Chapter 1

Go ahead.

Ban it.

Strike it from the school curriculum.

Take every Afrikaans page that’s ever been penned and burn it in front of the Voortrekker Monument.

Change the name of every Afrikaans-name-bearing city, suburb, town, highway, street and residential driveway.

Gag the mouths of every remaining Afrikaans-speaking South-African*.

You’ve been trying to crush Afrikaans into all kinds of zero since 1994.

But this behavior has been extremely shortsighted, and should be reversed with immediate effect!

And here’s the reason why:

Chapter 2

Back in the ‘90’s on a trip abroad, a friend and I decided to climb to stand at the feet of the statue of Christ that towers with outstretched arms over the city of Rio.

About half way up we stumbled upon a refreshment stand.

As hydrated as the compressed leaf I’d left in my biology book from standard five, it was the greatest thing I’d seen in Rio so far, and that statue was going to take a lot to beat it.

We praised the foresight of the Brazilian tourism industry, and scrambled toward the small oasis alongside other survivors with identical thought-bubbles hovering above their desiccated brows.

Thankfully we were nowhere near Jo’burg, because our spiral-perms had sweated flat. Our “I-HEART-RIO” vests revealed our army-tans. Our denim cut-offs revealed our why-wax-who’s-gonna-know-us-here? legs. Our slops restrained crimson feet ending in swollen yellow blisters between our first and big toes.

Unfortunately however, I found myself standing behind the second greatest thing I’d seen in Rio so far, and that statue was quickly descending off my list of “things-to-do-in-Brazil”.

Pressed up in front of me in line, stood the most good-looking guy I’d seen since Tom Cruise [still cool then] in the In-Flight movie.

“WOW!” I exhaled into his face.

I impressively multitasked by holding his gaze, fracturing Anja’s ribs, throwing back liquid and squealing, “how hot’s this guy???” simultaneously.

[In retrospect – other than exhausted, I cannot imagine a plausible reason as to why I didn’t lift up my camera and take a close-up of him at the same time.]

Unbelievable, I’ll bet you’re wondering. From whence had a vision of beauty such as I summoned up the kind of courage not even the Dutch could lay claim to?

Was I high on South-America’s gross domestic product?

Had my animal instinct been unleashed through fatigue?

Had hallucinations been brought on by sunstroke?

No.

I was brimming with confidence because I was speaking in Afrikaans!

Chapter 3

“Thanks!” he replied.

“…”, I snapped back in a quick-witted recovery.

Why could he respond with this crippling answer?

Because he was from Hillbrow.

Epilogue

Okay, not the textbook case study I was looking for, but a deeper investigation here will reveal that Afrikaans is a powerfully surreptitious method to infiltrate other nations.

And has the potential to make every single South-African a Johannes Bond!

*Axing the springbok from the national rugby team jersey is off-sides. He cannot speak Afrikaans.

…but the oxen can.

It’s been drummed, whipped and beaten into him before, during and since the Great Trek with such affliction that I don’t think he’d have the audacity to speak anything else!

So let’s send him back to the Holland-ish, Germany-ish, France-ish area from whence he came.