English in a Splintered Metropolis: South Africa After Apartheid

jac 29.1–2 (2009)

English in a Splintered Metropolis:South Africa After Apartheid

John Trimbur

Since the end of the South African liberation struggle, with the fall ofapartheid and the establishment of representative government in 1994,there has been a significant shift in the politics of language, particularlyconcerning English and its representations, circulation, and enactments inthe post-apartheid period. A number of commentators have noted howEnglish has changed from being the language of liberation in the anti-apartheid movement to its present status as the language of neoliberalismand the turn on the part of the African National Congress (ANC) tostructural adjustment and middle-class black empowerment (Alexander,Language Policy; Sonntag). During the struggle against apartheid, fromthe Durban strike wave of 1973 and Soweto uprising of 1976 through themass mobilizations of the 1980s and the negotiated settlement of the early1990s, English was seen widely as the language of liberation for at leastthree reasons:

i. It was not Afrikaans, which was closely linked to apartheid andthe Afrikaner nationalism of the ruling National Party. The Sowetouprising started, it is worth recalling, in reaction to the proposedextension of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in the schoolcurriculum.

ii. It was not an African language, which carried associationswith the Bantustans or tribal homelands of the apartheid regime’sscheme of separate development, with Bantu education that usedmother tongue for schooling in social inferiority, and with a divide-and-rule strategy that promoted inter-ethnic rivalries and inhibitedunification of the African majority. Concerns about ethno-linguistic

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divisions and their potential for violence increased in the early1990s, after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the unbanningof the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups, when the dyingapartheid regime cynically promoted, with arms and other materialsupport, Zulu nationalism and Inkatha Freedom Party’s attacks onANC supporters.

iii. English accordingly seemed to fit best with the anti-apartheidgoal of a nonracial political future. Nonracialism was one of thedistinctive features of the liberation struggle of the 1980s, influ-enced in part by the class politics of the ANC’s two key allies—theCongress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the SouthAfrican Communist Party—as well as independent Marxists andsocialists to the left of the ANC; and in part by other politicalformations, such as the Black Consciousness movement and theNon-European Unity Movement, which emphasized the potentiallyunifying and detribalizing role of English in reaching across ethnicdivisions. Moreover, the fact that English had been adopted in 1981as the official language in newly independent Namibia, the formerGerman colony administered after World War I by South Africa,where English had virtually no historical roots, only seemed tovalidate further the role English could play as the language ofnational unity in the post-liberation period.

Given this configuration of historical factors, it is not hard to under-stand the appeal of English to the South African liberation struggle and thecalls for a transformative “People’s English” (Gardiner; Pierce) or a“democratic variety of South African/Azanian English” (Heugh). Englishsimply seemed more inclusive and democratic than other South Africanlanguages and, in its international circulation, more modern and cosmopoli-tan, transcending narrow ethno-linguistic identifications as the languagethat linked activists in South Africa to the wider world of transnationalsolidarity campaigns and anti-apartheid support networks in Europe, NorthAmerica, and elsewhere. While English was never meant to displaceAfrican languages or Afrikaans but to serve as a linking language inmultilingual societies such as Namibia and South Africa, it was almost asthough the matter of language as a political question slipped the minds ofthe leaders of the liberation struggle due to the allure of English and a tacitconsensus about its progressive standing among the languages of South

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Africa. As Neville Alexander notes, “the language question was nevertreated more than superficially” by the ANC (28).

With the negotiated settlement of the early 1990s, as the ANC tookover but did not dismantle the formerly apartheid state and the widerapparatus of racialized capitalism in South Africa, English was re-identified. No longer represented as the language of consciousness-raisingand national liberation, English was figured as the language of capacity-building for South Africa to compete in the world market and maintain itsposition as the main sub-imperial power in Africa. In a shift, markedsymbolically and actually by the ANC’s turn from the populist nationalismof the Freedom Charter of 1955, with its call for nationalization (“Themineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall betransferred to the ownership of the people as a whole”) to the self-imposedneoliberalism of the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution strategy(GEAR) of 1996, English was increasingly seen not just as the linkinglanguage of national unity but as a global lingua franca associated withgeographical and social mobility, entrepreneurial values, and empower-ment of a black middle class. As a high school student from the Cape Towntownship Khayelitsha told researcher Rochelle Knapp, “with English youcan go everywhere” (258).

In the post-apartheid years, surveys show that black parents over-whelmingly wish their children to be schooled in English, to acquire thenecessary cultural capital to get ahead in a new world order. By the sametoken, and despite the South African constitution’s recognition of elevenofficial languages, 85% of airtime on SABC, the public broadcastingcorporation in South Africa, is devoted to programs in English, with 10%in Afrikaans and 5% in African languages. Further, the percentage ofspeeches delivered in English in the South African parliament increasedfrom 87% in 1994 to over 95% in 2001 (Kamwangamalu 164-65). And, ina distressing finding, researchers at University of Cape Town report thatfluent English-speaking black students make derisory comments about theaccents of their less-fluent classmates, making English a class marker thatdivides an English-fluent newly arrived black middle class from those fromtownships and rural areas still struggling to master the language (Madiba).

This pattern of using English as the main language in education,government, and public affairs makes South Africa appear to be a prime

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instance of the inevitability of global English in the twenty-first century,confirming representations of the spread of English, in Alastair Pennycook’swords, as “natural, neutral, and beneficial” (Cultural Politics 29). Thisview of English in South Africa, moreover, seems to confirm convergencetheories of global English as a powerful homogenizing influence, part of theMcDonaldization of the world, whether articulated positively by thosesuch as David Crystal who believe English just turned up irresistibly at the“right time in the right place” or critically by language rights advocatessuch as Robert Phillipson who see the global spread of English involved inthe loss of linguistic diversity, linguicide, and linguistic imperialism. Theview I develop here rejects such homogenization theories as inadequateto explain the meanings, uses, and circulation of English in contemporarySouth Africa.

