Books: Hairybacks and white kaffirs

Never mind. This is a wonderful achievement, an occasion for trumpets and confetti. At long last, speakers of South African English have been given a work of reference commensurate with the rich, irreverent vigour of their language. It's been a long time coming. A quarter of a century in the making, some 5000 entries and a joy from first to last.

From now on, not only will others understand us a little more easily; but here is proof that South African English may be read, savoured and, even more surprisingly, understood. So if I write: "The kugel left the Greek and jumped the robot", the foreign reader need only consult the dictionary to see that I'm talking not Yiddish, science fiction or even sexual perversion. I'm reporting that "a young, spoilt, wealthy (Jewish) woman...preoccupied with frivolities" drove away from the corner shop and failed to stop at the traffic lights.

As to the question of giving offence, nothing the commendable editors of the dictionary may say, is likely to discourage South Africans from insulting one another when the occasion demands. Nor should it. Because your outrage may be my pleasure. It was always so. Only when the dictionary ventures into cautionary matters does it flounder.

Take the time honoured insults addressed to Afrikaners: the popular "hairyback"; or the more inventive "rockspider". No good, says the dictionary. Yet equally popular gibes at the English - rooinek (redneck) or soutpiel (saltprick) - rate only the dodgy health warning "often derogatory". Often? Mostly, surely, or why bother?

And sometimes the same word may have entirely opposite effects. Black radicals often used "Boer", referring to police officers or soldiers or farmers, as an insult. But when used among Afrikaners about themselves, the editors insist, it is an "affectionate and humorous name".

In fact - not here canvassed - the word is also favoured by the neo-fascist white, right wing Afrikaners for whom it has mystical overtones of purification and lost innocence.

Then there is the word no one talks about but a lot of people use: "Kaffir". A form, derived innocently enough (except that it was probably coined by slave traders) from the Arabic kafir, meaning unbeliever. The k-word receives by far the longest entry in the dictionary (eight pages) and is deemed "offensive in all senses and combinations".

And yes, often it is. But outside the cities, you travel in the platteland (rural or country districts) you will find it in the mouths of almost every farmer you meet, used with calculated venom or unabashed affection. I do not know which is worse.

But then, again, it is impossible to understand the often poisonous relations between black and white during the past three centuries without familiarising oneself with the term and its remarkable variants.

I think such words might be liberated far more effectively by taking them out of the mouths of those to whom the sole right to use them has now been ceded: the coalition of bitterenders (diehards), religious crazies and messianic Boers who constitute the grumbling opposition to democracy by giving them back to those they set out to insult.

Happily, when it comes to laying down the law as to what is and is not correct: the editors of the dictionary, have done, as Fowler did in the vexed matter of the hyphen, and chosen to wallow in the general confusion. They show themselves to be far more interested in recording and celebrating the varieties of South African English than deciding who should have their mouths washed out. Such mildness is admirable and wise. We have had enough of the language police in South Africa.

And they are still rising high. Recently, the new government, following the example of apartheid, decided to enforce laws against "hate speech". Like their predecessors, this will do little to stop the hate and much to curtail free expression.

There is always a great gaseous cloud of rhetoric floating about easy talk of freedom of speech, and essential liberties in the new South Africa. The country remains the capital of cant and the home of humbug. The number of official languages has risen from two (Afrikaans and English) to eleven. It is called "indigenisation", an ugly word for an empty notion. The idea is to emphasise languages unjustly neglected in the past. Zulu, say, which boasts more speakers than any other language. But the policy is likely to enhance the appeal of English, the one language unconnected to party or tribe.

Afrikaans is now under threat. Hardly surprising that the tongue of the masters does not appeal to their former servants. It is scant consolation, perhaps, but a cross-section of the taal, ranging from racial epithets like kaffirboetie (little brother of black people) to amatory jokes: opsitkers (courting candle) and bellicose political war cries like baaskap (bosshood) as well as many of its choice vulgarities like the memorable bosbefok (driven crazy by bush warfare) remains embedded in South African English. Odd to think that were Afrikaans to disappear tomorrow, a good deal would survive in the dictionary of the old enemy.

Oddness does not end there. One of the pleasures of this compulsively readable work is to discover that all sorts of people, encouraged to hate and detest each other, have been borrowing bits of each other's languages for centuries. South African English, true to its mongrel traditions, has simply stolen more thoroughly than any of the others. And that's why it will always offend one party or another.

For a long time, merely being an English speaker in South Africa was politically incorrect. The language itself was seen as seditious, inclining its speakers towards what I'll call "kaffirboetiedom" And since it does not yet appear in the dictionary and remembering what is and is not offensive, I will translate my coinage as "an unnaturally fraternal feeling for people of African origin".

To the seditious popularity of English, the former regime responded by banning English books, newspapers, attacking English churches and universities with ritual enthusiasm. This was regarded as perfectly fair. Yet whenever English speakers objected to living in a racial zoo designed to protect the mythical purity of Afrikaner nationalists, they were accused by their masters of giving way to Boerchaat (hatred of the Boers).

For a long time we were governed by demented social engineers, aided by the police. Words and their meanings were crucial. The leaders of the rolling tribal coup which ran South Africa did not just take over the radio stations, they captured the dictionaries. Words were to mean what Ministers decided them to mean. Shoddy linguistic goods designed to disguise local lunacy. When the state intended to disenfranchise most of its citizens it declared them "independent". When it planned to murder them it formed the "Civil Co-operation Bureau".

It's good to have recorded here our very own idiot lingo: "parallel development", "separate freedoms" and "National Christian Education". All as empty of meaning as the great sham lexicon of the Soviet era, right up there with "Internationalism" and "Enemy of the people".

I'd like to report that those days are gone. In fact the new broadcasting services seem as anxious as ever to reflect and promote government policy. And obediently spray audiences with news as cloudy as soporific gas, designed to pacify or confuse. A poem of mine, celebrating the agonies and fatuities of right wing bigotry was banned recently by the new SABC, just as once it had been banned by the old, a quarter of a century before. I claim a kind of record: the first writer to have work banned under both regimes.

South Africa has a way to go before people resist the urge to check their rifles when politicians talk of freedom. This essential book takes us several steps along the way.