South Africa Two - Text
This male speaker, who had been living in Australia for some ten years when Kate Foy recorded and edited this sample in April, 2000, gives quite detailed demographic information about South Africa, revealing that of the 50 million inhabitants of that country some 5 million white and some 3 million 'coloured' speak Afrikaans, his first language. He is from Cape Town, though has lived in Natal and in the Transvaal also. Running time 00:03:35.
TRANSCRIPTION
When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long, round arch with its path high above and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I was born in Cape Town where….I think everybody knows where Cape Town is and lived a great deal of my life in the Cape province which is overwhelmingly Afrikaans speaking. And as a result as I recall I actually learned to speak Afrikaans thoroughly before I was 6. Then left that part of the world and largely forgot it, and relearned it at a later age. Much of my life I then spent in the Transvaal which again is…is overwhelmingly African speaking, but I was educated in English. And then the last, I suppose, 20 years before I left South Africa, I lived in Natal, which is predominantly English speaking. Now, when I talk about English and Afrikaans, of course there are also a whole host of African languages, notably Xhosa and Zulu of which I have a smattering, but since neither of these were official languages and schools taught the…the two European languages so to speak, that's what I learned. But even within the sort of pure English, there is…there's marked differences. Cape Town is a very distinctive, almost sort of sing-song element about it that I've noticed. When I hear South African sports teams, for example, being interviewed on television, I cringe to think that I sound like that. What's happened now, interestingly enough, is that under the ANC government, English is really the official language. Because with something like 15 local black languages and…and two others, what could they do? Except go for, I suppose, the international language. And this has been something of a…what do you say….soft point among the Afrikaans speakers, because they used to have the official language so to speak. It was dominant but now it's relegated to a minor language, which in educate I suppose is the mother tongue of only about 5 million people. The official population is about 40 million, which is probably closer to 50 million. The last census they were talking about is about 43 million of which about 5 million are white where the distribution is about 3 million Afrikaaners and 2 million English speakers. But then you have to remember that the colored people, mixed blood people of whom there are probably 2-3 million overwhelmingly speak Afrikaans. And quite a lot of black people who live in the Cape also speak Afrikaans in addition to something else. I suppose with the…the international media, television and radio and all that….English has a head start.
Transcribed by Christy Bickerstaff
Associate Editor for Transcriptions