At the same time, I am also skeptical of Braj Kachru’s notion of WorldEnglishes as the heterogeneous indigenization of English into distinctlynational varieties spoken outside the Anglo-American metropolis. Therecan be little question about the important role Kachru has played inlegitimizing the range and diversity of Englishes across the globe. None-theless, mapping the global spread of English as Kachru does in his wellknown model of three concentric circles relies upon a questionablelanguage-nation equation that marks core and periphery countries in theAnglophone world by their national varieties of English, with an InnerCircle of the metropolitan standard in the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia,and New Zealand; an Outer Circle of indigenized Englishes, such asNigerian English, Singapore English, Indian English, and so on; and anExpanding Circle that designates the status of China, Russia, and easternEuropean countries, among others, as pupil nations just learning English.As we will see shortly in greater detail, the difficulty here is that theunderlying language-nation equation erases differences within the sup-posed national varieties and the multidirectional language mixings acrossthe circles.

In the case of South Africa, the uneven settlement of English seems,if anything, to slide across Kachru’s concentric circles, with about 3.7million native speakers of English or 8.2% of the population in the InnerCircle; an estimated 10 million or 20% who speak English as anadditionallanguage in the Outer Circle; and the remaining population in the Expand-

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ing Circle for whom English remains a foreign language. These figures,moreover, help us recognize that contemporary South Africa, in PeterPluddeman’s words, is “English seeking” rather than “English speaking”(qtd. in Meiinsthrie and Bhatt 24). In many respects, as Neville Alexanderhas put it, English is “unassailable but unattainable,” characterized neitherby its inevitable spread nor its nativization but by its value in the globalmarketplace and the social distinctions and economic advantages itconfers on its speakers (English Unassailable). Like many things in theworld of globalization—such as capital, information, and labor—English isunevenly distributed in stratified ways that have recast but not overturnedthe old hierarchies of empire and colonialism.

My purpose is to examine the spread of English by considering twofamiliar metaphors, flow and varieties, that have been used extensively todescribe the circulation of English in the era of late imperialism. Flow andvarieties, of course, are organic figures of speech, derived from the naturalsciences, that help invest the ostensible globalization of English with acultural logic of inevitability, identified, on one hand, in terms of the flowof English, with the implacable movement of water or lava and, on theother, in the guise of new varieties of English, with evolutionary processesof variability and speciation. Language is figured problematically, in eachcase, as a natural phenomenon or a genetic population controlled by thelaws of nature rather than a resource of representation in semiotic activity.As an alternative to these naturalized and naturalistic representations ofthe spread of English, I propose to take South Africa as a kind of case studyto insert the sociolinguistic term “styling” into an analysis of what hasotherwise been seen as the global flow of English and its indigenization innational varieties. To do this, I turn, in the final section of this paper, torecent literary production in South Africa by poets Kelwyn Sole, Ike Muila,and Lesego Rampolokeng to represent the circulation of English incontemporary South Africa not as a matter of natural processes but ofartifice and linguistic agency. But first, I must say a few words about themetaphors “flow” and “varieties.”

The Problem of Flows

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The notion of flows is meant to signify, in globalization theories, thecollapse or porousness of national boundaries, the increased velocity of thecirculation of information and capital enabled by information technologies,and the reconstitution of economic and cultural activity in nodes located ina global network. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri use what has becomethe now commonsensical meaning of flows in the preface to Empire.Following decolonization and the removal of the Soviet Union as anobstacle to the capitalist world market, “The primary factors of productionand exchange—money, technology, people, and goods—move with in-creasing ease across national boundaries; hence the nation-state has lessand less power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over theeconomy” (xi). In The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells iseven more sweeping when he says “our society is constructed aroundflows”:

flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows oforganizational interaction, flows of images, sounds, and symbols.Flows are not just one element of the social organization: they arethe expression of processes dominating our economic, political, andsymbolic life. If such is the case, the material support of thedominant processes in our societies will be the ensemble of ele-ments supporting such flows, making materially possible theirarticulation in simultaneous time. (411-12)

For Castells, the “space of flows” (constituted by a “circuit of electronicimpulses,” “nodes and hubs” in networks, and the “organization of thedominant, managerial elite”) is located in a dialectical relationship to theolder “space of places” tied to actual geographical locations such as themetropolitan centers of the North—in New York, London, Brussels, andParis.

These breathtaking (and sometimes breathless) accounts of globalflows have become standard in thinking about the reconfiguration ofeconomic, political, and cultural activity in the post-1989 period. Certainly,the notion of flows, along with open borders (for capital, goods, andservicesif not necessarily for people) and a tolerant consumerist cosmopolitanism,fits neatly with the neoliberal ideologies of the free marketeers that can betraced back to the conservative restoration of the Reagan and Thatcher

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years, with the centrist triangulations of Bill Clinton and Tony Blairproviding further validation and institutionalization (Harvey). Even forcritics such as Pennycook and Arjun Appadurai, who have argued tounderstand globalization as a contradictory and uneven process operatingthrough transcultural localizations from below as much as from WTO,NAFTA, and IMF impositions from above, the notion of flows itselfremains largely intact and unquestioned.

This is why I find the work of anthropologist James Ferguson sohelpful in regard to the position of Africa in the globalized capitalism of thelate imperialist era. In Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal WorldOrder, Ferguson writes:

We have grown accustomed to a language of global “flows” inthinking about “globalization,” but flow is a peculiarly poor meta-phor for the point-to-point connectivity and networking of en-claves that confront us when we examine Africa’s experience ofglobalization. Such language literally naturalizes globalization bymaking it analogous to the natural process of flowing water. . . . Butas the contemporary African material shows so vividly, the “global”does not “flow,” thereby connecting and watering contiguousspaces; it hops instead, efficiently connecting the enclaved pointsin the network while excluding (with equal efficiency) the spacesthat lie between the points. (47)

In Ferguson’s account, “movements of capital cross national borders, butthey jump from point to point, and huge regions are left bypassed. . . .Capital is globe-hopping, not globe-covering.” In fact, there are notflows at all but rather a selective interconnection of premium places, “fromNew York to Angola’s oil fields, or from London to Ghana’s gold mines”(38), not to mention the “fortress conservation” policies of game parks inAfrica as enclaved places for tourists affluent enough to travel, “protectedwith ‘shoot-to-kill’ policies against ‘poachers’ who are often simply thelocal people who lost their land and ancestral hunting rights when theywere forcibly evicted to make way for the game park” (43).

