World
What’s South Africa’s new school language law and why is it controversial?
A new education law in South Africa is dividing lawmakers and sparking angry emotions in a country with a complex racial and linguistic history.
Last Friday, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) bill into law but suspended the implementation of two hotly contested sections for at least three months for further consultations among opposing government factions.
Authorities insist that the law will make education more equitable. Stark economic inequalities in South Africa have contributed to lower literacy and post-school opportunities for the country’s Black majority. By 2022, even though 34.7 percent of Black teenagers had completed secondary school – up from 9.4 percent in 1996 – only 9.3 percent of Black people had a tertiary education. By comparison, 39.8 percent of the white population had a tertiary education.
“The law that we are signing today further opens the doors of learning. It lays a firm foundation for learning from an early age … It will ensure young children are better prepared for formal schooling,” Ramaphosa said during the signing event in Pretoria.
But critics of the law, mainly from the Afrikaans-speaking community, argue that clauses strengthening the government’s oversight over school language and admission policies would threaten mother-tongue education.
Here’s what to know about BELA and why some groups disagree with parts of the law:
What’s BELA and why is it controversial?
The new amendment modifies older school laws in the country: the South African Schools Act of 1996 and the Employment of Educators Act of 1998.
It includes new provisions, such as a ban on corporal punishment for children, jail terms for parents who fail to send their children to school, compulsory grade levels for children starting school, and increased scrutiny for homeschooling.
However, Sections 4 and 5, which regulate languages of instruction in school, and school admission policies, are causing upheaval among Afrikaans-speaking minority groups.
The clauses allow schools to develop and choose their languages of instruction out of South Africa’s 11 official languages, as well as their admissions policy. However, it also gives the National Department of Basic Education the final authority, allowing it to override any decisions. Until now, school boards had the highest authority on languages and admissions.
Authorities in the past have cited how some schools exclude children, especially from Black communities, based on their inability to speak Afrikaans as one reason for the policy update.
Following South Africa’s break from apartheid, Black parents were allowed to send their children to better-funded, previously white-only schools where Afrikaans was often the main instruction language.
Some Black parents, however, claimed their wards were denied placements because they did not speak Afrikaans. Accusations of racism in school placements continue to be an issue: in January 2023, scores of Black parents protested in front of the Laerskool Danie Malan, a school in Pretoria that largely uses Afrikaans and Setswana (another official African language), claiming their children were denied for “racist” reasons. However, the school authorities rejected the claim, and other Black parents confirmed to local media that their children attended the institution.
Why are some Afrikaans speakers upset over BELA?
Some Afrikaans speakers say the new law threatens their language and, by extension, their culture and identity. Afrikaans-speaking schools also accuse the authorities of pressuring them to instruct in English.
Afrikaans is a mixture of Dutch vernacular, German and native Khoisan languages, which developed in the 18th century. It is predominantly spoken in South Africa by about 13 percent of the 100 million population. They include people from the multiracial “coloured” community (50 percent) and white descendants of Dutch settlers (40 percent).
Some Black people (9 percent) and South African Indians (1 percent) also speak Afrikaans, particularly those who lived through apartheid South Africa, when the language was more widely used in business and schools. It is more commonly spoken in the Northern and Western Cape provinces.
Of a total of 23,719 public schools, 2,484 — more than 10 percent — use Afrikaans as their sole or second language of instruction, while the vast majority teach in English. Some Afrikaans speakers argue that giving locally elected officials more power to determine a school’s language will politicise the matter and could lead to fewer schools teaching in Afrikaans. Many also fault the section of the law that allows government officials to override admissions policy.
“There is only a government of national disunity,” one commenter posted on the website of the South African newspaper Daily Maverick on Friday about the divisions within the coalition Government of National Unity (GNU) that have emerged amid the language row.
“By opting to destroy Afrikaans and Afrikaans schools and universities, the ANC and Cyril are making a mockery of unity. This is what happens if the provincial department can unilaterally control the admission of learners and language mediums at schools,” the commenter said, referring to Ramaphosa and his party, the African National Congress (ANC).
