A or E?

On the back of protest about language equality at our dear university, by Afrikaans students who claim they are being marginalised, I’ve noticed that there is some complaining going on amongst English students as well.

Many of my English friends complain that campus newspapers, such as the Perdeby and Kampus Bleed, are solely published for Afrikaans crowd, leaving them without a platform to express their views and feelings. They claim that even though there are English articles in the Perdeby, these are usually fashion or movie reviews, and not the need-to-know university news which affects the lives of every student on campus.

As always I find myself stuck on the fence when it come to the language debate, since being bilingual means I don’t much care about the language something is written in, as long as it is well written and spellchecked. To me it has never matter whether the class was in Afrikaans or English, or whether the sports report was presented more often in the one then the other.

But what I realised last week was, that while I was swimming around in my tiny pond of bilingual tranquillity, the rest of the campus was divided, not between the so often spoken about racial lines, but rather, dialectic ones.

Forget the black/white struggle, there is a something new and ugly about to boil over at the university and if it not addressed soon, the next protests we have about language equality might not have such peaceful endings.