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First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper. A nostalgic sepia-coloured photo was posted on our three-generation family WhatsApp group the other day. This miserable Covid-19 pandemic tends to trigger nostalgia. My mother’s handwritten caption was: “Off to Taal Plaas Sept 1974”. The nine-year-old me was framed by a train window. A messy DIY haircut framed my scrunched-up face of bewilderment and fear as I forced a smile before departing for a weekend away to learn Afrikaans on a farm outside Cape Town. My well-intentioned, tweetalige parents reckoned that I needed to sharpen my Afrikaans. We lived in a community devoid of diversity, as was typical at the height of the apartheid era. The whites-only co-ed government school I attended was virtually monolingual, with Afrikaans (never mind other languages) rarely heard on school grounds, except in Taal classes and among some of the staffing community.

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