Afrikaans was born in enslaved women’s kitchens as a language of cultural translation

Evidence

There are larger linguistic ironies at work here. The creole language that would later be consolidated into Afrikaans emerged as much in the kitchen to enable enslaved women to communicate with the wives of those owning them as around the campfires of the frontier. A very large percentage of burgher (citizen) households owned at least a small amount of slaves, who pretty much serviced the entire household economy from cleaning and cooking to childrearing and market-shopping. In these originating linguistic sites the language of apartheid was born in the demands of cultural translation. If post-apartheid South Africa has a lingua franca, an indigenously prompted language more or less universally available to its heterogeneous population, it may now be Afrikaans rather than – or at least alongside and interactive with – the more globally prompted commercial and administrative univeralism of English. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1337

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is Afrikaans actually now a lingua franca for post-apartheid South Africa’s heterogeneous population, or is this the author’s provocative claim? Worth verifying.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ theme of how what begins as subaltern, intimate contact zone material becomes an oppressive dominant institution. — connects to: Afrikaans was born from enslaved women’s kitchen communication with their owners. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1337
• SEED: Essay angle: languages of oppression born in intimacy — the kitchen-and-campfire origins of a language that became an apartheid instrument, versus the purist myth of Afrikaans as national tongue.