South Africa: The Rocky Road to Nation Building

Abstract

Abstract South Africa is a country which has witnessed spectacular and far-reaching changes from the 1990s until the present, having emerged as a constitutional democracy with equal rights for all races and ethno-linguistic groups only in 1994. Prior to this, the country was subject to two forces of colonization and the assertion of their associated languages, Dutch rule from the mid-seventeenth century and British from the early nineteenth century. It then experienced a twentieth century dominated by increasing racial separation and inequality under the system of apartheid, which took colonial dynamics to an extreme and promulgated a near-complete segregation of people into four main groups: White, Black, Indian, and Coloured. In the colonial period first Dutch and then Dutch and English were imposed as the official languages of the territories within South Africa. The twentieth century saw the rapid rise of Afrikaans as the language of power in the Union of South Africa. This was a form of Dutch which had emerged since early European settlement showing considerable influence from local languages, and which came to be seen and promoted as a central symbol of White Afrikaner nationalism during the course of the twentieth century. Under the domination of apartheid, recognition was given to indigenous African languages, but only in their designated ‘homelands’, areas within South Africa assigned the status of self-governing territories and demarcated along ethno-linguistic lines, KwaZulu being the homeland established for Zulu-speaking people, KwaNdebele that of Ndebele-speakers, and so on. The Afrikaner government thus supported a Herderian view of nation–language–culture, and saw not one nation but many nations in the territory, which would be allowed to ‘develop separately’ (Alexander 1989). These homelands had little legitimacy in the eyes of the Black population, however, as they were illresourced, primarily rural, and sustained the apparent divide-and-rule policy of the White government. The extremism of apartheid finally came to a head in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the country close to civil war and under increasing international