I’d like to address the person who berated Kaaps as a language (“Ek hou nie van Kaaps”, TygerBurger 23 April).
Many people are unaware, and perhaps even purposefully disregard the fact, that Afrikaans is a creole language that developed in the Cape.
It was spoken by indigenous and enslaved people among themselves. Afrikaans is not the creation of European settlers. The “suiwer” Afrikaans was purposefully developed by a task group in Stellenbosch to disassociate from the creole language being spoken.
If you know and understand history, it is not surprising that many still have that view of Kaaps as inferior, the language of the less intelligent. The attempts to erase culture has been a decades long process in South Africa, and the legacy of that process remains.
Dean, Uitzicht
