TOM EATON | Ja nee, if Afrikaans isn’t indigenous, then the SACP isn’t South African

On Wednesday, former professional gaslighter Mac Maharaj and prominent non-doctor Pallo Jordan held an online discussion about their new book which has been eagerly anticipated by dozens of readers in SA.

I was one of them. When I first heard that the ANC veterans had written a book together, I was intrigued to find out if one of the two co-authors had taken the lead, producing either an interesting non-fiction work like Fart-Catching for Dummies or else a gripping spy thriller like Dr Not Really.

Instead, I discovered, it was called Breakthrough, focusing on the secret talks between the ANC and the apartheid government before 1994.

Of course, there’s no doubt that those fragile, desperate, make-or-break years deserve their own book. I’m just not sure that these two are the ones to write it, at least not if they want anyone to take it seriously as an essential and objective historical account.

Maharaj might have been present at those talks, and was undoubtedly a brave and honest revolutionary in his youth, but I must confess that I struggle to believe anything that comes from a man who spent his last years in the public eye endlessly telling us that Jacob Zuma hadn’t really said what we’d literally just heard him say, and that we’d taken everything out of context.

Afrikaans is widely acknowledged by linguists and historians to be an indigenous language. If you don’t believe me, just try speaking Afrikaans in Amsterdam and see how far you get.

For his part, Jordan is best remembered for being something of a trailblazer, using false qualifications long before the DA made it cool.

Still, despite their dodgier exploits, both Maharaj and Jordan loomed like giants over the pitiful Blade Nzimande, thrust back into the headlines this week by the DA.

In a letter to the Human Rights Commission of SA, the official opposition accused Nzimande of acting unconstitutionally for maintaining a language policy in higher education in SA which states that Afrikaans is not an indigenous language.

Nzimande hit back on Wednesday, insisting that he doesn’t dislike Afrikaans, and is in fact determined to see the language “rescued from a white right-wing agenda”, presumably by keeping it firmly classified as the filthy jabbering of Johnny Foreigner, and therefore out of reach of those who want to, well, do right-wing stuff with it at universities.

Now this position strikes me exceedingly odd, and not just because Afrikaans is widely acknowledged by linguists and historians to be an indigenous language. If you don’t believe me, just try speaking Afrikaans in Amsterdam and see how far you get.

No, what I find so bizarre here is that Nzimande is apparently suggesting that foreign influences shouldn’t get to dictate behaviour in this country or be privileged above indigenous systems ... while simultaneously being the leader of the South African Communist Party, which is entirely dedicated to imposing on South Africans a system invented by a German and put into lethal practice by Russians and Chinese.

Then again, why am I surprised? The continued existence of the SACP is a monument to absurdity and hypocrisy, as it insists with a straight face that it is a legitimate political party with important things to say, while simultaneously refusing to contest elections to see if anyone is interested in anything it represents; all the while paying lip service to democracy on stationery decorated with the same hammer and sickle that have brutalised democracy everywhere they’ve ruled.

It’s almost enough to make me wish Mac was still on the payroll to tell us that, while Nzimande might look like a belligerently incompetent phoney who’s only in the cabinet because the cynical rubes in charge of this circus have paid his fake revolutionaries to rubber-stamp its catastrophic reign, we’re wrong and we’ve taken it all out of context ...

How about it, Mac? One last, sweet, anaesthetising lie, for old time’s sake?