Professor TJ Haarhoff, of Cardiff University College, delivered last night a lecture at Oxford on Afrikaans, the youngest language of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Afrikaans grew out of the various Dutch dialects spoken by the colonists who reached the Cape in 1652. After 1825, an attempt was made by the British Government to Anglicise the white population of Cape Colony, of which seven-eighths spoke Dutch or Afrikaans, by forbidding the language in schools and law courts.

About 1860, the first attempts were made to write Afrikaans by way of propaganda or for comic effect, and there began a struggle for the recognition which seemed, at first, completely hopeless, for it was opposed and ridiculed not only by the English on grounds of Imperial policy but by the Dutch themselves, blinded by the current conception of linguistic development.

While children spoke their own racy idiom at home, they were punished for using it in school. But Afrikaans prevailed. It was the language of the soil and, just as English, a despised peasant speech at the time of William the Conqueror, ousted both the French of the Norman Court and the learned Latin of the clerks it survived.

Professor Haarhoff said that Afrikaans literature was worth studying for its own sake. He advocated the desirability of recognising Afrikaans, of abandoning the superior attitude, ignorant and unhelpful. Long years of experience had taught them that Afrikaans and all it implied was the key to co-operation between the white races.

If they could rise above the personal and negative things and come together on the big and positive issues, goodwill to each other would engender goodwill to others, and in time the inherited emotions and prejudices of the blood would be tamed, and fear would cease to be the terrible factor it was to-day.

It had been said that the struggle of culture must result in the victory of one. English must conquer Afrikaans, or Afrikaans English. That was not his vision of the future. The two streams of culture could keep their identity, not in the sense of establishing a barrier between two races but in the sense of fructifying the soil of the same mind, as there flowed in Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, and Quintilian, who remained thoroughly and distinctively Roman, a fluctuating stream of Greek culture.

The development of the nationalist reaction into a fruitful cooperation, in which both the English and the Dutch elements were healthily distinct, and yet reinforced each other, without any of the cramping that led to suppression and eruptions, depended very largely on Afrikaaner and Englishmen actively sharing each other’s language and literature in South Africa. A passive tolerance was not enough. There was needed a mutual effort in South Africa, an active enthusiasm that would invoke a responsive eagerness.



