Old Takkies Indaba

Anyone who has ever heard someone from the Northern Cape region speak will know exactly what I am talking about when I say the words ‘Namaqualandse Afrikaans’. Everyone there spoke Afrikaans, regardless of race and a black person there could possibly out-Afrikaans any white Afrikaaner in other parts of the country. The Afrikaans spoken there was almost completely perfect, but sounded flat. We did not use English slang words, mix English and Afrikaans and even when we were swearing each other, we would be calling each other ‘Hond’ (dog) and ‘Teef’ (bitch).

There was one thing I always found funny about Afrikaans there though; it was something I did not realize we did until I moved out of Upington into the much more English Port Elizabeth: in Upington everyone and everything became a male.
Saying ‘Marie sê hy gaan hom se rooi rok aantrek’ (Mary said he is going to put on his’s red dress) was perfectly acceptable. My family from there still talks like that and more than 20 years after leaving the small town behind me for good, I find that I still revert to that oddly ‘flat’ Afrikaans when I am around my family from there…I refuse to start calling everything a male and insert double possessive morphemes where they do not belong though.

From a young age I was fiercely and proudly Afrikaans though. Afrikaans was my language, my mother’s language and the language I loved. My mother did make a point of teaching us excellent English, but I was an Afrikaans speaking coloured through and through.

After starting my tertiary education though, I realized that Afrikaans had its limitations. You cannot study computers in Afrikaans because…well…computers were English weren’t they? You do not talk about a ‘c-aandrywer’ (c-drive) because only about one other person in the group will know what you are talking about. Saying ‘drukker’ instead of printer sounded stupid and how can you program in Afrikaans when Visual Basic is based on basic English commands?

And so it began: I would use an English word here and there, then later entire English phrases. Eventually I would flop between the two languages while having a conversation and eventually it reached a point where in the real working world I needed to speak English. So I became English. I raised my son English. Half the time my mother and I speak English when talking to each. I have hardly any Afrikaans friends and when I watch the news the only reason I watch the Afrikaans version is because Riaan Cruywagen is an institution. I find that I think in English even when speaking Afrikaans.

Now living in Cape Town, where the large majority of Afrikaans speaking Coloured people live, I find the mutated Afrikaans spoken here so abhorrent that I would rather stick to English. I might be an Afrikaner at heart, but I present myself as an English person to the rest of the world. I am not ashamed of being Afrikaans though. I am not ashamed of my roots and history. I am a coloured Afrikaner.
So if you think being Afrikaner means a white oom (Uncle) with a boep (big stomach) and a safari suit, think again.