
The Day of the African Child
47 years after that fateful day in June of 1976, the imaging of the Day of the African Child is still primarily Sam Nzima’s photos of the mortally wounded Hector Pieterson in the arms of an older child, Mbuyisa Makhubo, and running next to them with manifest anguish on her face, Hector’s older sister, Antoinette.
Much as I hold a strong position that the fate of today’s African Child should be what the world focuses on, I will take a little delve into the Hector Pieterson story, but purely from the angle most relevant to the core business of this website.
Hector Pieterson was born to Mr Vivian and Mrs Dorothy Pieterson, whose names appear on the surface, to belong to people of European extraction. However, a more thorough inspection would reveal that Dorothy Pieterson is now known as Dorothy Molefi (after the divorce from Hector’s father). I have not been able to establish if Molefi is her maiden name, but her middle name is Mantwa – a Setswana name meaning she-warrior (which would actually be spelt Mmantwa in Botswana orthography) – and the surname Molefi too, is a Setswana name.
But here is where it gets more interesting: the Pieterson surname. Now in order to fully appreciate this, one needs be familiar with the racially stratified government policies of Apartheid South Africa back in the day. To cut the long story short, Blacks were on the lowest echelon, and Whites at the highest. Somewhere in-between, but closer to Blacks, were other races, including mixed-race people, who are known as Coloureds in Southern Africa.
Over the 300 years since European men first landed at the Cape and started having children with African women, a new ethnic group was created. These people are predominantly known as Cape Coloureds, and deserve an ethnic group classification of their own, since they are literally mixed raced (including European, Bantu, Khoisan, and even Asian ancestry) and have become a race over centuries of being isolated to propagate families on their own – now estimated at 10% of the South African population.
Because of the racial segregation policies and eventually laws, each ethnic grouping would develop on its own, and the Cape Coloured, like all others, became a significant portion of South Africa’s population. Like all cultures, they have a “mother tongue”, and in this case it is Afrikaans.
Now back to Vivian Pieterson. Pieterson was a fairly light-skinned person who could easily be pass off as a Coloured and get better opportunities than if he were jet Black, so he changed his surname to the Afrikaans Pieterson, from the original “Pitso”. This way, he didn’t have to lie about his ethnicity, as people would just look at his complexion, match it with his name, and conclude that he was Coloured, and therefore worthy of better opportunities than if they assumed him Black. Wise move! But he was neither the first nor the last, as the practice was somewhat more common, and many Blacks who have Afrikaans or even English surnames probably got them because their ascendants did the same thing.
“Pitso” is a Setswana name. In fact it could also be from other Sotho-Tswana languages; but according to 2004 interview with the Mail & Guardian newspaper, Hector’s sister Antoinette Sithole (who is seen in the picture running next to the young many carrying her dying brother 47 years ago) confirms that indeed their family is Tswana and that their father changed their surname from Pitso to Pieterson with the hope of better opportunities for them all. It is up to this part, where I say the Hector Pieterson story is “most relevant to the core business of this website”. Other interesting Tswana people who have Afrikaans surnames like this include legendary pioneer writer, linguist, translator, journalist, and politician, Sol Plaatje.
Now back to the challenges of the modern-day African child.
The first and biggest is the identity crisis that is on the steady increase with each new generation. In the past, many Africans were told to discard their African ways and adopt British and French traditions, as well as versions of Christianity peddled by European missionaries who called their traditional beliefs demonic and Satanic. This was bad, but at least there was some direction.
The African Renaissance brought up a new sense of self-worth and self-understanding, which is very good. However, due to links that have been broken over hundreds of years of Europeanisation, it often becomes difficult to reconnect with what was really there, and usually logical deductions are used, but sometimes it is just a matter of finding the easiest solution.
This is more visible than ever in the sudden proliferation of African-based “Christianities” and churches, as well as the new trend of becoming “Sangomas” (particularly in South Africa). This is because there is that hunger for spirituality and connecting with ancestors, but the truth is that people have lost the modalities for doing that and resort to the next best thing: either using Christianity as a basis, but bastardising it to the point where the missionaries who brought it here would not be able to recognise it, or using the only names associated with traditional religions that you know, such as Sangoma even though you probably do not fit the description.
Living in a tech-filled world but without as much access and control as their counterparts in the Northern Hemisphere really throws young Africans of today into an abyss of confusion and helplessness. Internet technology has made the world very accessible, but without the requisite skills and ability to create content that forks in enough following, the African Child remains a mere spectator in a world that has supposedly evened the playfield. These are the real challenges that face the young African of today, and the fact that only a fraction of a fraction of a percentage make it often gives the illusion that they are coping and even conquering the 4IR dimension.
It would not be thinkable that we conclude on this topic without discussing how African languages have been impacted, and how children struggle to even speak their own mother tongue. The existence of large international languages like English, French, and Arabic in itself does give our languages a hind start, as children would often ask what opportunities are there for them if they were to master their vernacular, rather than the international languages.
Pan-Africanists have for close to “four score and seven years” been talking of having an African bloc language, or at least some regional bloc languages. Kiswahili (Swahili) is spoken in almost all of East Africa and parts of Central and Southern Africa, and was one of the first to be selected for this meticulous task. Decades later, there is still not much evidence suggesting that there is a move in that direction.
I recently saw a question on Facebook where someone wanted to know which language we would choose as the regional language for Southern Africa/SADC bloc. My answer was swift and simple: Setswana.
From the 10 countries that make up continental Southern Africa, Setswana is an official language in South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, and is a recognised regional language in Namibia. At this point, we are already at four out of ten countries, where Setswana is taught in schools as part of the mainstream curriculum.
Then we have Lesotho’s Sesotho, which is the national language there and is spoken by “almost everyone”. Sesotho has an over 90% intelligibility with Setswana, meaning that a person speaking Sesotho can have a decent conversation with a person speaking Setswana; and therefore getting Lesotho on the list of “Tswana”-speaking countries should not be a logical problem So now we have five out of ten.
Some people, albeit a small minority, in Zambia would also find it easier to use Setswana, as their native language, Lozi (Serotsi) is also significantly intelligible with Setswana. Other people who speak languages which are mutually intelligible with Setswana are South African speakers of Sesotho, Sepedi, Sepulane, and other Northern Sotho dialects.

So yes, it is time to have a regional language for Southern Africa, and the most logical choice by far, is Setswana.