In 1994, during the months around the first multiracial elections in South Africa, while I was settling into a university teaching job in Cape Town, buying a home there and looking for a publisher, several people apologized to me for using the phrases that commonly introduce advice: "What you must do, you must . . ." Authoritarian thinking was plain in this tic, they said. Nowadays I hear how much everybody hates "Ja-well-no-fine," a reply that seems to show painful confusion about authority. I am not a professional linguist; I am trained as a philologist, whatever that is. A few years ago I attended a conference at Harvard entitled "What Is Philology?" where philologists tried to define what it was they did. My private conclusion was that the calling had something to do with language and literature both, but that we preferred to work with Latin and Greek because that way nobody knew or cared if we were getting anything right. But I hope that, despite my suspicious background, it will be acceptable for me to make some observations about South African English. My premise at least, that the state of a nation is reflected in the state of its language(s), is a respectable one. It may not be too much of a generalization to say that South Africans are uncomfortable and unhappy with their own use of English, and it is perhaps not an analytical pot-shot to say that this is related to their feelings about South Africa.

South African English offers a lot in itself to be unhappy about. To the extent that the government had its way, English under apartheid was a "discouraged language," as it was during the same period in the Eastern Bloc, and still is in France. In South Africa, however, the mechanisms of control were perhaps the most unusual; the historical conditions were certainly unusual. At no period did more than a tiny portion of the population speak the officially favored white version of Afrikaans, the Dutch-derived colonial language. This group, though never technologically far behind Europe, had as its formative ethics strict adherence to the tenets of the Dutch Reform Church, racial separatism, and farming. ("Boers," or "farmers," is still the synonym for "Afrikaners.") The riveting together of these three had one result in the fact that the areas of the country where Afrikaners have been the main white group have no "coloured" (or mixed-race) population to speak of, like the one that in America represents nearly all of the descendants of slaves. Boers really did leave alone the black women under their power as slaves and then as farm workers, because of the church and church-derived politics. The Boers also resisted the "worldliness" of mining long enough to allow the British to get a large share of control. Americans sometimes say that northern South Africa was like the ante-bellum South. It is probably more useful to imagine the Amish of Pennsylvania with guns and a lot of cheap help. Both the Amish and the Boers made long journeys (immigration from Switzerland in the former case, the Great Trek starting in the 1830s from the Cape of Good Hope in the latter) to settle where there would be no fiddling with their religious traditions or their way of life. The biggest difference was that having to move left the Afrikaners in a permanently foul and imperialistic mood.

The energy with which politicians of the twentieth century fostered the Afrikaans language was in inverse proportion to the wealth of that language. Ordinary Boers did not even read anything besides the Dutch Bible, and were probably at first as startled as anybody to see the entire Western curriculum (except for the radical and spicy parts) translated for use at major universities; "job reservation" to cram the civil service with less-qualified Afrikaans-speakers; and the gung-ho promotion of Afrikaans literature (which led, inevitably, not to support for the traditional culture but to people taking it apart; Joan Hambidge, a sardonic, three-hundred-pound butch lesbian, is one of the leading Afrikaans poets today, and, as her name indicates, she is not even an Afrikaner).

Promotion of Afrikaans was accompanied by attacks on English, with the main purpose not of separating the British from their language (no one thought this could be done), but of weakening blacks by depriving them of access to white liberal society (overwhelmingly English-speaking) with its international political and economic power. Public schools which taught English effectively were seldom open to blacks after the early 1950s. Instead, there was "Bantu Education" in Afrikaans, with a curriculum designed to frustrate intellectual and vocational effort. The regime knew that English, the practical language of black power, was for blacks a commodity obtainable only through artificial means such as a school. English-speaking whites and their media products were too rare to allow a black child to pick up English in daily life. Parents, working at menial jobs for whites, might learn some English, but not enough, or of the right kind, to help them or their children negotiate a better life, to the extent that apartheid allowed one. With apartheid restrictions gone, the same disadvantages tend to persist, for the most obvious and homiletic of reasons. It is relatively easy to repeal laws and conduct free elections, producing superficial political change, but real social change comes hard.

