The University of Cape Town’s College of Accounting, concerned by high drop-out rates, has developed English, Xhosa, and Zulu videos to teach financial and accounting concepts to second-language black students.
Adding up numbers, it seems, is much easier in your home language.
The videos are between four and 10 minutes long and are available free on the learnaccounting.uct.ac.za website.
They allow students to watch a lecture in Zulu or Xhosa while reading a script to help them learn the main financial terms in English.
College Associate Professor Jacqui Kew said: “For many students there is a double translation process that should happen. They need to understand accounting concepts at the same time as interpreting nuances in English.”
Kew said most black accounting students did not pass all subjects in their first year. This forced them to extend a four-year degree to five years, which increased the financial pressure on them.
Lecturers from Walter Sisulu University present the Zulu and Xhosa videos.
Get Smarter, an online education company, produced the videos, which can be downloaded and watched on cellphones.
The company used graphics, animation and actors, including a ballerina, to explain concepts in an engaging way.
Kew said: “Poor black students face many barriers at university, including language difficulties.”
She said only 24% of chartered accountants were black and language difficulties led to many accounting students dropping out of university.
The Finance and Accounting Services Sector Education and Training Authority funded the making of the instructional videos.
The college hopes to extend the range to include Sotho.
Top former and current Cape Town police, backed by the police union Sapu, have denounced a recommendation by the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry that police members stationed in the crime-ridden township be trained to speak Xhosa.
In its final report on the actions of the three police stations in Khayelitsha, the commission recommended that all police members who did not speak Xhosa be taught the language, while the police management must actively seek to ensure that new members placed in the township were able to speak it.
While Sapu conceded that the language barrier had an impact on policing in the area, it was less than pleased with the recommendation that all staff unable to speak Xhosa be trained to do so.
Sapu’s Western Cape chairman, Joseph Manuel, said the recommendation was a practical one, but asking old policemen stationed there to learn a new language was outrageous. “It will be an impossible recommendation to achieve and will not work.”
The union, which represents police officials across the racial spectrum, said that while the language barrier had always been a concern, forcing people to learn a language was not the way to go.
“In the end you will have to place Afrikaans-speaking police officials in predominantly Afrikaans areas. But how would one manage this if there are 11 official languages in the country? Doing this all over will be a mammoth task and it will hamper integration,” Manuel said.
He also pointed out that there was not a single community in Cape Town where people spoke only one language.
The policeman said appointments such as that of Major-General Johan Brand, who previously headed the Mitchells Plain station and was now Khayelitsha cluster commander, were made on the basis of their competence as managers, not on the basis of their race or language.
“The official language in policing and the criminal justice system is English. Does the language issue become a competency requirement for employment into a position? If so, then it’s wrong.”
He said police were governed by the country’s equity legislation, which required that staff of different demographics should be replicated at all levels of the organisation nationally. This referred to population demographics, not language.
Guy Lamb, director of UCT’s safety and violence initiative, who also testified before the commission, said where practically possible police should take the language recommendation seriously, especially in crime hot spot areas.
“The important thing in Khayelitsha is that there have been specific complaints about not having Xhosa-speaking staff to deal with complaints from the public. Khayelitsha is a priority crime area and there needs to be language representation.”
Axolile Notywala, a Khayelitsha resident and member of the Social Justice Coalition, said most Khayelitsha residents were Xhosa speakers and so it would be more effective if police officers stationed there spoke the same language.
Nelson Mandela was very much in favour of his Xhosa tribe’s annual initiation rite during which circumcision for teenage boys takes place in remote rural areas, usually with blunt instruments that are not sterilised.
The current “initiation season” is upon us in South Africa and so far the body count is 13. Of course, no-one in the outside world would ever report about this as it would be considered “racist” or at least politically incorrect to question African cultural practices, endorsed by the Great Xhosa himself.
According to provincial health department, “thirteen initiates have died in the Eastern Cape since the beginning of the winter initiation season”.
Spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo said hospitals were overcrowded with severely ill initiates seeking medical assistance.
“The worst affected area is Mthatha in the OR Tambo region where health centres are clogged. Boys are brought in with their penises practically falling off,” Kupelo said.
The already constrained health system in the province was suffering a setback because of the initiation season.
“The day to day work by health workers is severely affected, the department is spending R1 000 on each initiate brought in for treatment,” said Kupelo.
The department had set aside R20m to intervene and help the initiates.
Private healthcare services and an additional 37 SUV vehicles have been hired to get health workers to initiates in the mountains.
