'Things are bad when whites start learning Zulu’

Press, 14 January 1986, Page 6

'Things are bad when whites start learning Zulu’

NZPA-AFP Johannesburg

As the movement escalates against apartheid, whites in South Africa are hedging their bets in a new way — by tuning in to a new television series that purports to teach Zulu in six months.

Four times a week, twice for English speakers and twice for Dutch-descended speakers of Afrikaans, local television presents lessons in the language of South Africa’s largest black ethnic group, Zulu. The lessons, to continue until July, have drawn wide public interest, and stocks of a workbook published to accompany the television programme have already run out in a number of

Johannesburg’s book shops.

According to the director of the Zulu language programme, Horst Keil, the twice-weekly lessons should

enable South Africa’s white minority of five million to “get by” in Zulu, which is spoken by about six million of the country’s 23-million-strong black population.

In the first lessons televised last week, in which three black teachers are presented giving lessons to a white student, viewers learned to say “sawubona,” or hello, “unjani” (how are you), "mama” (madame) and “baba” (mister).

Interest in the Zulu lessons has been such that South Africa’s largest circulation English-language daily, the “Star,” is publishing a bi-weekly review of the lessons with a list of new words for those who may have missed a broadcast.

The timing of the programme, which comes as South Africa enters its seventeenth month of the

worst anti-apartheid unrest in its history, in which more than 1000 people have died, has provided commentators with ammunition for their columns.

The “Financial Mail” newspaper commented: “You know things are bad when whites start learning Zulu.”

Among jokes inspired by the programme: “The definition of a white optimist is someone who is learning Zulu. A white pessimist is someone learning Xhosa.” This is a reference to the fact that the leader of the Zulu community, chief Gatsha Buthelezi, is considered one of the country’s most influential black moderates. The most well-known Xhosa is Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of the banned anti-apartheid guerilla organisation, the African National Congress (A.N.C.).