Twelve official languages, one nation: columnist says what holds South Africa together is stronger than what pulls it apart

South Africa’s twelve official languages, and the many smaller tongues spoken alongside them, are doing nation-building work that politics alone has not managed, according to a Sunday World column by Vika Khumalo published on 26 October.

Khumalo’s argument is that the country has spent the years since 1994 attempting something no other nation has had to attempt in quite the same way: stitching together a single national identity out of a set of languages and cultures that were never designed to sit in one room. The column treats that project as unfinished but real, and it treats the country’s diversity as an asset rather than a problem to be managed.

He points to the languages that sit outside the official twelve as evidence of how deep that diversity runs. Khoekhoegowab, which he identifies as a San language of the southern Kalahari, and isiBhaca, along with a number of regional Nguni languages, are described in the column as at risk of disappearing. He also makes room for Tsotsitaal and for Fanakalo, the pidgin that grew up around the mines and that, in his account, has outlived the circumstances that produced it and is understood widely across the country’s language groups.

For Khumalo, those languages are not curiosities. They are part of the case that South Africans are bound to one another by more than a shared border, and that the binding is strongest where it is least official.

The column does not pretend the project has been easy. Khumalo writes that social and national cohesion should have come naturally to a country with so much in common, but that South Africans have instead had to work through differences that have not gone away and that are sometimes turned inward, to the country’s own cost. He attributes some of that friction to a competitive streak that runs through South African life, visible in sport but not confined to it.

That competitiveness, in his reading, occasionally hands an advantage to people outside the country who would prefer to see it divided. He warns that there are those who would welcome the sight of part of South Africa trying to break away from the rest, and he treats that prospect as a reason for South Africans to be more careful with one another.

Against that, Khumalo sets two things he says keep pulling the country back towards itself. The first is sport, which he credits with repeatedly giving South Africans a reason to rally behind a single flag. The second is the Constitution, which he describes as a document South Africans hold in common and which, in his account, keeps the country pointed at a shared goal even when the surrounding politics is noisy.

Reconciliation, he writes, has been among the hardest things the country has attempted since 1994, and it remains the foundation the rest depends on. He argues that it should not be wielded as a threat over South Africans who have not yet settled their differences, and that a country which cannot forgive will struggle to move forward. Ethnic difference, in his view, should be celebrated rather than used to divide people.

He closes the argument by tying it to the local government elections, which he says should be treated as an expression of the larger national project of building a country that is united in its pursuit of better governance. His summary line is that the things holding South Africans together outweigh the things pulling them apart, and that the national crest, with its motto of unity in diversity, says as much.

The column also opens with a quotation from Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and prime minister, drawn from his 1963 book Africa Must Unite, to the effect that the forces binding a people together run deeper than the outside pressures working to separate them.

The Enquirer will keep reporting on the language, cohesion and reconciliation questions the column raises as they surface in policy and in public argument.

Source: Sunday World, Vika Khumalo | A call for continuous national cohesion and reconciliation