I find it interesting that professor Anthony Butler of UCT should point out potential tribal schisms within the ANC in Business Day. According to Stephen Ellis in his book External Mission: the ANC in exile 1960-1990 there had been a gun fight between Xhosa and Zulu members of MK in the Tanzanian camp, but this got buried under the avalanche of details concerning the heroic life of Nelson Mandela.
Many South African and British academics seriously analysed South African ethnicity using the Soviet term “the national question”. For years we were made to believe that, unlike the rest of Africa, this country had no real tribes, only artificial ethnic “divisions” imposed by the Nazi-like “apartheid regime”, at gunpoint as it were.
Likewise, the rise of the South African identity was more or less coterminous with the Book of Genesis, and everything else was just an “imagined community” or a “social construct” like race which would dissipate as people turned into global, brand-conscious consumers.
The uncomfortable truth is that South Africa is no different to any other multiethnic or multinational state where the most numerous group will capture the state through the ballot box and then use clientelism to retain power.
The current system was designed not to ensure efficient or accountable government, but to disenfranchise minorities, especially Afrikaners who do not even rule the tiniest rural municipality anymore.
Machiavelli’s dictum that the prince should be particularly generous in distributing largesse paid for by others will ensure that Afrikaner assets will be plundered to the last cent. Eventually the remaining family-owned farms of Afrikaners will have to go and South Africa will experience a Zimbabwean-style rural melt-down although it might not lead to hyperinflation as long as the mines keep earning foreign exchange. No-one in the City of London will even wince when it happens.
Xhosas and Zulus do not like each other, but they are locked into a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. Given current demographics, neither Kwazulu-Natal nor the Eastern Cape may rule the rest of the country without some degree of cooperation from its sister province on the East Coast.
Together, these two Nguni “dominant tribes” constitute 40% of SA’s population but their respective regions produce just over 20% of our GDP. So the benefits of power are obvious, especially to politicians from impoverished rural areas whose access to the state could turn them and their families into billionaires almost overnight.
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Many people scoffed at the term used by Dr. Piet Koornhof in the 1970s when he referred to the homeland system as a “plural democracy”. I suppose those same cynics are cackling today when they hear that South Africa is no longer a plural, but a “model democracy”.
Given the demographics of the current South Africa there is no way in which even an alliance of minority ethnic groups could ever outvote the ANC. Those opposition politicians, such as the DA, who are pretending otherwise, are not only deluding their supporters but also themselves. Even in the unlikely event that ANC support had to slip among ethnic Zulus and Xhosas, it would be inconceivable for South Africa to ge be governed by a coalition exluding the ANC.
First of all, the outbreak of violence and riots by ANC supporters would far surpass those which occurred in the aftermath of the Kenyan elections of December 2007. ANC potentates who have been treating the state as their private preserve would be very reluctant to leave office. The ruling party would not have to stage a coup because it has already erased any separation of party and state. In the unlikely event that it should ever lose power through the ballot box, it has maintained its militia known as Umkhonto we Sizwe which could be equipped from government military stockpiles. On the other hand, its militia commanders are already in control of the South African National Defense Force, so there would be no need for that.
In fact, the opposition coalition having triumphed at the ballot box would have to stage a coup just to assume office, or summon outside militarry intervention. Given the example of Zimbabwe where ZANU PF has held onto power through a spell of electoral weakness, the outcome seems predictable.
For all intents and purposes, South Africa is a one-party state or one-party dominant state ruled by the East Coast tribes. Event at the University of Cape Town with its British and quasi-British professors who have long denied the existence of ethnicity in South Africa, that reality is finally sinking in.
A shorter version of this column appeared as a letter in Business Day.
The Edinburgh Festival is not the kind of place that tends to attract giggling groupies – but then it has never featured a comedian quite like Trevor Noah.
Not only was he mobbed by gaggles of signature-hungry fans after his debut dates there last year, he has, since then, become the first South African comedian to appear on The Tonight Show.
He also has a unique story to tell: the son of a black Xhosa mother and white Swiss-German father, Noah was ‘born a crime’ under the apartheid regime.
‘But I was lucky growing up,’ says the warm, softly spoken 29-year-old, ‘I was always allowed to question. Some kids were not afforded that luxury. I’m not an angry person by nature. It’s easier to be an abrasive comedian, to be very in-your-face, but I find disarming is more fun. I feel you can get more across if people are laughing with you.
Which is why, even though Noah’s show is called The Racist, white people needn’t be afraid of sitting in the front row when he takes it on tour around Britain next week.
‘I would love everyone to come,’ he says. ‘Everyone in history has some sort of link to racism, somewhere. I guess, in recent history, white people have had the most notoriety when it comes to racism. But funnily enough, racism is almost not a colour thing, but a people thing – people will always find something to be racist about.
