Hope and Doom 1

(excerpted from travel blog to South Africa, March 2004, http://sbmhome.typepad.com/south_africa)

On Tuesday afternoon at NMMU in April 2004, four members of the CCC Sharing Cultures Project teaching team attended a panel and roundtable discussion on “Culture and the Academy” with our NMMU colleagues and other faculty gathered from around the university, which had recently been merged with Vista University, a historically Black institution. Amy Hawkins was one of three invited panelists.

Following the panelist presentations, the whole group engaged in a very interesting roundtable discussion, which moved quickly to issues of language – heritage language maintenance in the face of English as a medium of instruction. It started with a question to us, the Americans, about "Ebonics." I could go off (and very well may) on a long tangent about my surprise that anyone would see the heated 1997 debate in the U.S. about Ebonics as analogous to the language situations here in South Africa, but I'm not heading there yet. Suffice it to say, it was not what I had expected.

After my presentation to the faculty the week before on language and content instruction, one of the faculty (who is white Afrikaans) mentioned to me that she was convinced that in South Africa there was no stigma attached to being a language learner, no power struggle, because the vast majority of the population did not speak English as a first language. Her take was that everyone was on a level playing field, no matter what the heritage language or educational background. I couldn’t quite buy that, so we went around about it a few times, and I let it go. I didn’t want to be rude or to presume to know more about the sociocultural and sociopolitical dynamics in South Africa than she did, but it rang of the “look how far we’ve come” and “there’s no discrimination anymore” statements I hear sometimes from mostly white, dominant culture Americans.