I am an Afrikaans speaker. The language of my childhood, of family conversations, of the literature that shaped me, and of the intimate spaces where I first learned to think and feel, is Afrikaans. Yet I refuse, with every fibre of my being, to define myself as an “Afrikaner.”
That word has become toxic. It has been captured, weaponised, and abused by those who treat it as a racial and cultural fortress rather than a simple linguistic identity shared by people of many backgrounds. The concept of the Afrikaner, as currently mobilised by organisations such as AfriForum and the broader Solidarity Movement, is soaked in nostalgia for power, in racial anxiety, and in a determination to recreate, by private means, the parallel worlds that apartheid once enforced by law.
I reject that identity because it has been turned into an instrument of division. And it is precisely for this reason that I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the project to build and expand Akademia as an Afrikaans-medium university.
This is not a rejection of Afrikaans. It is a rejection of the attempt to use Afrikaans as a tool of exclusion, racial separation, and the preservation of historical privilege. The new campus developments linked to AfriForum and Solidarity, funded by hundreds of millions of rand and, by some reports, approaching R3 billion in private capital overall, represent a deliberate effort to construct an educational space that is, in practice if not always in explicit admission criteria, closed to the overwhelming majority of South Africans.
That majority is Black. The language barrier is real. The demographic reality of who speaks Afrikaans as a first language, and who does not, is well known. To pretend that a private Afrikaans-medium university is merely about “mother-tongue education” is to ignore the history, the power, and the social consequences of such a project in a country still struggling to overcome the deepest racial inequalities.
Naledi Pandor has spoken with clarity and courage on this matter. In her recent interview, she described the construction of an Afrikaans-medium university receiving vast private funding as something that should not be accepted. She noted that Jonathan Jansen has been almost alone in speaking out, while too many of us have remained silent, “too complacent with our freedom.”
Pandor correctly located the project within the longer struggle against centuries of racism and colonialism. Those who once held control, she observed, do not let go easily; they find other ways. Private capital, cultural organisations, and the language of “community initiative” become the vehicles for reproducing privilege outside the reach of democratic accountability. I share her alarm completely. When a former minister of international relations, and a figure with deep roots in the education sector, feels compelled to warn against this development, we should listen.
Professor Jonathan Jansen, former Rector of the University of the Free State, has been consistent and rigorous in his criticism. His July 2026 column, “A degree in isolation,” cuts to the heart of the danger. Afrikaans-exclusive education, he argues, locks young people into ideological and racial isolation. It leaves them unprepared for the complex, diverse society in which they must live and work. It endangers democracy itself by reinforcing closed circles of socialisation that run from family to school to university without interruption.
Jansen has long warned that exclusive Afrikaans institutions are not primarily about language rights; they are about separateness. They keep alive what he has called “knowledge in the blood” — the intergenerational transmission of bitterness, superiority, and fear of the other. As an Afrikaans speaker who has spent a lifetime rejecting that inheritance, I find Jansen’s analysis devastatingly accurate. A university that isolates its students from the majority of their fellow citizens is not educating them for democratic citizenship. It is preparing them for a parallel existence.
The Higher Education Transformation Network has, over the years, pointed out the discriminatory character of such institutions. Akademia’s language policy, and the practical effects of its Afrikaans medium, raise serious questions of consistency with the Constitution, with the Education White Paper, and with the Higher Education Act’s commitment to equity of access and the eradication of unfair discrimination.
Blade Nzimande, when he served as Minister of Higher Education, correctly identified the racial implications of an institution structured around Afrikaans exclusivity and raised the prospect of regulatory scrutiny. These are not peripheral objections. They go to the core of what a post-apartheid higher education system is supposed to achieve.