‘As the world becomes more and more PC, we don’t tell each other how we really feel – but people are surprised how similar we all are, in terms of what we’re thinking. I live for those moments where I feel like, “ooh, I’m pushing my luck here”.’
The Racist sees Noah go on a journey of identity by attempting to re-invent himself as a black American (the coolest kind of black, in his eyes). It’s a tight, smart, astute show, with Noah oozing charisma.
Even though he seems a natural talent, Noah had to learn his craft his own way. With comedy practically banned in South Africa while he was growing up (‘the first time I watched any was Eddie Murphy on DVD, when I was about 20’), he looked closer to home for inspiration.
‘I definitely get my sense of humour from my mum,’ he smiles. ‘She is wild, she’s crazy, she’s a storyteller. And she laughs a lot.’
He worked as radio and TV host in his home country before focusing on comedy. In 2011, he was taken under Eddie Izzard’s wing after the legendary Europhile spotted Noah (who had ‘no clue who Izzard was’) performing at London’s Comedy Store. Izzard went on to produce Noah’s subsequent, storming stints in Edinburgh and London last year.
‘Stand-up in the UK is a very old art form,’ notes Noah. ‘It’s a very cultured comedy society, and very calmed down.
In South Africa, on the other hand, it has only been legal since the start of democracy, so there’s still a huge excitement – it’s very big, very boisterous.’
Now, Noah says, the country has a thriving, evolving comedy scene. ‘There’s a sense of belief now. The comedy is growing with the country, which is good – we are learning what free speech means. We haven’t gotten to the level of PC yet, so it’s still very raw and unrefined, which is great to watch and be a part of.’
Noah hopes that South Africa’s government leaders start thinking as progressively. ‘There’s still a lot of fixing to be done,’ he says, ‘but we’re waiting for a time when politics is less defined by race and history, and more about what the country needs going forward.’
Whatever the future has in store for South Africa, Noah’s looks glittering – but he’s also taking things as they come. ‘I never make plans that are definitive,’ he says. ‘The only plan is to be the best comedian I can be and to enjoy it. I feel that everything that comes after that is a blessing, a bonus. If I can pay my bills, live a good life and make people laugh while doing that, what more could you ask for?’
Trevor Noah’s British tour begins at Warwick Arts Centre on Nov 26. www.trevornoah.com – metrro.co.uk
I was still pondering the implications of “black colonialism” as set out in a previous column when it struck me that some of South Africa’s ethnic categories are completely wrong.
Afrikaners were the first group in the country to refer to themselves as “Africans”, as long ago as 1707 when Hendrik Biebouw said: “Ik ben een Afrikaander.” However, today Afrikaners have been defined as an out-group by South African legislation that simply classes them as “whites”.
Most of our affirmative-action legislation has been imported from the USA and BEE is just an adapted form of what is called “minority procurement” over there. So there is nothing “African” about the current race-classification system!
In German, “Afrikaner” means simply “African”, yet the current laws define Afrikaners as Europeans. The ultimate irony is that ANC and especially SACP ideology has been constructed by recent immigrants from Lithuania (like Joe Slovo) and, of course, Britain.
Imposing racial quotas on everything from the medical schools at Afrikaans universities to the Blue Bulls rugby team is bad enough. But stripping us of our age-old Africanness by legislative fiat represents the ultimate insult, making us interlopers in our own country.
Searching for answers, I reread Thabo Mbeki’s “I am an African” speech, but it is simply a fanciful restatement of American multiculturalism, with echoes of (Swedish) Gunnar Myrdal’s “melting pot” idea. So nothing “African” there, either.
We urgently need to bring back the term “Bantu” and I have begun to recommend its use on social media and everywhere else. There seems to be a certain squeamishness about using this word, meaning “people”, which is unfathomable. Even the famous Xhosa definition of “ubuntu” contains it: “Ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu.”
Anthropologists, linguists and other people in need of proper definitions have never stopped referring to the “Bantu peoples”, “Bantu languages”, etc. Even Bantu education has been rehabilitated by such leading authorities as Dr. Mamphela Ramphele and a lecturer at Wits Business School, Mr. Rabelani Dagada, both of whom consider it better than the current schooling system.
The first ANC-supporting newspaper in the 1920s was called Abanthu-Batho and today there is a clothing brand which is thus advertised: “Abantu is a ladies wear brand which creates timeless pieces which speak to the South African audience.”
The Bantu peoples inhabit East and Southern Africa. For them or their Lithuanian theorists to arrogate unto themselves the sole right to being called “Africans” is not only intellectually unsound, but also unfair. After all, there are 200 million North Africans, including Egyptians, Arabs, Berbers, Copts and so on, who are Africans, by definition. West Africa too, is given the cold shoulder by Bantu imperialism.
