Arabic Afrikaans - Arabic Under Apartheid

Arabic Under Apartheid

The apartheid regime was reluctant to openly acknowledge the influence of other languages spoken in South Africa on Afrikaans, since Afrikaans was purported to be a pure language of Afrikaner and Christian origin, and therefore a unique treasure of the Afrikaners. This is supported by the fact that until around 1900, Afrikaans was considered a dialect of Dutch and therefore not recognized as a separate language. Even today, Afrikaans and Dutch are considered mutually intelligible. As far as the Christian European origins of Afrikaans go, Afrikaans speakers in the Cape had to rely on the Dutch Statenbijbel which dated to 1618 (decades before Jan van Riebeeck came to the Cape). The first official translation of the entire Bible into Afrikaans was in 1933 by J. D. du Toit, E. E. van Rooyen, J. D. Kestell, H. C. M. Fourie, and BB Keet. This monumental work established Afrikaans as "a pure and proper language" for religious purposes, especially amongst the deeply Calvinist Afrikaans religious community that had hitherto been somewhat sceptical of a Bible translation out of the original Dutch language to which they were accustomed.

Today efforts are being made to assess Afrikaans and its origin and contributions to it, especially in vocabulary, of other languages (e.g. Bantu, Khoisan, Portuguese and Malay). A major factor in this was the non-white Movement for Alternative Afrikaans, that succeeded in getting non-standard Cape Afrikaans recognized. Yet the role of Arabic Afrikaans in this emancipatory movement is as yet unclear.

Afrikaans is a West-Germanic language extremely close to the Dutch from which it originated and has been influenced by German, French and other languages, with a relatively small number of loanwords from Khoi and Bantu words which are mainly used as place names or in words like "karos" which have fallen into disuse as far as modern standard Afrikaans is concerned. Whether or not Arabic Afrikaans is a language per se, Arabic has had at least some influence in South Africa, even if only 2 or 3 words have been borrowed from Arabic; the word "kafir", which means "infidel" or "heathen" in Arabic is a taboo word referring to black people. Additionally, the root of the Arabic word jihad is "jahada", meaning "he struggled", which is the term often used by black South Africans to refer to the fight against Apartheid, which included bombings of shopping centres, courthouses, a cinema (Sterland bomb) and at least one car bomb (the Church Street bomb on May 20, 1983).