Last week, Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, who is the leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), the second-largest party in the GNU, condemned the government’s decision to move ahead with the bill despite reservations among the ANC’s coalition partners.
The politician, who is Afrikaner, also threatened a tit-for-tat response if the law is eventually signed as is.
“The DA will have to consider all of our options on the way forward … Any leader who tries to ride roughshod over their partners will pay the price – because a time will come when the shoe is on the other foot, and they will need the understanding of those same partners in turn,” he said.
Education Minister Siviwe Garube, a Black member of the DA, did not attend the signing ceremony in Pretoria in a show of defiance.
What is the history of school language controversies in South Africa?
Afrikaans is historically emotive in South Africa, dating back to British colonial rule.
To some, Afrikaans represents self-determination, but to many more, particularly in the Black community, it evokes memories of the brutal days of segregation and apartheid.
Originally, Afrikaans was regarded as an unsophisticated version of Standard Dutch. It was called “kitchen Dutch”, referencing the enslaved Cape populations who spoke it in the kitchen and to their settler masters. In the late 1800s, after the first and second Boer wars that saw Dutch settlers or “Boers” fight their British colonists and win independence, Afrikaans came to be regarded as a language of freedom for the white population. In 1925, it was adopted as an official language.
During the apartheid years, however, Afrikaans became synonymous with oppression for the majority Black population which faced the worst forms of subjugation under the system. Some scholars note (PDF) that the apartheid government uprooted Black families from urban areas to destitute self-governed “Bantustans” (homelands) partly based on their inability to speak the two official languages at the time, Afrikaans and English.
Most Black schools in South Africa at the time taught in English, as it was regarded as the language for Black emancipation. However, the government attempted to impose both English and Afrikaans as compulsory medium languages in schools starting from 1961.
That move ignited a series of student protests in June 1976 in the majority-Black community of Soweto, where the policy was meant to be implemented first. Between 176 and 700 people were killed when apartheid security forces used deadly force on schoolchildren in what is now known as the Soweto Uprising.
Apartheid authorities rescinded the language policy in July 1976. When Black schools were allowed to choose their medium of education, more than 90 percent opted for English. None chose the other African languages, such as Xhosa or Zulu, which the apartheid government had also pushed: it was seen as a measure to promote tribalism and divide the Black community. In addition to those, the country’s other official languages are Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Siswati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga and Ndebele.
What’s next?
Authorities say the different arms of government will debate Sections 4 and 5 for the next three months. However, barring a resolution, the law will fully be implemented as is, President Ramaphosa said.
Meanwhile, Afrikaner rights groups such as the AfriForum, have declared they will contest the decision in court. The group has been described as having “racist” leanings, although it denies this.
“Afrikaans has already been eroded in the country’s public universities in a similar way,” Alana Bailey, AfriForum’s cultural affairs head, said in a statement last week.
“The shrinking number of schools that still use Afrikaans as a language of instruction now is the next target. AfriForum is therefore preparing for both national and international legal action to oppose this,” she added.
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Multiple documents featuring some of the worst Nazi war criminals were released and declassified earlier this year by Argentine President Javier Milei. The more than 1,850 documents comprise thousands of pages detailing the South American country’s efforts to track and verify the whereabouts of thousands of Nazis who fled Europe after World War II.
The catalyst for the effort came from the Senate Judiciary Committee and its Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who was credited by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for his efforts in getting Milei to release the documents.
Most of the materials relate to investigations carried out between the late 1950s and the 1980s and were digitized and made available on the nation’s General Archive website, along with secret, declassified presidential decrees from 1957 to 2005.
The original batch of documents released online is divided into seven large files roughly centered around the main Nazi criminals covered in them. There are multiple documents related to Adolf Eichmann, the engineer of the “Final Solution,” the plan for the extermination of European Jewry. He lived under the name Ricardo Klement around Buenos Aires until being captured by Mossad agents on Argentine soil and taken in a secret operation to stand trial in Jerusalem in 1960.