This notion of “point-to-point connectivity” (and its subsequent by-passes) is taken up from a different but complementary angle in StephenGraham and Simon Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism; Networked Infra-structures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. For

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Graham and Marvin, the contemporary city has retreated from thegreat modernist projects of 1850 to 1960 that imagined the integration

and unification of the nation state and particularly its urban areas throughsingle standardized infrastructures and natural monopolies in roads,interstate highway systems, and water, waste, energy, and telecommuni-cation grids. Rather the “integrated ideal” of linking municipalities, regions,and whole nations has collapsed due to decaying infrastructure, the fiscalcrisis of the state, deregulation, urban sprawl, polynucleated megacities,the forces of globalization, the fear of crime and interclass contact, and apostmodern critique of urban and social planning. This has led to theunbundling of infrastructure and the privatization of formerly publicservices—and to a splintered metropolis of “secessionary networkedplaces,” such as hub airports with dedicated high speed trains to centralcity, downtown skywalks, gentrified neighborhoods, malls, business parks,museum complexes, and gated communities, all protected by CCTV andprivate security, with optic fibers connecting these highly valued localspaces and global networks.

The result is hardly the “smooth space” of Empire which Hardt andNegri describe as “defined by uncoded flows, flexibility, continual modu-lation, and tendential equalization” (327). Instead, by-passes and discon-nections are, as Graham and Marvin note, “directly embedded into thedesign of networks, both in terms of the geographies of the points they doand do not connect, and in terms of the control placed on who or what canflow over the networks” (15). This point-to-point, globe-hopping characterof capital has produced “splintering urbanism” in the form of megacitieslike Mumbai, Karachi, Mexico City, Lagos, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiros, andJohannesburg, as well as New York, Paris, Tokyo, and London, wherepremium spaces in the global economy, politics, and media are concen-trated and connected through high-speedcommunication, energy, andtransport systems, while the masses drawn from the hinterlands—the“redundant” people who are, as Castells says, “either functionally unnec-essary or socially disruptive” (404)—live in switched-off townships,favellas, and slums, disconnected and bypassed.

In a moment, I will suggest what this “splintering urbanism” holds forthe situation of English in South Africa. But before that, I want to look atthe second metaphor, varieties, to see what its examination might add to

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this consideration of flows, by-passes, and point-to-point connectivity.

The Problem of Varieties

In linguistics, the term “varieties” has been a widely used but problematicone in explaining language diversity. It is seen by many linguists, KingsleyBolton notes, as a neutral academic term to describe differences inlanguages, dialect, accent, sociolect, style, and register (290). In TheAmerican Language, for example, H.L. Mencken used the term toseparate American from British English as a distinct national variety. And,as we have seen, it has also been used, in the postcolonial period by Kachruand others, as a designation to validate new versions of English developedby non-native and non-monolingual English speakers and writers inSingapore, India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and elsewhere and torepresent their uses of English not as partially failed attempts on the partof colonials or former colonials to approximate metropolitan standards butas full-fledged Englishes in their own right, in an increasingly diverse andpolycentric Anglophone world.

My interest in the notion of varieties concerns the term’s metaphoricalproperties and how it invokes the discourse and authority of the naturalsciences, in particular Darwin’s ideas about speciation. The term “vari-ety” is a standard one in the taxonomies of the natural sciences, appearing,for example, in the International Code of Nomenclature for CultivatedPlants (at a rank below kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, and genus,as an aspect of species, just above form). Still, it is telling that, for Darwin,the idea of variety was more ambiguous, similar to species but “given toless distinct and more fluctuating forms” that signify nonetheless some-thing beyond mere individual differences, locating varieties “arbitrarily, forconvenience sake” in the space between species and individuals (108).Bolton notes the influence on Darwin of Linnaeus’s taxonomy in theSystemae Naturae of 1758, where variety (Varietas) was seen asindividual subspecies, as well as the use of the term by Linnaeus and hiscontemporary Count de Bouffon in “Varieties of the Human Species”(1749) to classify humans in early examples of scientific racism. Not onlythe term “variety,” Bolton says, but “much other linguistic terminology was

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derived from the developing natural sciences and associated race theoriesof the nineteenth century” (303) to establish the conceptual foundationsfor comparative linguistics to trace the genetic relations between lan-guages. In this regard, Bolton quotes August Schleicher’s observation in1869 that the “kinship of different languages may consequently serve, soto speak, as a paradigmatic illustration of the origin of species, for thosefields of inquiry which lack, for the present at least, any similar opportunityfor observation” (303).

A number of problems arise from this link, formed early in theknowledge-producing work to establish linguistics as a field of inquiry,between linguistics and the discourse of the natural sciences, particularlyconcerning the term “variety.” For one, Darwin’s sense of the ambiguityof the term might be seen to anticipate Bolton’s judgment that while the“concept of language variety and variation lie at the heart of the worldEnglishes enterprise” (287) and despite the widespread use of the termvariety in sociolinguistics, “in fact the label is somewhat indeterminatelyapplied in practice” (300). Second, in a broader sense, the introduction ofthe term into linguistics raises questions about the meaning of the idea oflanguage itself and how naturalized representations such as the termvariety picture language as a living organism or subspecies governed bylaws of nature rather than a social artifact that must be explained byhistorical circumstance. A third problem follows that is highly pertinent tothe global spread of English and its situation in South Africa, namely thereliance on evolutionary models, drawn from population genetics, inaccounts of language differences in English.

Salikoko S. Mufwene is perhaps the leading advocate of this ap-proach. In The Ecology ofLanguage Evolution, Mufwene argues for aview of language as species (rather than a living organism) that evolvebased on natural selection from a linguistic “feature pool” of “competingalternatives made available by the idiolects of individual speakers, whichvary among them” (just as genes do) and which share a common ancestorand, in situations of contact, interbreed and produce offspring. “There isplenty of evidence,” Mufwene says, “of speciation in language evolution,evidenced by the development of new varieties” (146), including not onlyvarieties of World Englishes but also creoles, which, importantly, Mufweneincludes in the ranks of languages (or species) that have evolved according

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to the dynamics of speciation. In fact, Mufwene says, “the namingpractices of new Englishes has more to do with the racial identities of thosewho speak them than with how those varieties developed and the extentof their structural deviations” (107).

