One of the people I was looking forward to see during my short trip to Cape Town to watch some of the matches in the 2010 World Cup hosted by South Africa, was filmmaker Dylan Valley (rapper Lee Ursus introduced us). I was hoping to talk more to Dylan about his work as a filmmaker (especially”Lost Prophets,” a documentary film about rap pioneers, Prophets of da City, that Dylan co-directed with another Cape Town filmmaker, Sean Drummond), but football took precedence.

Dylan has a new film out on the neglected (among white speakers of the language and in mainstream debates) creole roots of the Afrikaans language. The film, “Afrikaaps,” will premiere in South Africa at this year’s Encounters International Documentary Film Festival in Cape Town and Johannesburg; it also made it to the IDFA documentary film festival in Amsterdam.

Though the majority of Afrikaans speakers are not white, for most observers, including its black (including coloured speakers) the language is synonymous with colonialism, Apartheid and white racism. It is perceived as a white language. And you can’t blame them. That’s despite the fact that, while ” (t)oday there are roughly 15 million Afrikaans speakers in South Africa, but how many of these people really speak the pure ‘higher’ Afrikaans that is taught at most schools?”

Afrikaner Nationalists and their allied media, cultural organizations, publishing industry, universities, school systems, etcetera, for a long time downplayed and degraded the fact that Afrikaans is a creole language since it was odds with their political project of racial purity and white domination. Academics and researchers may agree about the language’s creole roots, but that does not extend to popular ideas about Afrikaans.

Postapartheid, some Afrikaners still hold onto this exclusive vision. Valley’s film, which breaks with this history (by the way, he is not the first to make this argument), documents the making of the stage production, also called “Afrikaaps.”  The main roles in the stage production are played by some of Cape Town most well known hip hop artists, amongst them Jitsvinger, Bliksemstraal, Blaq Pearl and Emile YX, as well as the jazz musician, Kyle Shepherd. For one reviewer, in April this year, “…  the show, Afrikaaps, doesn’t attempt to tell the whole story either but it feels like an endeavour to emancipate the language from her oppression and those who singularly stake claim to her.”

That same reviewer captured what is the real value of the documentary beyond the talking heads (among them linguist Neville Alexander) who appear in it:

Yet it is in an interview with school children, shown as part of the documentary, that the Afrikaaps message is most clearly illustrated.  The interviewer asks a primary school learner if Afrikaans is her mother language.  She laughs as she replies that the Afrikaans that she is taught at school is definitely not the language she uses when she communicates with her mother, and yet people insists on calling it her mother tongue.  A young boy is asked what would happen if Afrikaaps is introduced as part of the school syllabus.   He replies without hesitation, “Many more children would pass the subject.”