Historical and cultural background

Settlement in South Africa by English-speaking people started in the closing decade of the 18^th century, when British forces occupied the Cape. In 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Cape was allocated to Britain by the Congress of Vienna. This put an end to one and a half centuries of control by the Dutch East India Company. By this time Cape Town was very cosmopolitan. Indigenous people did not constitute a large proportion of its inhabitants, having been decimated by smallpox or driven out of the area, or – as was the case for many hunter-gatherers – killed by settlers. Prior to the arrival of the British, the settlers were mainly of Dutch origin, but included people from other European countries. The large slave population was the most heterogeneous in the world, having been brought from Dahomey, Angola, Madagascar, Mozambique, Zanzibar, Oibo, various parts of India, Ceylon, the Malayan Peninusula and the Indonesian Archipelago (particularly Java, Sumatra, the Celebes, Macassar, Ternate and Timor). Most of the slaves’ languages did not survive beyond the first generation, Malay being a notable exception. Portuguese Creole and a Cape Dutch pidgin acted as lingua francas for slaves, but they all had to learn Dutch. In doing so, they contributed to the development of what is now known as Afrikaans, a language that has significant structural differences from Dutch. Slavery was abolished in 1834, almost two decades after the establishment of British colonial rule.

In 1822 a policy of anglicization was instituted by Governor Charles Somerset. It was aimed at weakening the independence of those who had previously been dominant, namely the Dutch/Afrikaans-speaking slave-owning group, but obviously the policy also affected the rest of the people in the colony. Of the three domains subjected to anglicization – law, religion and education – it was in education that the policy had the greatest success. English was entrenched as a medium of instruction by the simple expedient of refusing state funding to schools that taught through the medium of any other language. A few private schools were established to provide education in Dutch, but they were unable to survive financially for more than two decades. Aided by grants from the state, Christian religious institutions took a major share of responsibility for primary and secondary education in the Cape Colony during the nineteenth century. In Cape Town most of the church schools and all the state schools taught through the medium of English, regardless of the fact that the home language of many learners was Afrikaans.

The phasing out of socio-economic structures based on slavery did not result in an egalitarian society. There was stratification based on class and, increasingly, on color though legally entrenched segregation started only in the 20^th century. As is common, working-class areas were more multicultural and multilingual than middle-class areas. They were home to freed slaves and their descendants, to indigenous people (both local and from territories further north), and also to immigrants. In the early years of the colony, the majority of the immigrants were English-speaking. Later in the century, economic opportunities in South Africa created by the discovery of mineral wealth, coupled with events in Europe prompted the immigration of thousands of people from Eastern and Western Europe. Many of them started their South African life in the boarding houses and rented accommodation of inner-city neighborhoods. One of these, District Six, included among its residents East European Jewish immigrants who spoke Yiddish, Russian and Polish, and read Hebrew; Muslim descendants of slaves and political exiles who understood Malay, read Arabic, but spoke Afrikaans as their home language; Christians – descendants of settlers and of slaves, and newer immigrants, whose languages included Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho. Cape Flats English has its roots in these old, mixed residential areas where language contact was the order of the day, and where everyone needed to acquire some command of English if they had any dealings in the adjacent city centre or the middle-class suburbs to the south. The dialect spread to the Cape Flats as residents of the older suburbs moved to that area voluntarily or through the massive forced removals of the 1960s and 70s.

Information on the areas of origin of 19^th century English-speaking immigrants to Cape Town is sparse. Most of them did not come in the kind of organized immigration schemes used by settlers in the Eastern Cape or Natal, which provided documentation about background. Because British subjects could travel relatively freely in the Empire, if they came as individuals or in small privately organized groups, they did not have to fill in their particulars on immigration forms when they arrived in Cape Town. Thus there are no consolidated documentation bases to draw on in working out which dialects of English these immigrants would have spoken. Church and secular registers of marriages and births provide some clues, as do ships’ passenger lists, but as yet these have not been systematically followed up. Studies of the English of nineteenth century immigrants who settled in other parts of South Africa show non-standard British English dialect features which are also found in Cape Flats English. Whatever their provenance, non-standard dialects of English spoken in Cape Town would have had an important role shaping the early form of what is now known as ‘Cape Flats English.’

Since the dominant language of the central business district was English, residents of the adjacent working-class neighborhoods who wanted to engage with its resources had to learn some English, if it was not their home language. Adults mostly did this informally, picking it up from their neighbors who, if they were not also speakers of an L2 English, were more likely to speak a regional dialect of British or Irish English, than standard English. Children had more exposure to standard English from their teachers and text books. However, in the playgrounds they would have been more likely to have heard L2 English or regional dialects than standard English. This is because working-class children tended to go to what were called ‘mission schools’, which offered a practical curriculum and were for poorer children, while middle-class children attended ‘church schools’, which had an academic curriculum. Christian schools offered both secular and religious education. Madressahs and cheders offered only religious and related cultural Islamic and Jewish education, respectively. The former had taught through the medium of Malay until about the 1830s, when they started to use Afrikaans. They taught pupils to read Arabic. The latter used Yiddish and, later, English, and taught the reading of classical Hebrew.

In 1905 racially-based segregation was introduced in Cape schools. This obviously affected the range of English varieties to which children were exposed in the classroom and the playground. In 1915 Afrikaans was recognized nationally as a viable medium of instruction, and a ‘mother-tongue’ policy was put on the statute books shortly thereafter. However, it was not strictly enforced, and in Cape Town most schools for colored children continued to teach through the medium of English, regardless of the children’s home language. In the 1950s, when apartheid education policies forced the implementation of mother-tongue education, many of these schools had to change to Afrikaans as medium of instruction or at least add an Afrikaans stream.

Being forced to use Afrikaans in this way was bitterly resented by colored parents and teachers, some of whom circumvented the law by placing Afrikaans-speaking children into the English stream or into English schools. A very wide-spread belief developed among parents and children that children got a better education in English schools and classes than in the Afrikaans counterparts, and therefore would have better opportunities for further study and for employment. Separation by language was seen as contributing to the construction of social class division. (In neighborhoods which wished to counter such division, one of the markers of solidarity was the used of a bilingual vernacular) A common thread in oral history interviews is the memory of playground division, with children from the Afrikaans and English classes not mixing with one another at all while at school because ‘the English children are snobbish’ or ‘the Afrikaans children are rough and wild’. Thus, the combination of government policy and social divisions meant that the generation who had their education through the medium of Afrikaans after 1950 had far less exposure to English than previous generations had had. As a result, by the nineteen seventies there were clear intergenerational differences with regard to proficiency in English in those working-class colored families who spoke mainly a local dialect of Afrikaans at home and in the neighborhood. The grandparents and great-grandparents had had all their schooling in English and were comfortable speaking it. Some had L1 proficiency. The parent generation had had little opportunity to use English outside the classroom and were less confident in the use of their L2 variety. As they did not want their children to have the same experience of what they saw as second-rate education, they raised their children in English so that they could go into English classes. Thus it was common that the input for the children’s L1 was an L2 variety of English.