The inclusion of creoles among languages and the critique of theirexclusion are, in my view, welcome, but there is still the problem ofvarieties and the basic question of speciation and linguistic evolution to dealwith. This comes up from a slightly different angle in Edgar W. Schneider’s“dynamic model” of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes (PCEs),perhaps a better term than World Englishes. Schneider draws heavily uponMufwene’s notion of linguistic speciation to posit a series of stages thatidentify “linguistic changes affecting the parties involved in a colonial-contact setting” and the “reconstruction of the group identities as to whoconstitutes ‘us’ or the ‘other’ by both settlers and indigenous residents ina given territory” (29). In contrast to Kachru’s concentric circles, whichmap spatially the spread of English, Schneider’s ambition is to provide adiachronic model of how PCEs have evolved into their present formsthrough five stages: 1) foundation (with the introduction of Europeanlanguages by settlers or occupiers); 2) exonormative stabilization (accord-ing to metropolitan standards); 3) nativization; 4) endonormative stabiliza-tion (according to indigenized standards); and 5) differentiation. WhilePCEs may differ considerably from place to place, Schneider claims thereis an underlying process of competition and selection from the “featurespool,” which are diffused (just as genes are) through “imperfect replica-tion” (23).

It is important to recognize that both Mufwene and Schneider areaware they are using terminology from population genetics and evolution-ary theory as analogies to explain linguistic processes. In fact, one ofMufwene’s most striking analogies, taken up by Schneider, is to castlanguages as species parasitic on their host population of human speakers.This analogy is meant to underscore the social determinants involved in theecology and speciation of language but, in its way, reveals how resortingto biological models, terminologies, and taxonomies, based on the dis-course (and carrying the authority) of science, attempts uneasily toincorporate social and linguistic activity into naturalistic conceptual frame-works, thereby investing terms such as variety with an authority and

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groundedness unavailable otherwise in the symbolic economy of aca-demic work. In this case, representing language as a parasite accords itthe status of a species, separate from its host population but dependent onit.

The establishment of a new variety of PCE, in other words, requiresworking out a relationship of mutuality between a variety of language andits host population that, as Pennycook puts it in his critique of the very ideaof national varieties, “leaves out all those other Englishes which do not fitthe paradigm of an emergent national standard” (Global Englishes 22).This is the movement designated by Schneider’s dynamic model from“nativization” to the establishment of “endonormative stabilization.” WhatSuresh Canagarajah says of Kachru may be applied equally to Mufweneand Schneider about the establishment of national varieties as parasites ona host population: in an “attempt to systematize the periphery variants, hehas to standardize the language himself, leaving out many eccentric, hybridforms of local English as too unsystematic” (180).

Now, it is reasonable to think that Mufwene and Schneider mightcomplain, saying that what is left out is due to the processes of naturalselection that guide speciation and the emergence of new varieties,enabling the establishment of a dynamic mutuality between language andhost population. That would be a fair response, I think, but one thatobscures the problem that Mufwene and Schneider have already, by wayof their models of linguistic evolution, taken for granted the appearance ofnew varieties as the called-for outcome and only available object ofinquiry.By this account of evolutionary development, the emergence of nationalvarieties of English, according to the terms of speciation, is virtuallyguaranteed in advance. To put it another way, the “differentiation” thatSchneider posits as the final stage in his dynamic model is a constant andomnipresent feature in the global circulation of English, not something thatis overcome by “endonormative stabilization,” only to reappear withlinguistic consequence once a national variety is firmly established. It isonly the teleology of Schneider’s model of language variation that wouldenable such view.

A Note on Stylization

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So, if we abandon the evolutionary drive toward national varieties ofEnglish, then what, if anything, are we left with beyond Darwin’s“fluctuating forms”? Is there any way to find patterns in the global spreadof English to replace the evolutionary metanarrative of speciation or do wefind ourselves in the face of postmodern indeterminancy and the free playof signifiers? One way to answer this question is to consider what mightcome to light by inserting the sociolinguistic term “styling” in the place thathas been occupied by the evolutionary model in linguistics, to replacemetaphorically the flow of genes and linguistic features regulated bynatural selection with the point-to-point connectivity of linguistic activity.As we will see, the notion of styling offers a particularly apt explanationof the representation, circulation, and enactment of English in post-apartheid South Africa, enabling analysis not of the differentiation of anindigenized national variety but of the dispersed and differential pathwaysthrough which English travels, point to point, in the splintered metropolis ofglobalized capitalism.

To begin, it is useful to distinguish the term “styling” from “style.” Thelatter term was conceived by William Labov and other sociolinguists tosignify intra-speaker variation as a response to the degree of formality ina situation. For example, as formality increases, so will a speaker’s use ofprestige linguistic features. Stylistic agency is limited in such cases,however, Penelope Eckert notes, to the “manipulation of status in thesocio-economic hierarchy” (456). Variation in style is the result ofdemographic categories and generalized expectations about groups andsituations, reflecting a speaker’s position in the social order. The socialoperates, in other words, “as a set of constraints on variation” (Eckert472). On the other hand, “styling” (or what Eckert calls “stylisticpractice),” is meant to assign a more performative and productive role tovariation, to see it as not simply a reflection of social categories but, in amatrix of styled behavior, constitutive, an exercise of semiotic agency thatdraws on the available resources of representation (spoken language, text,gesture, fashion, visual arts, music, and so forth), often combining them innovel or surprising or exaggerated ways, to articulate new identities,relationships, and social solidarities. In this sense styling is closer to DickHebdige’s notion of style in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, as aprocess of bricolage, “intentional communication” that samples and mixes

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semiotic elements, whose meanings are not precoded but rather activatedthrough stylistic practice.

