On Stryd-perke [Limited Spatio-Temporal Struggles] vis-à-vis Racialized Nationalism and South African Language Political Memory: An Archaeological Genealogy of Kaapse Afrikaans

Against the backdrop of Afrikaner nationalism’s historical stranglehold on the discourse of the Afrikaans language, on the one hand, and the theorisation of language and nationalism developed in response to this stranglehold, on the other, I propose stryd-perke, meaning limited spatio-temporal struggles, as a concept through which current developments in the language can be understood. The analysis centres on Kaapse Afrikaans, or Kaaps for short, which is traditionally regarded as one of Afrikaans’s three main dialect continuums. Three assumptions are linked to the contemporary discursive developments surrounding it: that Kaaps is a ‘Colored’ language, that it is distinct from Afrikaans, and that no change has occurred relative to Kaaps and Afrikaans. These assumptions are critiqued through discussing the long history of Kaapse Afrikaans language politics – analysing this history in relation to two stryd-perke. The first, ‘conscientisation’, stryd-perk focused on Adam Small, Jakes Gerwel, and Peter Snyders, and the second, ‘scientificity’, stryd-perk on Charlyn Dyers, Hein Willemse, Frank Hendricks, Michael le Cordeur, and Anastasia de Vries. This long history points to how the three contemporary assumptions are, at best, false, constituting often misguided interpretations of previous language-political work, and, at worst, falling prey to race-based nationalistic discourses that past stryd-perke have vehemently warned against. The article concludes that more historically informed, sober, and critical work is necessary regarding Kaaps to avoid nationalism once again taking hold of (a form of) Afrikaans.