OPINIONISTA: Skirmishes with language: Unisa can’t abandon Afrikaans as medium of instruction, court rules

Pierre de Vos teaches Constitutional law at the University of Cape Town Law Faculty, where he is head of the Department of Public Law. He writes a blog, entitled 'Constitutionally Speaking', in which he attempts to mix one part righteous anger, one part cold legal reasoning and one part irreverence to help keep South Africans informed about Constitutional and other legal developments related to the democracy.

The latter is one of the reasons I have largely been in agreement with the reasoning of recent Constitutional Court judgments dismissing challenges to the downscaling of Afrikaans at various universities. For example, inthe court dismissed the claim that the University of the Free State policy that phases out Afrikaans as a co-equal medium of instruction with English was unconstitutional.

But this may have been a pyrrhic victory for AfriForum as the Constitutional Court in effect gave Unisa another chance to fix the mess it had itself created, by referring the matter back to the university for reconsideration.

I would argue that the introduction of courses conducted in indigenous African languages would be an important step to address the effects of past and ongoing racial discrimination at a university, and that a university that chooses to spend its money on this, rather than on the retention of courses taught in Afrikaans, would be acting reasonably and would thus be constitutionally justified to do so.

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