This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

30th June 2007

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The challenges facing multilingual South Africa are not unique, but the ways in which our various languages are associated with race, ethnicity and class have moved some observers to bemoan ‘the curse of Babel’ manifested in this country. Other commentators are more sanguine, noting that linguistic variety is part of the cultural diversity so often touted as a national asset. Small wonder that it was a hot topic of conversation at this year’s Cape Town Book Fair.

While the production of school textbooks in African languages is increasing, the trade publishing industry continues to be dominated by English and Afrikaans books. Authors who do not have English as their first language will nonetheless generally choose to write in English, a phenomenon related to questions of language-specific literacy. Novelist Kgebetli Moele complained that "I use English so much in my life that when I write, I have to write in English ... I find it difficult to express myself in Northern Sotho [his home language]. I don’t even know some of the spellings!" Adding to this, Antjie Krog (herself an interesting case, nominally an Afrikaans author-poet but firmly part of the English literary establishment) recalled how Wally Serote described writing "in his head" in Setswana, but "on the page" in English.

Serote, of course, also chose English because he knew that, as a lingua franca, it facilitates the widest possible audience. Thembelani Ngenelwa, author of the acclaimed work The Day I Died, described himself as "English third language" but explained that he chose to write the book in English "because the subject matter doesn’t only affect Xhosa people".

The question of audience has economic inflections. Trade publishers, working to small profit margins, are reluctant to produce books for a relatively small black target market. Fred Khumalo – whose Touch my Blood was shortlisted for the Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award – admitted that his publishers have no interest in bringing the book out in Zulu, despite his desire to do so. Moele expressed anger at "the myth that black people don’t read" but, once again, the restrictions are economic: Zulu-language newspapers and magazines may have high circulation figures but, as Rachelle Greef pointed out, books are prohibitively expensive to most and are "a luxury when you’re living on the bread line".

Andre Brink suggested that South Africa should follow the French example and do away with taxes on books. Other government actions were mooted. Khumalo reminded his audience that "political intervention brought Afrikaans to where it is today", asking why the same can’t be done with indigenous languages. But Michiel Heyns (who won the Fiction Prize along with Marlene van Niekerk for his English translation of her Afrikaans novel Agaat) argued that this was not a useful precedent to follow: "governments should not control what gets published – the results are too selective and exclusive".

Leon De Kock, who has also worked as a translator, placed the onus on academic institutions, suggesting that translation should be encouraged as "the highest form of reading". Like Brink, who emphasised the need for university courses in translation, De Kock made the case for National Research Foundation sponsorship of graduate student translation projects as exercises in crossing the boundaries of language and culture. "Translation is a form of play and performance. If we create a culture of performance, this will change attitudes to reading – performance is a very different thing to the sedate notion of reading." The problem, echoes Heyns, is not only achieving literacy, but also creating a literary culture. Asked by Ivory Coast novelist Veronique Tadjo, "Doesn’t everyone want to read?", Heyns replied "No – often enough, not even those who choose to study literature at university want to read all the set texts!"

Mike Nicol was amongst those who pointed out that there is a dearth of popular fiction produced in languages other than English and Afrikaans; there was general agreement that more ‘pulp fiction’ (romance, sci-fi, or detective/thriller genres) is needed from ‘writers of colour’ to bring in a wider pool of ‘readers of colour’.

As for publishers, Khumalo cited the example of Zulu newspaper Isolezwe, stating that the same success could be achieved in book publishing: "It takes one brave person, who has the resources, to test the waters." Poet and critic Rustum Kozain concurred: "Where are the black entrepreneurs opening up African language publishing houses and bookshops? This must come before the promotion of the languages in the media and in schools."

Meanwhile, the task of translation continues to pose its own difficulties. Heyns pointed out that it was important to retain something of the "foreignness" of Agaat to a potentially international English readership – to show that it takes place in rural South Africa, "not the Cotswolds" – and thus to reflect, for instance, the Afrikaans accents of characters in the English version. Likewise, Ngenelwa insisted that "Even when I’m writing in English, I want my black South Africanness to come out in the text." Still, Nicol disputed the perception that there is a "black" South African English as opposed to a "bourgeois" South African English, dismissing as "unfair" Lesego Rampolokeng’s recent criticism of Khumalo’s English usage (which Rampolokeng called "Cremora-whitened").

Nevertheless, it was clear that the sublimation of African languages into English – as much as the subjugation of African languages by English – was of concern to many who attended the fair. Tadjo posed "the eternal question to black authors: why don’t you write in your mother tongue?", alluding to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s project of elevating African languages. Some audience members wanted to know how second-language writers inject idioms and colloquial terms into their English prose; others expressed concern over the disappearance of cultural heritage that accompanies the decreasing literary use (in both oral and written forms) of indigenous languages, emphasising the role that translation can play in resuscitating languages.

For De Kock, however, "It’s not the job of translation to rescue a language. Translation follows ‘hot’ languages." He was referring, in particular, to the burgeoning activity in Afrikaans publishing, and to its support from the "wider apparatus" of critics and academics. Krog was less optimistic about the health of Afrikaans literature. Moele rather cynically observed that "we used to have dinosaurs, we used to have dodos, but they are now extinct. Afrikaans, too, may become extinct. Why is that such a bad thing?"

Kozain took a more philosophical approach to the sensitivity around preserving languages. Having grown up bilingual, he prefers to talk about languages in terms of "not quite mother tongue" and "not quite non-mother tongue" and eschews "essential" notions of language: "We can learn and unlearn a language; it’s just a collection of electronic impulses."

Nevertheless, all the speakers agreed that those who are lucky enough to have learned more than one language are enriched. Ngenelwa proposed that "every new language you learn enhances your mother tongue", while Heyns confirmed that, even if "translation is tampering" because it introduces elements from the receiving culture into the translated text, this actually "enlarges" the original. Brink echoed these sentiments, paraphrasing a Dutch saying – "for every language that one masters, one becomes a new human being" – and concluding that "for every language in which a book is published, it takes on a new life".

But do the benefits of writing in a multilingual milieu outweigh the disadvantages? Kozain cited the example of Polish-French-English novelist Joseph Conrad in claiming that "a certain level of cultural estrangement is always very productive for a writer". Greef, on the other hand, described a feeling of isolation, of being "trapped" and "enclosed" within her own language: "I feel deeply aware of the divides in South Africa. In my little Afrikaans boat I feel so far away from the other ‘boats’."