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Adolf Eichmann, in a bulletproof cabin, puts on earphones to hear the reading of the act of accusation against him, Dec. 17, 1961. He was in charge of the extermination of Jews in Poland and then organized the deportation and extermination of Jews in 13 European countries. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
Eichmann’s case features prominently in the files and there is contradicting evidence that the leftist, populist government of Juan Perón not only knew Eichmann was in the country but also made efforts to protect him.
Multiple documents also exist detailing the lives of Josef Mengele, the “angel of death” doctor from Auschwitz-Birkenau camps who lived in Argentina and escaped to Paraguay and Brazil, where he died in 1979.
Documents detailing the hunt for Martin Bormann, Hitler’s lieutenant and right-hand man, as well as Croatian murderer, Ante Pavelic, deputy führer and defector Rudolf Hess and the so-called “butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie, received special attention in the files.
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Three SS officers socialize on the grounds of the SS retreat outside of Auschwitz, 1944. From left to right they are: Richard Baer (Commandant of Auschwitz), Dr. Josef Mengele, and Rudolf Hoess (the former Auschwitz Commandant.) Mengele escaped to Argentina, later escaping to Paraguay and Brazil. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
According to Harley Lippman, a member of the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad and a board member of the European Jewish Association, the relevance of the release of the Argentinian documents cannot be understated.
“There are numerous questions that these documents can bring light to why a sophisticated society, far from the plagues of European antisemitism such as Argentina’s, agreed to hide Nazi criminals and their secrets for so long. What happened to the U-boats loaded with Nazi gold brought to the country and given to the authorities?” he asked.
“On the one hand, it is shameful that Argentina kept these documents a secret for so long, but on the other hand, we also need to acknowledge the enormous efforts being made by this government to make these documents public. While the historical significance is important, this is more important for Argentinians to be able to confront their demons as a society than for Jews,” Lippman said.
This 1950 Argentine federal police memo, marked strictly secret and confidential, seeks intelligence on Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor from Auschwitz, suggesting that Argentine authorities were aware of his possible presence or activity in the region at that time. (General Archives of the Government of Argentina)
Adding to the large reveal, in May, while the Supreme Court of Argentina was undergoing renovations and transferring document collections to museums, a forgotten trove of 83 boxes of Nazi documents was discovered almost untouched in the basement of the institution. Upon inspection, the crates revealed documents intercepted by Argentine customs in 1941, sent from the German Third Reich Embassy in Tokyo, Japan, to Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, aboard the Japanese steamer Nan-a-Maru.
The documents had been sent as personal effects of embassy personnel but were intercepted under orders of the country’s minister for foreign affairs in order not to undermine Argentina’s neutral position in the war. The shipment became the subject of a probe by a commission investigating “anti-Argentine activities”, which led to the seizure and possession of the crates by the country’s supreme court, where they remained for nearly 84 years.
The finding of the boxes revealed multiple materials intended to propagate and consolidate the Third Reich’s and Hitler’s ideologies in Argentina and South America, possibly in an effort to bring neutral countries under the auspices of Germany.
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The document recounts an Argentine police report describing a German fugitive, Walter Flegel, believed by some to be Martin Bormann, Hitler’s former deputy, living under a false identity in Argentina. It was later proven that the lead was incorrect and that Flegal was not Borman. Earlier this year Argentina President Javier Milei declassified and released over 1,850 documents detailing Argentina’s efforts to track and verify the whereabouts of thousands of Nazi war criminals. (General Archives of the Government of Argentina)
After opening the boxes along with prominent members of the country’s Jewish community, the court issued a statement saying that “given the historical relevance of the find and the potential crucial information it could contain to clarify events related to the Holocaust,” an exhaustive survey of all the material was ordered.
The contents of the crates have not yet been made public, but Milei’s office has said that once all the documents have been digitized, they will also be declassified and made available.
Argentina’s Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers, Guillermo Francos, has previously said Milei gave [such] order “because there is no reason to continue withholding that information, and it is no longer in the interest of the Republic of Argentina to keep such secrets”.
