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This article was first published in New Frame. As the ANC celebrates the 109th year of its existence, it is a rebuke to the present to recall the intellectual and literary calibre of its early leaders. Let us take but two: John Langalibalele Dube and Sol T Plaatje. Dube was elected the first president of the South African Native National Congress, later to be the ANC, in 1912. It was he who led the congress deputation to London in June 1914 to make the case against the previous year’s Native Land Act, by which Blacks were dispossessed of land and traditional agrarian rights such as sharecropping. Plaatje was the secretary on that mission. ....
The Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote in 1986 in Decolonising the Mind that, “Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world… Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.” In South Africa, the role of language has always been a powerful one. In 1976, the Soweto Uprising was sparked by the forced imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in Soweto schools. When our new Constitution was enacted it contained 11 official languages, as well as a section that states: “Recognising the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of these languages.” ....