Perhaps the most widely known studies of styling are Roger Hewitt’sWhite Talk/Black Talk about white teens in South London who take upJamaican Creole as a prestige youth language and part of inter-racialfriendships and Ben Rampton’s Crossing where groups of multiracialadolescents in a British working-class community mix their use of Creole,Punjabi and Asian English in anti-racist linguistic practices that contestracial boundaries and assert a new “de-racinated” ethnicity. Theselanguage-mixing stylings can be found as well in the Rastfani spoken bycharacters in Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth.

Though often associated with resistance to the dominant order, stylingcan also take on other orientations. This may be seen, for example, in JaneHill’s discussion of “junk” or “mock” Spanish, language crossings such asArnold Schwarzenegger’s famous “Hasta La Vista Baby” line before hewipes out a foe in Terminator or his purposeful misuse of Spanish whenhe says “No problemo.” (“No problemo” is a problem not only because thegender marking is wrong but also because it is not idiomatic among nativeSpanish speakers.) According to Hill, the intentional misuse of Spanish,exaggerated Spanish accents when speaking English, and other stylingsmeant to denigrate or mock Spanish amount to a racist strategy on the partof Anglos in the Southwest and California to distance themselves fromLatinos. In another study, “TheWhiteness of Nerds: SuperstandardEnglish and Racial Markedness,” Mary Bucholtz found that nerds in aCalifornia high school used superstandard English as a way to identifythemselves as hyperwhite and to distance themselves from AfricanAmerican influences on the youth culture of their white classmates.

In all these cases, styling is part of a rhetoric of identification anddivision, whereby individuals and groups draw upon the available meansof representation to align and distance themselves from other individualsand groups in the splintered metropolis. For rhetoricians, this is a familiarpoint about the relationship between semiotic activity and identity forma-tion. But it is also worth emphasizing how such styling operates in what JanBlommaert calls “polycentric and stratified systems in which hierarchiesof identities can be developed” (211). As is evident from the examples inthe work of Hewitt, Rampton, Hill, and Bucholtz, the semiotic means of

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identity formation come from a world system marked not just by differ-ences but, more fundamentally, by inequality. Consequently, Blommaertpoints out the “non-exchangeability of ‘values’ for particular linguisticresources across societies. For example, a good mastery of East AfricanEnglish may be valuable and a source of prestige in Nairobi, but it may bethe object of stigmatising reactions in London or New York” (211). In thislight, Spanish, which has high prestige in Latin America compared toindigenous languages, takes on a quite different, stigmatized value in thestylings of racist Anglo “mock” Spanish speakers, and the same “non-exchangeability” may be applied to the Punjabi combined by multiracialLondon youth with Creole and English, compared to the Punjabi spoken inIndia and Pakistan. The point, as Blommaert says, is that “semioticpotential is tied to places and their characteristics, and determined by theinequalities between that particular space and others” (213).

For Blommaert, there is no homogenizing flow of English that amountsto the “invasion of an imperialist or killer-language.” To be sure, inTanzania, about which Blommaert writes, as well as in South Africa,“standard, Euro-oriented English” is at the top of the linguistic statushierarchy, the “code associated with core values of capitalist ideas ofsuccess: entrepreneurship, mobility, luxury, female beauty.” And, as inSouth Africa, “the lasting prestige functions attributed to English” areoffset by “the extremely restricted access to its prestige-bearing standardvarieties” (212). Despite these limitations, English is taken up nonethelessat local levels that the circulation of standard English has bypassed. Forexample, Blommaert examines a number of signs on doors, walls, buses,and billboards in Dar es Salaam, written in eccentric English:

·“Fund rising dinner party” (on a banner)

·“Whole saller of hardwere” (on a shop)

·“Approxi Mately” (on a bus)

·“Sleping Coach” (on a long-distance bus).

According to the principle of “non-exchangeability,” the value of thesesigns in Dar es Salaam consists in how they transfer the prestige of English

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from a transnational to a local setting, offering, in Blommaert’s words,“tremendous semiotic potential for users to construct inhabitable groupidentities,” while in other places the “errors” in the signs would lead to quitedifferent ascriptions (213).

What Blommaert’s examples and analysis enable us to see is that thesheer contrivance and inventiveness of these signs appear not so much asnativizations of English but rather as stylized enactments, off the grid, inthe unequal spaces of the splintered metropolis. To understand thesemiotic activity of these signs and their work in identity formation, notionsof linguistic evolution, speciation, and varieties are not especially helpful.And yet, these instances of sign-making should not be cast, as Jane Hillsays more generally about styling, as simply transidiomatic expressions ofa “transgressive playfulness” that is “kaleidoscopic, ludic, open” (“StylingLocally,” 550-54). Rather, as Blommaert insists, the signs appear withina world systemthat depends not on the global flow of English but on theuneven and unequal distribution of linguistic resources in the globe-hopping, point-to-point circulation of English. The appearance of the signs,in other words, is the result neither of the indeterminancy of “languaging”practices nor of determinations drawn from the natural sciences. They arepatterned, structured, and determined but within the order of historicalrather than natural time.

With these thoughts in mind, I return to South Africa and anexamination of styling and identity formation in post-apartheid poetry.

Styling English in a Splintered Metropolis

In this section, I look at three contemporary poets—Kelwyn Sole, IkeMuila, and Lesego Rampolokeng—whose work enacts, in quite differentways, the situation of English in South Africa. My remarks are not meantas literary criticism but rather as an examination of the poetics—ormakings—of the Englishes that circulate in the point-to-point connectivityof globalized capitalism in the late imperialist era. I am concerned, that is,with voice but not simply in the literary sense of persona or style or as ithas been used in U.S. college composition as authenticity of expression.As Blommaert puts it, “voice in the era of globalization becomes a matter

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of the capacity to accomplish functions of linguistic resourcestranslocally, across different physical and social spaces. Voice, in otherwords, is the capacity for semiotic mobility” (69, italics in original).

I begin with a styling I call neoliberal English. This is a stylisticpractice tied to the identity formation of free marketeers who imaginethemselves operating in the corporatized “knowledge economy” of a new“information age.” You can see signs of this styling in the exchangebetween consultants from a private security company in the U.K., hiredby New Labour to assist in merging prisons and probation into one system,and Home Office officials who are civil servants from the era of oldLabour’s welfare state:

There have been awkward meetings between Home Office officialsand senior executives from the security companies. “The executivesgo in and say ‘How are you getting on with your process mapping?’and the officials just look blank. The executives tell them it’s likerunning a credit-card business; you need relational databases tomanage information about individuals, so you need organizationaldesign and data management. The Home Office don’t really knowwhat they are talking about.” (Davies 4).