South Africa's demographics in language loom over the common national future. English is a necessary language, not only because the country is a small and poor one dependent on international trade, technology, and tourism. There is also the issue of ethnic division: as in India, English has no tribal charge. In the fairly shaky South African polity, with continued Zulu defiance and increasing Xhosa cronyism, despair in other tribes, and right-wing Boer intransigence, English is the only language you can speak in public, out of the eleven official ones (English, Afrikaans, and nine African languages), without seeming to make a separatist argument just by speaking. I don't envy the weaponry two pundits whipped out in a famous incident on a chat show. In arguing about language, one of them switched into Afrikaans in a rage and refused to switch back to English; the other switched into Xhosa in retaliation. Would it be too pompous to say that world history is not encouraging in what it tells us such passions can lead to, besides flying spittle and sweat-ruined make-up?

English ought to be good for South Africa, then, the way it has been for India. But there are problems here that India never had. Nelson Mandela and other older members of the new government, plus older black activists like Desmond Tutu, were educated in mission schools before the introduction of Bantu Education in the 1950s; they speak clear and articulate English (though with accents open to endless comic reproduction). The successor generations do not. Conservative whites write letters to the newspapers citing language crimes and stating or implying that blacks who cannot speak English well are not fit for responsible positions and are an embarrassment to the nation. It would be easy to dismiss this as hypocritical spite. Many of the writers voted for the National Party, which administered apartheid and deprived blacks of the education they would need, particularly in English. The NP leaders did this with the stated purpose of stopping the political and economic development of the majority of their countrymen. They did it after Gandhi had been in residence for a number of years and shown how effectively a single educated and articulate man in an oppressed group could agitate for democracy. The trouble is, they did it damn well. Since the 1950s, younger blacks have had too little access to English to acquire more than a hit-or-miss usage, so that it cannot even be argued that their English is a grammatically consistent dialect or creole with its own cultural integrity. (As far as I know, not even the most politically correct academics have made this argument.) Many blacks are, however, suddenly in positions of public exposure that demand fluent standard English. The mere first chapter in the damage is that the usurped whites who are listening draw attention to incorrect usage in nasty ways, reducing black confidence. I wince when thinking of the reactions I heard to a newscaster reporting that a man accused of rape had had his genitals "seveered" by a mob.

Black South Africans would gain vastly in authority if they could get better English teaching, but there is no real chance of that soon. The "reform" of public schools in South Africa is a story in itself, but all that is necessary here is the ending: the best-qualified, most experienced teachers—almost all white—are almost all gone. The all-black schools in the townships, which might have recruited some of these teachers, will have to make do for the time being with what apartheid gave them, which is extremely sorry staffing. But that is only one of the problems. Basic teaching materials have the status of luxuries. On a visit to a hard-scrabble school in a squatter camp, I took an English dictionary as a gift. The teachers screamed when they saw it, and two grabbed it at once and pulled.

But, as this incident shows, if there is one thing champions of English here have to be happy about, it is the sheer enthusiasm for English. Descriptive English names like Beauty and Big Brain and Own House and No Cesar (for children born without Cesarean section) compete with African names. (A candidate for the University of Cape Town Student Council whose given name was Boyfriend advertised, "This Boy Is Your Friend.") The constitution entitles every child to home-language education, and the government has ambitious plans for provision, but most black parents are puzzled as to the purpose of teaching children in languages they already speak but will seldom use beyond the township or the village. English is the instructional medium of choice.

New local-language programming and the dubbing of foreign programming into local languages helped take the South African Broadcasting Corporation from a substantial profit to the loss of tens of millions of dollars. As often, it is hard to tell whether we are talking about English per se or simply Western media culture. It may no longer make much sense to try to separate the two. A French or Italian film, for example, comes onto the international market with English subtitles. Fairly or not, English is the cultural as well as the economic marketplace, a fact that native speakers of English can view in humbling perspective. Other people don't love our language, and they don't think we're superior for speaking it. They just want a chance at our stuff. Wouldn't you?


 
But what is happening to English under all of this pressure? As I said before, there is no real dialect emerging. English in South African advertising is somewhat like "Japanese English," a language used for zippy effect rather than for meaning. For instance, nobody seems to have noticed what the two words in the name of the store Budget Busters do together. But South Africans have the same excuse the Japanese do for English clap-trap in marketing: English isn't a locally widespread home language, and a jingle or a slogan or a company name isn't an engineering safety report. Who cares? The trouble is that, while the Japanese write reports in Japanese, South Africans cannot write them in African languages: linguistic diversity is too great in the population, and the languages are pre-modern, unadaptable unless largely taken over by a European language. (In fact, their survival seems possible only through a hands-off policy that respects and preserves their social context in villages—a policy not to be expected, given the government's drive toward complete modernization.) Already, African-language sports commentary is so littered with English words that whites can follow it.

