JAMIL F. KHAN | First Kaaps dictionary marks milestone in reclaiming language and identity

The first trilingual Kaaps dictionary has been published through a collaboration between The Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and Heal the Hood Project launched in 2021.

Professor Quentin Williams, Director of the CMDR, leads the project with the editorial board including Emile Jansen, Shaquile Southgate, Tanswell Carl Jansen, Robyn Gelant, Tyron De Villiers and Professor Adam Haupt.

The publication of the dictionary marks a significant moment in the history of the language, plagued by centuries of distortion, political opportunism, stigmatisation and dismissal of a mother tongue to many in the Western Cape.

The project aims to “transform prevailing negative attitudes and perceptions of Kaaps and its speakers by producing an educational resource that will support social and academic literacy practices in the education, religious, cultural, political and economic spheres of our democratic society.”

The project states four main goals: to shed further light on the historical roots of Kaaps; to contribute to current debates about the unification of the writing system of Kaaps; to document the use of Kaaps across all relevant modalities, platforms, genres, practices, performances, interactions and linguistic landscapes; and, to describe the lived linguistic experiences of speakers of Kaaps.

Often mischaracterised as a slang version of Afrikaans, Kaaps has a long and important history in South Africa that is not only relevant for speakers of the language, but for speakers of all South African languages, where some words and phrases have travelled from the linguistic repertoire created by Kaaps.

Kaaps or Afrikaaps is a language created in settler colonial South Africa as far back as the1500s. Developed through encounters between indigenous Khoi and San, South-East Asian, Dutch, Portuguese and English people.

Varying accounts of the language’s development suggest that Kaaps predates the emergence of an early form of Kaaps-Hollands (the South African variety of Dutch that would help shape Afrikaans), acknowledging that traders and sailors would have passed through this region well before formal colonisation commenced, while migration and movement on the African continent contributed to possibilities for linguistic exchange and the negotiation of new meaning facilitating the emergence of the language we know today.

Today, Kaaps is most commonly used by largely working-class speakers on the Cape Flats used widely as both a social and professional language that voices how life is lived in Cape Town. As noted by Professor Adam Haupt: “It’s used across all online and offline contexts of socialisation, learning, commerce, politics and religion.

And, because of language contact and the temporary and seasonal migration of speakers from the Western Cape, it is written and spoken across South Africa and beyond its borders.

It is important to acknowledge the agency of people from the global South in developing Kaaps - for example, the language was first taught in madrassahs (Islamic schools) and was written in Arabic script. This acknowledgement is imperative especially because Afrikaner nationalists appropriated Kaaps in later years.”

He goes further to emphasise the acknowledgement of Kaaps as imperative to the restorative project of testimonial justice especially because “Afrikaner nationalists appropriated Kaaps in order to create the dominant version of the language in the form of Afrikaans.

A ‘suiwer’ or ‘pure’ version, claiming a strong Dutch influence, Afrikaans was formally recognised as an official language of South Africa in 1925. This was part of the efforts to construct white Afrikaner identity, which shaped apartheid based on a belief in white supremacy.

”

This appropriation which was later operationalised as a policy of enforced linguistic uptake of Afrikaans under apartheid has caused great damage to the sociolinguistic expression of cultures rooted in the use of Kaaps and Afrikaans which have been disavowed as “the oppressor’s language”.

The violence done to Black people under apartheid through the enforcement of Afrikaans has had lasting consequences for our social relations.

As Professor Quentin Williams notes: “For decades, activists, academics, artists, authors campaigned for the empowerment of Kaaps speakers and the transformation of schools, universities and the economy. With this dictionary project, we are taking the first real step in that direction.

For a long time, academics, writers, activists and linguists have argued that we need to focus on the linguistic description of Kaaps, the unification of the writing system, as well as the educational advancement of Kaaps for academic literacy in basic and higher education, and the media and economic benefits of Kaaps.

Those who are sceptical would be surprised to know that one of our most popular South Africanisms, “aweh”, is owed to this innovation by indigenous and enslaved people at the Cape. It was lexico-grammatically fashioned from its verb use in Old Javanese, but is also a Khoe word still used in Indonesia.

Kaaps is also important in tracing the history of the construction of race as a socially and politically constructed social phenomenon in South Africa.

There are countless examples of cultural practices and traditions originated by indigenous enslaved communities in the Cape that were appropriated and rebranded by Afrikaners such as koesiesters (becoming koeksisters) and bredie.

These culinary inventions became markers of Afrikaner culture while descendants of those who invented them were relegated to “mongrels without language or culture”.

The result of this erasure was the characterisation of Kaaps and indigenous Cape culture as “impure” in contrast to Afrikanerdom’s concomitant status as “pure”, which Prof Haupt points out as a dominant mode through which Coloured people (primary speakers of Kaaps) are perceived.

“They often think about coloured identity as ‘mixed’, which implies that black and white identities are ‘pure’ and bounded; that they only become ‘mixed’ in ‘inter-racial’ sexual encounters.

This mode of thinking is biologically essentialist. Of course, geneticists now know that there is not sufficient genetic variation between the ‘races’ to justify biologically essentialist understandings.

Enter cultural racism to reinforce the concept of ‘race’. It polices culture and insists on standard language varieties by denigrating often black modes of speech as ‘slang’ or marginal dialects.”

The publication of the first Kaaps dictionary thus signals a point of significant progress in our democratic project of revising our distorted historical knowledges and reclaiming our cultural narratives mangled by the brutality of apartheid that not only sought to divide us but to destroy our identities and memories.

This project coming to fruition is also, in no small measure, a moment of immense personal pride and validation I did not think I would see. Sometimes, we truly are alive with possibilities.

Dr Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.