21/09/2026
More Than an Oppressor’s Language 🦉
Afrikaans remains one of South Africa’s most contested languages. Its history is closely associated with Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid, yet the story of Afrikaans is considerably broader than that. Its development involved people from many communities, including descendants of enslaved people, Khoekhoe and San communities, European settlers and Cape Muslims.
The language developed from Cape Dutch during the colonial period at the Cape. Dutch formed its principal linguistic base, while the language was influenced by Malay, Portuguese, Indonesian and the languages spoken by the indigenous people of the Cape. It was used by people from different racial and social backgrounds, including workers, farmers, traders, teachers and civil servants.
One of the lesser known chapters in the history of Afrikaans is its connection with the Cape Muslim community. During the 19th century, Afrikaans, or the Cape Dutch of the period, was written in Arabic script. This tradition became known as Arabic-Afrikaans or Afrikaans in Arabic script.
In 1860, a student at a Cape Town madrasah copied religious lessons into an exercise book. The surviving pages provide evidence of a form of Cape Dutch that is recognisable to modern Afrikaans speakers, although it was written using Arabic characters. Achmat Davids later documented this tradition extensively in The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims, including an earlier surviving koplesboek dating to 1806.
Arabic-Afrikaans was not limited to religious texts. It was also used for everyday writing, including shopping lists and political pamphlets. For Cape Muslims, it became an important written form of the language and a means of recording religious and everyday life.
The spread of Cape Dutch beyond the Cape was also influenced by communities known as Oorlams. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, varieties of Cape Dutch spread into the northwestern Cape and what is now southern Namibia, where the language became important in trade and communication.
The development of Afrikaans later became closely connected with a white Afrikaner nationalist movement. In 1875, the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners was established in Paarl and promoted Afrikaans as a written language and as an important part of Afrikaner identity. The movement helped establish written standards and contributed significantly to the development of modern Afrikaans.
At the same time, this process increasingly associated Afrikaans with white Afrikaner identity. Other Afrikaans speaking communities, particularly people descended from enslaved people and indigenous communities, were frequently pushed to the margins of the language’s official history.
The standardisation of Afrikaans therefore involved more than simply developing a new written language. It also took place within the racial and political circumstances of colonial and later apartheid South Africa.
The association between Afrikaans and apartheid became particularly powerful after the National Party came to power in 1948. Afrikaans became one of the two official languages of apartheid South Africa and was closely associated with the state and its institutions.
In 1974, the government introduced a policy requiring Afrikaans and English to be used as languages of instruction in black schools. The policy generated widespread opposition and became one of the immediate issues behind the Soweto uprising of 16 June 1976. For many black South Africans, Afrikaans had consequently become associated with an oppressive state.
The description of Afrikaans as “the language of the oppressor” therefore has a specific historical context. But it does not describe the entire history of the language or all of its speakers.
Afrikaans was also used by people who opposed apartheid. It became a language of literature, journalism, political activism and resistance, including among coloured and black South Africans. Writers, intellectuals, teachers and activists used Afrikaans to challenge the political system that had claimed the language as part of Afrikaner nationalism.
This is an important distinction. A language itself does not have a single political identity. Its history is shaped by the people who speak, write and develop it.
Afrikaans is now spoken by millions of South Africans from different communities and social backgrounds. It is also spoken beyond South Africa, particularly in Namibia, with smaller Afrikaans speaking communities elsewhere in southern Africa.
The history of Afrikaans therefore cannot be reduced either to its Dutch origins or to its later association with apartheid. Its story includes Cape Muslims writing in Arabic script, Oorlams communities spreading Cape Dutch northwards, white Afrikaner nationalists standardising the language, and generations of Afrikaans speakers who used it in both support of and opposition to political power.
To understand Afrikaans properly, its entire history needs to be considered. It is a South African language with a complicated past, and that past belongs to far more people than the political movement that later claimed it as its own.
