Parents often relate how their children adopted other languages quicker than they could say, for example, “Amerikaners”. Can you imagine the influences on the small kids who arrived in the US this week as so-called “refugees” from a “genocide”?
The Afrikaners who have left — or “cowards” in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s parlance — are the purists who didn’t embrace diversity, peed on our constitution and legitimised misinformation.
It is these deserters, among others, who almost fought a good fight against the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act, which they viewed as a tool the government would use to wrest control of the language their children are taught in schools. By going to the US, they must necessarily have resigned themselves to embracing English and perhaps Spanish (the second-biggest language in America) as the languages their children must make do with. By getting on that chartered flight, the language battle was lost.
What we must take exception to ... is the reliance of Elon Musk’s homies on lies and misinformation to secure entry to the US through the back door
Can you imagine the new influences on those children in US schools? It’s hard to imagine a quicker way of killing Afrikaans than packing your children off to Idaho or some such funny place in America that “nobody has ever heard of”, to quote an orange-headed sage.
If truth be told, kids are also some of the meanest people around. They have no adult filters. They brutalise each other with their harsh truths. So you can expect Afrikaner children not to breathe a word about their connection to South Africa — more so Afrikaans. I know I shouldn’t, but I pity them, given the cold and dangerous world they have been thrust into.
For a few American kids who missed a few hugs, their solution is to bring a gun to school and shoot whoever is in sight. There have been 228 school shootings since 2018, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. That they have a database tracking such matters indicates the scale of the problem, and that they’ve had so many shooting incidents suggests a crisis. Even the comedian Chris Rock responds to requests for him to speak to kids at schools thus: “F**k the kids — I am afraid of the damn kids.”
When Trump closes borders to more deserving refugees from other parts of the world but opens them specifically for Afrikaners, he essentially is setting them up for isolation and humiliation in America. If anyone doubted he was an obnoxious racist, the Afrikaners’ arrival settles the matter. This is also why it was not surprising that even the church that spent decades helping refugees settle in the US could not bring itself to get involved in this debacle. The schoolkids will, sadly, have it hard. The worst the Amerikaners can expect is that their children start to sound more American than native Americans. American accents develop in many in no time, without their adopters realising it.
This is what Frantz Fanon refers to when he says: “A [human being] who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language,” or that “to speak is to support the weight of a civilisation”. In this way, Afrikaners in America, without the express opportunities and support their language received in South Africa, will, in time, morph into Americans.
The loss of language rights, while crucial, will be just one of many that will occur as a result of this latest trek. The question for many is how long the Afrikaners will last in the land of the free. Put differently, when do we expect them to join the returning expats, imbued with a new appreciation of how good they had it here?
Many of us, including Ramaphosa, have been trying to refute the claim of there being “many bad things happening” in South Africa. We know US President Donald Trump has no regard for facts or the truth. So he will throw around words such as “genocide” and feel no duty to provide proof one is happening.
But others, including Deputy President Paul Mashatile, have ill-advisedly fallen over themselves to call for Afrikaners not to leave. “Please stay!” he pleaded this week. The point, though, is that it’s not in the Afrikaners’ interests to leave. Most of them — and the rest of us — know that. We don’t have to beg anyone to stay.
So we must wish our Amerikaners well but expect them back home soon. We have seen this movie before — most recently, after the 1994 elections. Back then some bought excess tinned fish and toilet paper, fearing the worst of Nelson Mandela and his communist comrades. Some packed for Perth but returned in no time, expressing renewed appreciation for Mandela and all we have here. While we suffer floods from time to time, we have no real hurricanes to worry about, much less the tornadoes and snowstorms Americans have to contend with. With an economy that is barely transforming, the best place to be for Afrikaners remains South Africa.
As a country, we should be the first to admit we have problems. Unemployment is ongoing and spawns other challenges. Crime affects everyone. It is not for us to make anyone — black or white — feel their experiences are invalid. What we must take exception to, though, is the reliance of Elon Musk’s homies on lies and misinformation to secure entry to the US through the back door.
Settling in America will be hard, and many lessons await the putative refugees. But they will no doubt soon learn that la vida es como una montaña rusa — life is a rollercoaster.
Our focus must be on rebuilding South Africa, in line with the constitution’s carefully crafted exhortation to transform our nation, heal the wounds of the past and build an economy that makes the most of our people, united in their diversity.
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