Now I realize it is not customary to use the term styling in relation tosuch metropolitan discourses of expertise. I also know for many observersin U.S. college composition and elsewhere that these modes of discoursemay be judged and dismissed as the jargon-filled doublespeak of moderncorporations, government bureaucracies, and educational institutions, withOrwell and the Anglo-American plain style as warrant. Nonetheless, atthe risk of stretching the term styling beyond its breaking point, I want toargue that the neoliberal stylings seen in this encounter in the U.K.between the information age consultants and old-school functionariesoperate in what we might call the language regime of neoliberalism andglobalized capitalism. The advertisement for the graduate program,Masters in Information and Knowledge Management (MIKM) at Univer-sity of Stellenbosch in South Africa, provides evidence that this neoliberallanguage regime amounts to a transnational way of speaking.

Notice, for example, how the Stellenbosch ad, like the encounterbetween the consultants and Home Office officials, depends on a rhetoric

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of identification and division that not only distances the new knowledgeeconomy from older “[r]igid and bureaucratic ways of production” but alsostratifies the old and new by investing power, authority, precision, andeffectivity in the discourse of neoliberalism and attributing incomprehen-sion, ignorance, and obsolescence to the old ways of doing and speaking.In this regard, in terms of how neoliberal stylistic practice participates inthe production of semiotic mobility in a stratified world system, notice thatthe Centre for Knowledge Dynamics and Decision Making Web sitemarks the MIKM program as a premium place, connected to a globalnetwork “of innovators at a world-class level . . . in the E.U. and theU.S.A.” The MIKM at Stellenbosch situates its focus on the dynamics oforganisationalknowledge within the wider frame of the global knowledgeeconomy. This is significant, because it means that the MIKM does notprepare students for only functional knowledge and information manage-ment practices in organisations, but also for strategic leadership oforganisations. The MIKM is a management programme with a differ-ence—ultimately it aims at preparing managers capable of ThoughtLeadership.

Kelwyn Sole takes up the neoliberal voice of “thought leadership” in“Agamapoort Dam (in twelve steps),” which is included in his recentcollection of prose poems Land Dreaming. A number of poems in LandDreaming capture ways of speaking in contemporary South Africa (the“Gardening Tips” of a radio announcer, a tsotsi in “Respect,” a sheep dogowner in “Training My Dogs,” a black farm worker in “Stain on the Wall,”a suburbanite in “Cats and (non) Dogs”) and in this sense suggest thevariable positions and potentialities of voice in a splintered metropolis. Thepoem has no trouble speaking for itself, and I will only make the obviouspoint that Sole’s parody amounts to the recognition that a neoliberal English(or “thought leadership”) emerged in the GEAR era of privatization andstructural adjustment in South Africa by overturning and silencing the olderpopulism of the Freedom Charter and justifying its rhetorical and politicalhegemony as a canny translocalization of the supposedly irreversible tideof globalization.

Agampoort Dam (in twelve steps)

(1) It is my pleasure to inform you that African Renaissance Global

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Forum, Rural Kickstart Development Corporation and the WaterBoard have set up a partnership to identify an appropriate frame-work for the development and financing of the Agamapoort DamProject.

(2) Water has the potential to contribute substantially towardsdevelopment but like most developing economies we lack funds todevelop such resources. It is urgent that we focus on an enablingenvironment to unleash the power of the private sector, togetherwith a regulatory, legal and institutional framework that will promoteand protect investments.

(3) Irrigation from this dam is envisaged as a key to initiating bothindustrial and small business projects. Pipelined it will go a long waytowards expediting metropolitan water needs within a burgeoninginvestor-friendly profit-maximising environment, and will no doubthave an effect on local industry.

(4) No project would be complete without consultative network-ing among roleplayers. Over a two-week period last January weundertook a process that included consultants, contractors, offi-cials from local, provincial and national Government as well asselected organs of civil society. At an appropriate juncture we willengage in the public in an awareness campaign.

(5) We have appointed a former advisor to the IMF as Chair ofa Consultancy Panel of distinguished experts that includes repre-sentatives of all major stakeholders. It will work semi-autono-mously, thanks to the appended budget drawn up to be funded bythe World Bank.

(6) The Consultancy Panel will submit within six months aproposal as basis for discussion with all pertinent authorities.These discussions must provide an enabling framework by the timethe second phase gets under way.

(7) Within reasonable time constraints and given the signifi-cance of the project, an effort will be made to liaise with minorroleplayers, including those who will have their land expropriatedfor construction purposes or whose residences, villages or smallholdings may be flooded by the dam. This will be done throughappropriate authorities after an impact study.

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(8) Simultaneously a Tender Board will receive and examinetenders for all phases of construction of the Dam; includingconstruction of the temporary settlement to be built for displacedpersons and livestock. Black empowerment opportunities for entre-preneurs will be explored at all levels, while displaced persons willhave first option on per diem manual labour.

(9) We hope to balance the entitlements of various parties withthe needs of a progressive economy. We will remain cognisant ofthe Report of the World Commission on Dams released last August.However, to comply with guidelines in an overly meticulous mannerwill make development of this resource expensive and unattractiveto investors at home and abroad. In line with national policy remaximising profitability (see directive from the Minister 17-3-2003)we thus view the above guidelines as recommendatory rather thanbinding.

(10) Other fora will be set up if and when other issues of a socialand cultural nature occur (the moving of graves, environmentalconcern such as plant species loss, etc.). It is probable that the goodoffices of traditional leaders will be vital, so payment of stipends (tobe reviewed biannually) is budgeted.

