Old Takkies Indaba

The neighbourhood that I grew up in was, I suppose you could say, predominantly Afrikaans. There was one local school about three blocks away that had full khaki uniforms (sans shoes) and being a student at a private school ten km’s away, I didn’t exactly have the motivation to go out and be friends with my neighbours.

I know that my mother and her siblings were given a hard time by the local kids when they arrived in South Africa in the early 60’s and I believe that a lot of rooi nekke were in the same boat, especially the ones with fresh English accents.

So it’s a possibility that I started off my learning career with a little disdain towards the language and the people. And I say that with the utmost ignorance because I didn’t know anything about them or their culture.

And that’s really where my problem lies.

From the age of six to fifteen I had but one Afrikaans person in my life per year – and that was my teacher. I still remember most of them by name and definitely remember what each one looked like because I used to loathe walking into that classroom each and every day to sit and listen to something that I had no will to learn.

We learn our primary language by speaking and repeating what our parents say which is a very different experience to being told to sit down, shut up and memorise grammar and punctuation rules for an hour at a time.

Yes, the Afrikaans teachers I had were by far the most hardcore of disciplinarians.

When I look back at them all I realise (conversely) that we probably treated them the worst of all, and we knew how to make a teacher cry. After all, we all hated their class. As I thought about it more while writing this piece I figured that they probably felt like the real outsiders. No matter what they thought or who they were, they were just the Afrikaans teacher to us, and at a very liberal English all-boys school in the 80’s and 90’s that might’ve not been all that pleasant.

Of course, what pre-teen is going to rationalise to that extent. I simply didn’t like the language, the class, the lectures or the exams and I did my damndest just to pass. And pass I did, with a flying “E” on higher grade. And “E” really does stand for Enough because an F would’ve cost me dearly.

My reckoning is that I learned as much Afrikaans at school that I would have picked up anyway just living in the country. I can understand conversations but it’s impossible for me to join in and that has served me just fine. Even when working for two years at a predominantly Afrikaans company I sat in meetings which were held in Afrikaans and just replied in English – everyone was happy.

What surprised me was that on my last trip back home I felt a newly found soft spot for the language, especially on our tour through the small towns of the Western Cape. It made me realise (as I picked a peppercorn out of my teeth from my freshly cut biltong) that it was a part of what made me and whether I like it or not I’m a small part rock-spider.