Let me be personal. I grew up in a world where Afrikaans was the language of power. I also grew up watching that language used to humiliate, to exclude, and to mark the boundaries of belonging. I chose a different path. I rejected the racial nationalism that claimed ownership of Afrikaans. I joined the struggle against apartheid precisely because I refused to allow my language and my cultural background to be conscripted into the service of white supremacy. Today, when I see AfriForum and its allies raising billions to build an Afrikaans university, I see the same old logic wearing new clothes. The claim is cultural preservation. The effect is the construction of a space where Black South Africans are, by language, largely absent. That is not preservation of a language. It is the preservation of a racialised social order by other means.
The threat to social cohesion is real. South Africa’s universities have been sites of intense contestation over language precisely because language policies have, for decades, produced racially segregated lecture theatres and residences. Parallel-medium arrangements at historically Afrikaans institutions repeatedly failed the test of integration. The Constitutional Court, in the University of the Free State matter, recognised that continued dual-medium instruction had entrenched racial division.
To now create a private institution that is even more thoroughly monolingual in Afrikaans is to double down on the very problem the public system has been forced, however imperfectly, to confront. Isolation is not a minor side-effect. It is the point. Young people who study only among those who share their language and, overwhelmingly, their racial background, are less likely to develop the habits of mind and the relationships necessary for a non-racial democracy. That is a danger to all of us.
This project stands in fundamental contradiction to transformation. Transformation in higher education has never meant the elimination of Afrikaans. It has meant the dismantling of institutional cultures and language regimes that systematically privileged one group and excluded others. It has meant expanding access, developing African languages as languages of scholarship, and creating campuses where students of different backgrounds learn with and from one another.
An exclusive Afrikaans university funded by private wealth rooted in historical racist divisions and advantage moves in the opposite direction. It says that those with resources can opt out of the shared project of building inclusive institutions. It says that language rights for one community can be secured by creating parallel structures that the majority cannot enter on equal terms. That is not transformation. It is the privatisation of privilege.
I therefore call for this project to be stopped. Not restricted, not monitored, but prevented from becoming a fully fledged, accredited university that entrenches the dynamics I have described.
The Department of Higher Education and Training, the Council on Higher Education, and the relevant quality assurance bodies must subject any application for expanded accreditation or new programme approval to the strictest possible scrutiny against the constitutional values of equality, non-racialism, and the right to further education without unfair discrimination.
Language policies that produce effective racial exclusion cannot be waved through under the banner of cultural autonomy. Private higher education institutions remain subject to the regulatory framework of the Higher Education Act. That framework must be used.
Parliament, through the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education, should demand a full accounting of the public implications of large-scale private investment in exclusive language institutions. Questions of land use, infrastructure, and broader social impact cannot be left solely to private developers and cultural organisations with a documented record of racialised advocacy.
The National Qualifications Framework and accreditation processes must prioritise institutions that demonstrably advance access and social cohesion, not those that recreate linguistic and racial silos.
More broadly, we need a renewed national conversation about language in higher education that refuses the false choice between English monolingualism and Afrikaans exclusivity. African languages must be developed as languages of teaching, learning, and research with real resources and institutional commitment. Afrikaans, as one of the official languages, has a place — but that place cannot be a private enclave that excludes the majority. Multilingualism that includes everyone is the only democratic path. Monolingual exclusivity for the historically privileged is not.
I write this as an Afrikaans speaker who loves the language and refuses to surrender it to those who would use it as a wall. I write as someone who has lived the consequences of racial division and who will not watch a new generation be educated into isolation. Akademia, in the form currently being advanced by AfriForum and Solidarity, is not a contribution to South African higher education. It is a retreat from the hard work of building a shared society. It must not be allowed to proceed. The cost to our democracy, to social cohesion, and to the very idea of transformation is simply too high.
We have fought too long and sacrificed too much to accept the quiet reconstruction of parallel worlds. Afrikaans does not need a university that excludes. South Africa needs universities that include. Anything less is a betrayal of the future we claimed to be building.
* Ambassador Carl Niehaus is an EFF Member of Parliament.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of IOL