“Jews after World War II lived a golden age of about 80 years where antisemitism had subsided, at least apparently, and they could be productive and contributing members of society. This has now ended — partially because of the genocide committed against Israelis by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, with world opinion projecting on Israelis and Jews the false role of perpetrators of genocide in the war in Gaza, but also by bringing back the same old antisemitic views that had been alive in Germany and before then,” Lippman says.
A police officer stands in front of a cache of Nazi artifacts discovered in 2017, during a press conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2019. Argentine authorities found the cache in a secret room behind a bookcase and had uncovered the collection in the course of a wider investigation into artwork of suspicious origin found at a gallery in Buenos Aires. (Natacha Pisarenko/AP Photo)
“The fact that many people under 30 do not know or understand [the meaning of] the Holocaust is part of the reason why antisemitism is on the rise again. “The Holocaust was the largest systematic industrial killing of humans in history. This happened only 80 years ago. Young people seem not to be able to grasp the scale of this, but these documents can bring back the memory of what the Holocaust really was,” he said, comparing the propaganda war currently faced by Israel and Jews under a progressive and projectionist guise.
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Beyond the lives of senior Nazis who escaped to South America on the so-called “ratlines”—possibly under the auspices of certain local governments—Lippman said the documents could also provide important information regarding the role played by Swiss and Argentine banks.
“The Holocaust was the greatest theft in history. Many Swiss banks [which were the depositaries of Jewish money] would not release funds to sometimes a sole survivor from a family who perished in the Holocaust without a death certificate for their loved ones. But Auschwitz did not issue death certificates — they only issued ashes.”
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi says both fighters who carried out suicide attacks on Islamabad and South Waziristan were Afghan nationals.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi has said both suicide bombers involved in the two attacks in the country this week were Afghan nationals, as authorities announced having made several arrests.
Naqvi made the remarks in parliament on Thursday during a session carried live on television.
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On Wednesday, at least 12 people were killed and more than 30 were injured, several of them critically, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance of the Islamabad District Judicial Complex.
The Counter-Terrorism Department in Punjab province’s Rawalpindi said seven suspects were detained in connection with the Islamabad blast. The alleged perpetrators were apprehended from Rawalpindi’s Fauji Colony and Dhoke Kashmirian, the Dawn daily reported, while a raid was also conducted in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.
The other suicide attack took place on Monday at a college in South Waziristan, KP.
Cadet College, which is near the Afghan border, came under attack when an explosive-laden vehicle rammed its main gate. Two attackers were killed at the main gate, while three others managed to enter, according to police.
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been severely strained in recent years, with Islamabad accusing fighters sheltering across the border of staging attacks inside Pakistan. Kabul denies giving haven to armed groups to attack Pakistan.
Dozens of soldiers were killed in border clashes between the two countries last month, as well as several civilians.
On Tuesday, Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said Pakistan may launch strikes inside Afghanistan following the attacks this week, saying the country was “in a state of war”.
“Anyone who thinks that the Pakistan Army is fighting this war in the Afghan-Pakistan border region and the remote areas of Balochistan should take today’s suicide attack at the Islamabad district courts as a wake-up call,” he said.
Pakistan passes bill giving army chief immunity for life
In a separate development on Thursday, Pakistan’s parliament approved a sweeping constitutional amendment, granting lifetime immunity to the current army chief, boosting the military’s power, which was previously reserved only for the head of state, despite widespread criticism from opposition parties and critics.
The 27th amendment, passed by a two-thirds majority, also consolidates military power under a new chief of defence forces role and establishes a Federal Constitutional Court.
The changes grant army chief Asim Munir, recently promoted to field marshal after Pakistan’s clash with India in May, command over the army, air force and the navy.
Munir, like other top military brass, would enjoy lifelong protection.
Any officer promoted to field marshal, marshal of the air force, or admiral of the fleet will now retain rank and privileges for life, remain in uniform, and enjoy immunity from criminal proceedings.
The amendment also bars courts from questioning any constitutional change “on any ground whatsoever”.
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