The language dilemma remains alive among authors from the African continent. The dilemma opened by, among others, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, is embodied in authors such as the South African Olivia Coetzee, who has opted to complete her work in Kaaps, a creole language, the daughter of commercial and human transactions, which is currently associated with some of the lowest strata of Cape Town (South Africa).
I would like to be a gangster like the South African writer Olivia Coetzee (1981). This author and literary activist challenges the thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the African language purists because she writes in Kaaps, a language ignored by the laws and perceived in her country as “something dirty, used on the streets, used by uneducated people or gangster slang,” she explains in an interview she offers online from the living room of her home in Cape Town (South Africa).
And the kaaps, which is also called africaaps, emerged in the 16th century, the result of commercial and later colonial exchange between the African Khoe ethnic group – settled in Namibia, Angola, Botswana and South Africa – with African merchants and European settlers. Today it is made up of words of Malay, Khoe, Arabic, San, Dutch, English, etc. origin, and it did not stagnate after its foundation. It quickly began to circulate and, today, its speakers, who do not come from an ethnic group adapted to essentialist precolonial Africa, are identified through exclusion. South African society categorizes them based on – among others – two indicators: social class and race.
Kaaps speakers are thought to belong to the working or impoverished class and that most are descendants of mixed couples, made up of people of different nationalities, ethnic origins, and races. The fact is that the hybrid character of kaaps confronts its speakers with dehumanization, orchestrated by two essentialist sides accustomed to confrontation.
On one side is the linguistic-ethnic essentialism of African origin, institutionalized, among other intellectuals, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. the book Decolonize the mind (1986), by the Kenyan author, channels the effective decolonization of knowledge, power and language through the recovery of languages that existed before the arrival of the colonial enterprise. It is along these lines that the Khoe ethnic group positions itself – always based on originality and purism – when claiming or rejecting the kaaps.
Western-style and equally essentialist linguistic imperialism is positioned on the other side. It is represented by the former colonizers of South Africa and Afrikaans speakers, who maintain that Kaaps constitutes a dialect of their language or, in their case, a vulgar version of it.
The “non-Mandela” generation
Olivia’s life is crossed by oppression, as is her mother tongue: Kaaps. He was born in Namibia, has lived in South Africa since he was seven years old, is a queer person and detaches himself from the figure of Madiba because “Mandela and the pioneers had their freedom,” he acknowledges, but “our generation walks with feet full of blisters.” She has a master’s degree in Creative Writing and is the first author to publish a novel in kaaps – her only work adapted to creative writing to date – although she is embarking on a trilogy that will soon surprise her audience.
His novel, published by Modjaji Books in 2019, is titled Innie Shadows (In the shadows of Innie). It is set in a “landfill,” he says, and narrates the lives of characters who live marginalized “in the shadows” of human development: “I am referring to the Cape Flats, a geographical space located on the outskirts of Cape Town where, during the apartheid period, people of color were expelled to house whites. “This is how we still live today, in a territory without State protection.”
Two years after the publication of Innie Shadows, the first kaaps dictionary was published. He was very happy because “my language is part of who I am”, but “in my novel I denounce problems such as how in the Cape Flats the bushes are the place where women and children are dragged, killed and murdered. Our communities are fed processed foods, illegal drugs are introduced, and we are deprived of the oxygen and centering energy that nature provides through the presence of trees. My work demands real rights. I am indigenous. I am from South Africa. “I am African.”
