaking AAVE and then told you that not only is it their language but you were also speaking it wrong. 

This process of appropriation culminated in the decade between the 2nd Boer War and the creation of the South African state, as Afrikaner nationalism was in it’s zenith and they began imposing it on all indigenous people as a “civilized language”. 

TL;DR Afrikaans is an indigenous language to South Africa which means it deserves to be recognized as such and not thrown out with the bathwater because some whities decided to claim it HOWEVER the codified and “grammatically correct” version of Afrikaans is very much an oppressors language and should be criticized as such and it’s history as a language forced upon indigenous people should not be forgotten. Shit’s nuanced and confusing what do you know.