In the nineteen-twenties some leading German and French anthropologists claimed, upon the basis of very ancient mining activity in these parts, that whites may have inhabited both South Africa and Zimbabwe as long ago as 3500 B.C. They must have been the first Afrikaners and we should venerate them as our true founding fathers, together with the Khoi and San.
Either we must qualify for affirmative action like other “Africans” – and even the Chinese! – or the Bantu must clearly announce their pretensions to being a kind of continental nobility with special privileges.
Controversial AbaThembu King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo has joined the DA, the party’s Eastern Cape leader said on Monday.
The self-confessed dagga-smoking Dalindyebo said he is not perturbed by being constantly associated with the illegal smoke.
“ (Smoking) dagga [marijuana] is a cultural behaviour. I am a Rastafarian by nature,” he told reporters at the Union Buildings in Pretoria.
“That (association with dagga) should not surprise you.”
“After a long meeting (on Monday) to discuss the DA’s values and the DA’s constitution, I can confirm that AbaThembu King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo has joined the DA,” Athol Trollip said.
Trollip said earlier on Monday he was meeting the king near Mthatha.
Last month, Dalindyebo made headlines when he reportedly described the African National Congress and President Jacob Zuma as “corrupt hooligans”. He made the remarks in Qunu, in the Eastern Cape, at a prayer service for ailing former president Nelson Mandela.
Dalindyebo reportedly said the ANC had distorted the anti-apartheid icon’s legacy and behaved arrogantly. He said he would stop smoking dagga the day Zuma stopped being corrupt.
Dalindyebo also said he would join the Democratic Alliance as a birthday gift to Mandela. Mandela, who remains in a critical but stable condition in a Pretoria hospital, turns 95 on Thursday.
On Saturday, AbaThembu royal family spokesman Nkosi Daludumo Mtirara said the family had apologised to Zuma.
He said at the time that a resolution in September last year, to remove Dalindyebo as king, had not been finalised. – Sapa
Former president Nelson Mandela is doing better, his grandson Mandla said on Saturday.
Addressing mourners at the funeral of the former president’s cousin Florence Mandela in Qunu, Eastern Cape, Mandla spoke about his grandfather’s condition in Xhosa.
“He is doing better,” Mandla said.
Mandla left soon after the service ended. He declined to speak to reporters.
The former president has spent a week in a hospital for a recurring lung infection.
A group of villagers and family gathered in a large white tent erected in a yard not far from the Mandela family graveyard in Qunu for the funeral service.
Friends and family also paid tribute to Florence during a service led by a Methodist priest.
The priest welcomed the media during the service and acknowledging their presence in Qunu since “our great father fell sick”.
On Friday, Mandela’s former wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela visited the former president with her daughter Zindzi. His granddaughter Tukwini and three other relatives also visited.
The presidency had described Mandela’s condition as “serious, but stable”.
President Jacob Zuma, accompanied by African National Congress treasurer general Zweli Mkhize, visited him on Thursday.
“Madiba’s health continues to improve but his condition remains serious,” Zuma said in a statement issued afterwards. – Sapa
A Pretoria magistrate has said black people are having to pay more bail than whites, and are effectively receiving harsher punishments than whites who have committed the same offences.
Magistrate Ndileka Ndamase made the statement in the Hatfield district court on Monday, during the bail application of Carol Smith, Beeld newspaper reported.
She wrote on the charge sheet that blacks who stole items worth under R1000 were granted bail of between R1000 and R2000.
“[On] the other hand, white people who commit serious offences are released with a warning, or on bail of under R1000,” Ndamase wrote.
Smith, who is accused of cashing a fraudulent cheque of R30,000 at an Absa branch, was effectively denied bail.
Smith’s lawyer, Mariette Jansen van Vuuren, told Beeld the State had not opposed bail, and that the docket had not been brought to court.
“The magistrate had a problem with the confirmation of my client’s address, but her [Smith’s] husband gave a statement and rendered proof of residence,” Jansen van Vuuren said.
Ndamase insisted on the submission of police confirmation of Smith’s proof of residence, and effectively refused bail on these grounds.
“My client is being disadvantaged because Ndamase is prejudiced against her,” Jansen van Vuuren said.
According to Beeld, the Law Commission is currently engaged in a disciplinary hearing against Ndamase, because of firstly, her alleged refusal to carry out judicial orders and secondly, her alleged refusal to accept authority.
Beeld reported Ndamase and Jansen van Vuuren earlier had an altercation in the same court, due to Ndamase addressing the court in isiXhosa, instead of English.
– Sapa
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