(11) As the present Agama Nature Reserve will cease to existonce the dam has reached optimum volume, a new area of the damperiphery is to be proclaimed. Without losing sight of the fact thatnature is an equal shareholder in our project and animals a preciousmarket resource, this facility must conform to Government policythat conservation is only indicated where financial self-suficiencycan be achieved within five years. Innovative attractions to optimiserecreational opportunities (such as a water theme park, quad bikes,pedal boats, a paddle-steamer restaurant, bungee jumping, a putt-putt course and a gold estate) are under consideration. Operatingguidelines for mooted hunting lodges, casinos, health spas, confer-ence facilities and other vendors and concessionaries will beprovided.

(12) You will appreciate that this localised project is a showcaseand potential model for others. It follows that diligent adherence tothe steps outlined above is advised. It is high time South Africa tookits rightful place as a global actor in this sphere.

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Perhaps the most telling linguistic stylings in South Africa to challengethe flow model of English as a global lingua franca are the townshiplanguages or lingos, urban argots variously known as Tsotsitaal, Flaaitaal,and Iscamtho (sometimes spelled Isicamtho), as well as other designa-tions. These are mixed codes that, in the townships and locations aroundJohannesburg, draw on Afrikaans in the case of Tsotsitaal and Flaaitaaland on Zulu in the case of Iscamtho as the matrix language, with elementsof other languages (English, Sotho, Tswana, and so on) embedded(Makhuda), while Cape Town Tsotsitaal is Xhosa-based (Hurst). Lin-guists do not totally agree on the origins or linguistic composition of theselanguages or whether they should be treated as one or many phenomena.There is less question, however, about who speaks Tsotsitaal andIscamtho and what they signify.

The term “tsotsi” may come from the tight-fitting, narrow-bottomedpants (“stove-pipe” trousers) favored by hip black urban youth in the 1940sor it may be a corruption of the American term “zoot suits” (Nixon;Molamu). In any case, the term “tsotsi” (along with “flaai”) signifies beingstreet-smart and city-wise, slick and urbane, with associations to con men,hustlers, hipsters, and urban gangs. (The term “taal” is Afrikaans forlanguage or tongue.) As Ellen Hurst suggests, it is useful to think ofTsotsitaal as a “stylect,” to link its distinctive lexicon (‘lect) to such extra-linguistic style markers as clothing, gesture, and music (from the jazz ofSophiatown and the Drum era of the 1950s to the Iscamtho-inspiredkwaito of Brenda Fassie, Bongo Maffin, and others in present-daySoweto). While Tsotsitaal may have originally been spoken mainly byyoung men participating in urban sub-cultures (and certainly retains strongsub-cultural identification), like Iscamtho, it can at times function as alingua franca and even home language in townships of mixed-languageresidents. And, as Dumisani Krushchev Ntsangase notes, Iscamtho hasbeen taken up in advertising, entertainment, and the media as a signifier ofhip urban life in contemporary South Africa.

For our purposes, there are two important things to say about thestylings of township languages as a challenge to the global flows model.First, unlike the English-based creoles of West Africa and the New World,these ways of speaking are not based on European languages. Rather,

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English, as a restricted linguistic resource, circulates in highly selectiveappropriations,providing further evidence of the point-to-point travels andby-passes of English in a splintered metropolis. Second, the improvised andinventive character of Tsotsitaal and Iscamtho, as largely unwrittenlanguages, resists the very idea of linguistic systematicity that has guidedthinking about speciation and national varieties. As many commentatorshave noted, the stylings of township languages are socially structured butopen-ended and always changing. For this reason, Allan Kolski Horwitzemphasizes the importance of translation, not to standardize Iscamtho butto keep a record of its enactments in historical time (qtd. in Berold 122),where words take on meaning according to the moment of their perfor-mance instead of their position in a linguistic system.

Ike Muila is perhaps the best-known South African poet to write inIscamtho. Here is a sample of his work, the first half of “Bottle KopShova,” followed by a translation:

Bottle Kop Shova

bottle kop shovaspinkane outfit barsdisturbance – woza – woza meet eyewholesaler rap strictly casual dakota fluitsnuff box phasane tennis shoe shine khakimuddy plastic hot hit mateki smelling socksharrow ruik for bidden fox thoasa pepethiza ntanjane file reading google sgelekopa dungarees goal keeper fenceziya mporoma kabo maseven for lifetbetsa spy kos gimba captaindie ander kant baya chuchurumbisabottle kop shovaboere wurs en tea bone steak braai. . . .

Bottle Neck Pusher

bottle neck pusherlocust out fit burstdisturbing attraction meet the eye

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wholesaler rap strictly casual dakota whistlesnuff box sandals tennis shoe shine khakimuddy plastic hot hit rubber shoe smelling socksharrow scent forbidden fox are you aware pepeteachers rope file reading goggle at schoolcopy dungarees goal keepers fenceits happening good time at seven for lifes placetry spy food glutten captainon the other side they are roastingbottle neck pushersausage and tea bone steak fry. . . .

By fracturing or dismissing syntax and conventional grammaticalconstructions as the substructure of poetic utterance, Muila releaseswords and phrases to mark them as circulating signifiers in the recombi-nant code-mixing of Iscamtho’s linguistic performances and to emphasizetheir sound, rhythm, weight, and texture. Like the guerrilla electricians whotap into power lines that bypass townships on their way, point-to-point,from generating plants to premium places in the splintered metropolis,Muila’s poems hijack shards of English to embedthem in Iscamtho.Furthermore, the sheer difficulty, for non-Iscamtho speakers, of decodingMuila’s linguistic assemblages, underscores the status of Iscamtho aswhat Halliday calls an “anti-language” of insiders and an “anti-society”which uses township language as a voice to prevent comprehension on thepart of outsiders, as a means of dealing with social inequality (qtd. inMakhuda 402). It is not accidental in this regard that township lingos suchas Flaaitaal, Shalambombo, and Iscamtho became the lingua franca ofprison gangs (Ntshangase 409).

The final example of poetry in post-apartheid South Africa comesfrom Lesego Rampolokeng and, as what I will call a post-liberationstyling of English, poses an acute and astute challenge to the language-nation equation invoked by the very idea of an indigenized English ofliterary production evident in such writers as Raja Rao and ChinuaAchebe, whose works have been taken up by Kachru and others asinstances of the nativization of English. Achebe makes the classic case forAfricanizing English in “The African Writer and the English Language”when he identifies a key passage from his novel Arrows of God, where

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the chief priest talks to one of his sons about going to Christian church:

I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eyes there.If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is somethingin it you will bring back home my share.

