The Government of National Unity (GNU) has come in for a lot of criticism. That’s fine. All political orders should be open to criticism. The most strident criticisms have come from the Left and from a loose affiliation of intensely ethno-centric (ethnicity broadly conceived), sometimes nativist, and generally disaffected groups and individuals.
The Left considers the GNU to be an expression of liberal capitalism under the guiding hand of vested capitalist interests.
The loose affiliation, the so-called Progressive Caucus, are either angry because there are “non-African” people in the GNU, or because they dislike Cyril Ramaphosa, or because they want to establish a state and society based on Marxist-Leninist principles, or just because they are not in the government.
It’s hard to keep up, but let us accept their sincerity and imagine that there is philosophical, theoretical and practical coherence in everything they represent.
One group that is terribly infantile are those people who are located in the overlap, in that intersect of a Venn diagram wherefrom a cadre of ideologically lost bandits get a thrill, and upon which they base their cred.
“I’m-more-radical-than-you” is their call sign. They’re fixed at the centre of their own attention. The GNU has received the most support from status quo patriots, market fundamentalists and vested interests. The rabid free marketeers have been remarkably quiet.
Status quo patriots
All of this is worthy of a discussion for another time, by someone who is better qualified, and more courageous. It would, however, be remiss of me to not drop a line about the status quo patriots.
These good people take their cue from people like that most noxious of conservatives, the late Charles Krauthammer, who, back at the end of the Cold War, believed that the “best hope” for the world was in asserting “American strength and will… to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them”.
These status quo patriots and public intellectuals, of whom I have written in this space previously, play Whac-A-Mole for Washington; they smack down any head that pops up with ideas and beliefs, anywhere in the world, that challenge the US.
Anyway, one strand of the GNU as a concept that I want to pull at is the idea of national unity. It sounds good, and national unity probably is good. There aren’t very many people outside romantic revolutionaries who believe in mass disruption and destruction, and the violent overthrow of institutions.
At an admittedly rarefied level, national unity in society, as opposed to in government, may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. It leans too tightly against “sameness” and discouraging dissent, and what is considered (randomly) as deviant behaviour and telling stories in “other” languages.
I should make the point, with some haste, that having a shared or common vision of a prosperous and stable future is not necessarily bad. As long as there is mutual respect and a constant drive towards equality, acknowledging diverse historical and cultural origins and passage, openness, exchange of ideas and mutual learning, and keeping individuals, families and communities in touch with the material world during times of technological innovation and advancement.
The dangers of a single language
One of the bigger problems, among several, with forcing a national identity or a national unity is when it is shaped by the dominance of one group expressed through a particular language. Just bear in mind how foreigners or immigrants in the US, that bastion of freedom and democracy, have been told “to speak English” or leave because “this is America”. More on this below.
Imagine, for a moment, the University of KwaZulu-Natal bans instruction in a language other than isiZulu, or the University of Cape Town outlaws classes on kiSwahili, or Mandarin or Hindi or English, for that matter, and insists that only speakers of isiXhosa are welcomed on campus or in classes. This should not be misinterpreted. Mother tongue instruction is fundamental for early learning, and for expression later in life.
We have, however, seen language used as a weapon to divide, provoke and ridicule.
Historically, language has been tied to national identity, patriotism and loyalty, and has been a divisive factor, sometimes resulting in tragic violence.
One inception point of almost all nationalist struggles, before and after wars, has been around language. Adolf Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland was driven by the idea that it was “a German-speaking” region.
The Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2009, with more than 100,000 people killed, was a conflict between that country’s Tamil-speaking and Sinhala-speaking people. See this article for a primer on the significance of language in Sri Lanka.
In Israel you may be compelled to attend Hebrew classes and placement tests for upward mobility and “true belonging”. In India in 2022, a man set himself alight and died in protest against that country’s policies to impose the nationwide use of Hindi. There are very many examples across time and place.
There are usually very many factors that shape the start of particular wars and war in general, but one of the “excuses” has always been to save, promote or protect language as the signifier of cultural specificity and exception.
Attention is usually driven to conflicts in Asia or Africa, but there are quite startling examples of the way language was weaponised in the US, to which the world has looked for leadership for most of the past 70 or 80 years. About 80% of people in the US speak English as a first language, but this is only marginally an error of historical forces.
Executed
There was a time, in the antebellum South, when slave owners and traders would cut out the tongues of enslaved people who were unable or unwilling to speak English. In 1862, Benjamin Butler, commander of the troops of the South in New Orleans, had Francophones executed to discourage the use of French.
Indigenous Americans were sent to English-language schools and forbidden to speak their native language. They were often beaten when they spoke their native languages in public.
And, during World War 1, some states and local governments in the US proscribed speaking German in public, with the hope of dampening old allegiances among the six million German immigrants. See Harvard Magazine’s report on these issues.
So… national unity is a good thing – if it leads to stability, prosperity, respect and trust among citizens. South Africa’s policy of 11 official languages is sometimes ridiculed. Fair enough, but it’s certainly a lot better than saying “speak one language or leave”.
Parenthetically, during my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which draws very many students from around the world who pay more than double their British counterparts, Welsh nationalist activists graffitied walls on campus with slogans like “speak Welsh or leave”. The language used was much more salty…
One of the best things about South Africa is precisely the diversity of cultural influences. There are, of course, necessary adjustments that have to be made; increasing instruction in indigenous languages, opening up pathways to indigenous knowledge and knowledge transfer to expanding fuller knowledge of regional genealogy and archaeology.
Who we are and where we come from is important in determining where we are heading.
None of this should lead to notions of exceptionalism of superiority. These were some of the fatal flaws of the Dutch and British empires in South Africa, and of the Afrikaner nationalists after 1948.
It remains a bitter disappointment that so many of us are fluent in Afrikaans or English, or pray in Arabic, but can barely utter a word or a sentence in any of the indigenous languages. Hashtag JustSaying. DM