Walk up Wale Street from the city centre and the Bo-Kaap hits you like a paint chart: lime green, hot pink and canary yellow stacked up the slope of Signal Hill. Most visitors take the photograph, buy a koeksister and leave convinced they have seen the Bo-Kaap.
They have seen the paint. What they have walked past is the birthplace of one of the great ironies of South African history. Some of the first Afrikaans ever written down was written here, in Arabic script, by Muslim teachers whose ancestors had arrived at the Cape in chains. A century later the same language had become the badge of white Afrikaner nationalism, and was being used to tell their descendants where they could live. It is rather like having your recipe stolen, watching the thief win MasterChef with it, and then being banned from the kitchen.
A Language Made in the Kitchen
The Dutch East India Company brought Dutch to the Cape in 1652. It then brought tens of thousands of enslaved people from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Sri Lanka and the Indonesian islands, speaking Malay, Portuguese creole, Malagasy and a dozen other languages. Add the Khoikhoi, who had been here all along, and sailors from half of Europe, and almost nobody shared a first language.
So people improvised. In kitchens, workshops and fields, settlers, enslaved workers and Khoikhoi hammered out a simplified Dutch that everyone could use, with the grammar stripped back and words borrowed from wherever they were handy. The settlers called it, dismissively, kombuistaal: kitchen language. And the kitchen was not where Company officials spent their days. It was where enslaved cooks, nannies and servants spent theirs, polishing the new language for generations.
The colonists named it “kitchen language”. They did not mean it as a compliment. They also did not do the cooking.
Written in Arabic, Read in the Bo-Kaap
The Bo-Kaap grew up from the 1760s as rows of small rented houses for artisans, freed slaves and, increasingly, the Cape’s Muslim community. In 1793 the exiled Indonesian prince and scholar Tuan Guru opened a madrasa here after his release from Robben Island, and the Auwal Mosque on Dorp Street, founded in 1794, is the oldest mosque in South Africa.
The children who came to learn did not speak Arabic; they spoke the kitchen language. So their teachers wrote it down in Arabic letters. Through the 1800s, Bo-Kaap scholars produced religious texts in what is now called Arabic-Afrikaans, among the earliest substantial writing in the language anywhere, including a guide to Islamic teaching by the Ottoman scholar Abu Bakr Effendi, published in the 1870s. Some of the first books in Afrikaans were Islamic texts in Arabic script, written by and for the descendants of enslaved people. It is not quite the origin story on the official monuments.
Enter the British
By the 1790s the Dutch East India Company was bankrupt. The British took the Cape in 1795, and for good in 1806, and set about making it British. From 1822 English replaced Dutch in government and the courts, English teachers arrived for the schools and Scottish ministers for the Dutch Reformed pulpits. Legal rights for the Khoikhoi followed in 1828 and the end of slavery in 1834, with compensation payable only in London. To many Dutch-speaking farmers it felt as though their language, their labour and their way of life were all being taken at once.
Thousands packed their wagons. The Great Trek of the 1830s and 1840s carried them inland to found the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, taking the Cape’s kitchen language with them, by now so far from Amsterdam Dutch that a visitor from Holland would have struggled to follow it.
Told to speak English, the Afrikaners borrowed a language from the servants. And forgot to give it back.
Under New Ownership
In 1875, in Paarl, the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners, the Society of True Afrikaners, set out to prove that Afrikaners were a people with their own language, and launched the first Afrikaans newspaper the next year. Britain then gave the movement plenty to push against: diamonds and gold drew it north, the Boers won the first war in 1881 and lost the second, from 1899 to 1902, at a terrible cost in the concentration camps, where Boer families and black South Africans died in their tens of thousands. Afterwards Lord Milner pushed English into the schools once again. If he had set out to create Afrikaner nationalism, he could hardly have done a better job.
A second language movement of poets, journalists and preachers followed. Afrikaans replaced Dutch as an official language in 1925, the Afrikaans Bible appeared in 1933, and along the way the language was re-badged as the property of the white volk, born of the Voortrekkers, the Bible and the farm. The kitchen was edited out. In 1948 the National Party took power and Afrikaans became the language of apartheid: a remarkable career move for a language first spoken by cooks. The Group Areas Act declared the Bo-Kaap a “Malay” area, and the people whose ancestors had first written Afrikaans down were told, by an Afrikaans-speaking government, which streets they could live on.
In 1975 the Taal Monument outside Paarl was unveiled to celebrate the language. In June 1976, Soweto schoolchildren marched against being taught in Afrikaans, and the police opened fire. Within a year, the same language was celebrated in stone and became the reason children were shot in the streets.
The descendants of the people who wrote Afrikaans down were told, in Afrikaans, where they were allowed to live.
Taking It Back
Here is the twist. Afrikaans never really belonged to the people who claimed it. Today most South Africans who speak it as a first language are not white, and in the Bo-Kaap, on the Cape Flats and across the platteland it is spoken by people who never stopped regarding it as theirs, in rich local forms such as Kaaps that the old dictionaries preferred not to notice.
You can still hear the kitchen in it. Piesang, banana, comes from Malay. So do atjar and blatjang, on sale in Bo-Kaap shops within sight of the Auwal Mosque. Every time a white Afrikaans speaker asks for blatjang with their bobotie, the Cape’s enslaved cooks get a small, quiet last word.
Why I Take Guests There
On my city walks the Bo-Kaap is never just a photo backdrop. We pass the Auwal Mosque, stop where Tuan Guru taught, and talk about who built the houses and who was allowed to live in them. Then we talk about language, because almost every visitor is surprised that the most politically loaded language in South African history was shaped in kitchens and first written down in a madrasa. Come and walk the cobbles, admire the colours, and ask me how to say “banana” in Afrikaans.