An interesting question for me, as a non-linguist free to speculate, is whether an intellectually corrupt language ever comes from confusion on the street as well as from manipulation by authority. In political speech, South African English is disturbing, showing faults like the ones George Orwell preached against in essays and in terrifying fiction. Thunderous polysyllables rumble in the dark sky of South African politics. "Colonialism" is vaguer than the Orwell nemesis "fascism." As I understand, "colonialism" is anything having to do with non-Africans in Africa. "Those convicted of politically motivated offenses"—actually murders, kidnappings, torture, arson, and bombings—are getting "indemnity," or pardon. I let the word "indemnity," which I hadn't heard before, wash over me for months before I got curious and looked it up. This was the first step toward wondering whether the Truth and Reconciliation Commission should have the power to override the courts, and what impression a mass of pardons will have on a country where crime is out of control. But the majority of South Africans could not have made that first step. They can't get at an English dictionary. They are cut off from the power of language by poverty almost as securely as the citizens of Orwell1984 England are cut off by the denatured language Newspeak.

But something else is happening here that Orwell did not anticipate in his testimony against the political abuse of words: there is a deep inattention to words that is developing along with extreme upheaval and stress. In 1984, a totalitarian effort of many years forces a population to accept slogans like "Freedom is slavery." I can imagine South Africans in a few years accepting statements almost as absurd, not because anyone has interfered with their minds in an organized way, but because rejecting a statement requires more energy than they can spare. When I realized I had not looked up an unfamiliar but obviously important word for several months, I at first found it hard to believe. In one way or another, I make my living through language. How could I have been so incurious? But then I remembered what had happened to me from day to day, how many people around me had died from violence or on the psychotic roads, how many times I had been robbed and shaken down and had my property vandalized, and simply how many weeks and journeys a bureaucratic transaction takes that takes fifteen minutes in the States by phone. It's no wonder that whenever I stopped, I didn't look up words but just sat in the sun. Journalists seem to work by a similar rationale. "Yes, the passage doesn't make sense, but I didn't have time to rewrite it. Don't worry: everybody else has too much to worry about to notice; if somebody notices, he won't bother to complain; if he complains, my boss won't bother to do anything." Except for striking mistakes like "seveered," which provide whites with political jollity, such calculations are pretty safe.

I often wonder about the consequences of this for a new democracy. In my clippings file is an article on abuse of government credit cards in the Independent Broadcasting Authority (April 20, 1997). The Sunday Times contacted one official about her use of a credit card to pay for tickets to a famously expensive Pavarotti concert and for a trip to the Lost City, the country's leading gambling resort. According to the article, "she refused to comment, saying: 'It's up to the auditor general's office to accept our comments or not.'" Whether the mistake was that of the official or the reporter, the passage as it stands is gibberish. The reader can do some reconstruction: What was said, or meant, was probably that the auditor general's office had received a report or documentation to consider, and this was the reason the official was not commenting; she was waiting for a response. But, as happens more and more in South Africa, the producers of language did not bother to make the situation clear. They just shoveled a few words at it.

The consumers of language usually do not make any effort toward clarity either, which they could do by putting pressure on the producers or trying to interpret. Nothing provoked a more helpless or, if I persisted, an angrier response from my students than the question, "What is the author actually trying to say here?" I'm surprised I get invited anywhere nowadays. I am the only one in my wide circle with the energy to complain coherently. (I've found the energy now that I've resigned from my job and moved out of my own home and into a friend's house in a gated community.) At parties and outings, my friends talk about the funny things they've seen on the Internet or heard somewhere, because the rest of the time they each have to get through the hassles that would be portioned out to two or three people in the West.

Orwell, who slaved as a dishwasher, wandered with derelicts and fought in a brutal civil war, never stopped putting precise words to his experiences. He was of course a much tougher personality than average. It is no wonder that he never imagined a society that had the political and (for the well-off) technical means of confronting language, but where the will to confront it had sizzled away under the acid of stress.

My South African businessman friend hands me a document just printed out. "Tell me what you think in general about it," he says. "Don't bother about the wording." This is what I would probably say if I had to be at the factory in five minutes to deal with an employee's marauding spouse, or with the nervous breakdown of my one reliable manager. But when everybody has been coping this way for a while, what will the country be like?