04/04/2024
THE QUESTION OF LANGUAGE IN NAMIBIA
Languages most often spoken in Namibian households are: Oshiwambo - also known as Ovambo (48.9% of households) Khoekhoegowab - also known as Khoekhoe (11.3%) Afrikaans - (10.4%)20 Mar 2024
The above presentation of language statistics in Namibia is based on National groups or what they call demography. It is wrong.
Urban population and the population in commercial farming make up roughly 60% (58%) of the Namibian population. The two groups in primary production and services speak Afrikaans as the functional language and cultural expression.
According to the 2004 census conducted under the statistician, Panduleni Kali, four percent (4%) of Namibians spoke English of which two percent (2%) spoke it competently. Afrikaans was the only language that grew by 4% annually. English declined.
The weight of Afrikaans in Namibia is historical. It was brought here by the Khoisan(first the Nama and then the Baster) in the 19th century.
Both groups used Dutch for official communications and religion.
Its weight is further an indication of the identification of national groups with the language.
Afrikaans was developed by the slaves in the Cape and the Khoi Khoi as a means of communication with the Dutch since 1652 when Van Riebeek arrived at the Cape.
The Afrikaners (Boere) in their resistance against British colonialism and imperialism developed Afrikaans into a scientific language through first their resistance poetry and literature and later on the backs of the black and red (Black (mid-Asian and Cape African) and Khoisan) proletariat when they took power in 1910. The proletariat provided the wealth - the material means - to develop the language. But they developed the expressive power of the language.
Afrikaans like any language expressive of the social economy of the region is an expression of the social economic development of South Africa and Namibia as an industrial region. It expresses the crucible of historical development in all its facets.
The mastery of language encapsulates its cultural conquests (literature, poetry, music - forms and power of expression - and its formal and technical expression).
In the historical development of language in Southern Africa misconceptions brought about by political obscurantism, that is, by different classes having diverse interests in the perversion of the history of language. The first major social intrusion was the black children's mass protests in Soweto in 1976 against Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. The protests should have been against Apartheid education and its deprivation of black children. This was graphically expressed by the solidarity uprisings with the Soweto children by the Cape Flats working classes, the progenitors of the Afrikaans language.
The second catastrophic social intrusion was the introduction of English and the banishment of Afrikaans in education as the main medium of instruction. To be able to speak a language you have to master its (Pathos(feeling) Ethos(values) Logos (logic)) that is historically and culturally forged. It severed at least 60% of the Nation from its basic culture of production and thus the means to procure its existence.
The reports that the crisis committee attaches to its communication with the interested parties are more than proof of the existentialist crisis through the destruction of education.
The reports that the crisis committee attaches to its communication with the interested parties are more than proof of the existentialist crisis through the destruction of education.
The struggle of tribal elements with the oral conduit of the British Empire could even have been comical if it were not that it in fact reflects the tragic caricature of a nation mutilating its chances of emerging from the still festering effects of colonialism.