The world is like a Mask, dancing. If you want to see it well youdo not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do notbefriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomor-row.

Next Achebe compares this passage to what it might sound like inmetropolitan English:I am sending you as my representative among these people—just to be onthe safe side in case the new religion develops. One has to move with thetimes or else on is left behind. I have a hunch that those who fail to cometo terms with the white man may well regret their lack of foresight.The point for Achebe is that to “carry the full weight of my Africanexperience,” there will “have to be a new English, still in full communionwith its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings”(433-34).

It is easy enough to see here Kachru’s Outer Circle or Schneider’sevolutionary stage of “nativization” at work, but if we move, as I haveurged, from the natural time of the speciation of English into nationalvarieties to historical moments, we can transfer Achebe’s manifesto foran Africanized English to its proper place in the Third World nationalismof the Bandung conference of non-aligned nations in 1955 and the Tri-Continental congresses of the 1960s, where writers are figured as thevoice of the people. Delayed somewhat, due to the particularities of theSouth African situation, poets and writers emerged in the anti-apartheidmovement (in many respects the last great battle in the postwar strugglefor national liberation) as an important cultural force in the 1980s, oftendrawing upon the oral performative tradition of izibongo, or praise poetry,at demonstrations, rallies, and funerals.1

Rampolokeng acknowledges the importance and influence of thisperformative tradition and of poems such as Ingoapele Madingoane’s“Africa My Beginning” in the liberation struggle. “The 80s situation had

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to be,” Rampolokeng says. “It was essential.” Nonetheless, he alsodescribes the role of struggle poetry as the “bring-on-the-poet-to-lick-the-stage-clean-for-the-politicians thing” and the summoning of ancestors asa “hustle”: “Imagine having to negotiate with your forefathers to takepossession of your tongue at exactly a quarter past eight, when you’re dueon stage. Those guys didn’t have any watches, man!” (qtd. in Berold 138).From a post-liberation perspective, confronting what Achille Mbembecalls the “banality of power” in the postcolony, Rampolokeng rejects therole of the poet as bard who speaks on behalf of (and calls into being) anation, registering the disillusions produced by identifying liberation withthe nationalist project of an “imagined community.” In “The RampsterComes Straight,” he says “it’s another struggle stage/bungle next agesame page” (111). In this sense, Rampolokeng echos the post-liberationsensibility of the Zimbabwe writer Dambudzo Marechera, “If you are awriter for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you” (qtd. in Berold41).

By rejecting the voice of the ancestors as the grounds of poeticutterance, Rampolokeng links voice not to nativization or Africanization ofEnglish but to its means of production (“I think in ink”) and to themediations of the African diaspora that appear in the recordings of LintonKwesi Johnson, Jamaican dub artists, the Last Poets, Fela Kuti, JamesBrown, Parliament-Funkadelic, Public Enemy, and Gil Scott-Heron. ForRampolokeng, the affiliations of voice cannot be separated from themediated global circulation of English: “the revolutionary’s now a pseudo-psychopath on the compact-disked warpath” (54). In his poem “To GilScott-Heron,” Rampolokeng registers the post-liberation disillusion of“garvey’s children & the spawn of Fanon,” for now, in post-apartheidSouth Africa (“a computerised nation”), “the revolution is on television”:

RUN NIGGER RUN was inspiration injectionof the LAST POET’S intonation insurrectiongil scott-heron was suckled ona mouth-to-brain respiration rot’s subversionliberation doctrine brought art to the fightfor immunization against the degenerationof garvey’s children & the spawn of fanonon the run from the super-duper shit man

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now life’s an acquisitionthe unborn have to make requisitionthe terror campaign’s gone electronicin the bionic generation a computerised nationthat won’t falter at the altar of self-immolationsatan collaboration spiritual contaminationlike experimentation with exterminationgil scott-heron the revolution is on television (51)

For Rampolokeng, “the revolution’s pantomime is broadcast/in an audio-visual bomb-blast,” and his advice is “switch off that shit” (52)—not in thename of the immediacy of voice in poetic performance but rather to deployelectronic media in spoken word performance with the Kalahari Surfersand other musicians to capture the soundscape of gunfire and digitalsignals and the contradictory realities of contemporary South Africa in hip-hop-accented rhyme.

The stylings of English we’ve seen in the three poets have in common aconsciousness of language and its associated style markers as semioticresources of identity formation. I have recruited them to the cause of thispaper as evidence of linguistic inventiveness and the artifactuality oflanguage. Each poet, in quite different ways, is working to denaturalizeEnglish, to delink it from any essential belongingness to national, class, orethnic identities and to reveal it instead, in its point-to-point circulation inthe splintered metropolis, as a resource of representation taken up underparticular historical circumstances to articulate identities as made things.In this sense, their poetic practice can help us see beyond the organicmetaphors, such as flow and varieties, that have shaped thinking aboutlanguage in the postcolonial era.

Too often, advocates of multilingualism draw on such natural meta-phors to describe minority languages as “endangered species,” threatenedby the global spread of English, and to argue for linguistic diversity on thesame grounds environmentalists argue for the importance of naturaldiversity in biological sustainability. This has led to the idea that languagesare life forms that have rights. My view is that people, not languages, haverights and that a better argument for the maintenance of linguistic diversityand the value of multilingualism can be made by starting not with images

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of ecological catastrophe and threatened language/species but insteadwith the problem of social inequality in the era of globalized capitalism.2

Notes

1. See, for example, the worker poets Alfred Temba Qabala, Mi S’DumoHlatshwayo, and Nise Malange in Black Mamba Rising, as well as Sole’s review“New Words Rising” and article “Oral Performance and Social Struggle inContemporary South African Literature.”

2. I wish to thank Rochelle Kapp, Lucia Thesen, and Ellen Hurst for helpfulcomments on an earlier draft; Kelwyn Sole for guidance on South African poetry;and Karen Press for the “splintered metropolis” and general inspiration.

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