Saamboerou, this is all fascinating stuff. Any sources that you could share? You seem to be coming in on it from a musical angle, so any history or music-history sources?

I met some Indonesian writers a few years ago in Den Haag, and also jumped and gasped when I recognised some ‘Malayo’ words when they were speaking among each other. It was a bit weird – mostly incomprehensible to me, with two or three words that I recognised. I think one was the good old ‘baie’.

That came out wrong. I meant, spoken by all of the poor who shared economic conditions and geographical space with slaves and freed slaves. I.e. a mixed group of people, black and white, but all poor and mixing it up, and speaking the same tongue.

I also remember reading somewhere that the original meaning of ‘Malay’ was primarily linguistic and referred to the mixed group of people (slaves of varying origins and different religious persuasion) speaking a language known as ‘Malay’. I.e. ‘Malay’ didn’t mean ‘Muslims of a certain ethnicity who make nice food’. So it could be that the language was from South East Asia, but now spoken by all who shared the economic and geographical situation at the Cape (slaves, the poor, black, white, etc). Or it could be that it was already mixing it up with Dutch; a kind of Dutch-Malayo pidgin, again spoken by slaves and the poor, and distinct already from Dutch and Malayo (I don’t have dates, sorry; so can’t think about the when and where wrt slaves and freemen).

As to informal, daily, narrative use vs formal, ‘high’ use: it’s difficult to think in these terms because, from my experience, there was little distinction in informal-formal modes of language in mosque or madressa when I was a kid. While in Arabic there may be such distinctions in Arabic speaking countries, in South Africa, the majority of Muslims do not know Arabic (Muslims typically can parrot Arabic (read and mouth it), but not know what they are saying). So I imagine the scenario must have been: the imam or khalifa can speak and write Arabic, the lay audience can read Arabic (i.e. read the letters that make the sounds), but they speak Afrikaans. But there’s no orthography for Afrikaans. Khalifa comes up with a solution: Afrikaans with Arabic letters.

These manuals of instruction also would not necessarily be in complex theology, but more about guidelines to ethical and practical behaviour. I’m reconstructing backwards from my own memory reading such literature as a kid in madressa, but I don’t doubt that my contemporary experience preserves the genealogy well. It is well known that SA Muslims are theologically conservative and in a place like Paarl, my hometown, even more so. Templates that were laid down centuries ago endure. Imams when I was a kid, for instance, never wrote their own sermons, but read sermons (and then translated them) from 18th, possibly 17th century (and possibly even earlier) anthologised sermons from Saudia Arabia! Practice and educational material in madressah may well then still follow what was going on back in the early days of Afrikaans.

So all in all I don’t think there would have been a divide between the levels of language in everyday use and in religious instruction. Remember also that this is about the early days of Afrikaans, a language developing in any case at a substrate of society. There’s no codification, so no rules to distinguish between ‘low’ use and ‘high’ use. Those khalifas were really the voortrekkers.

Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners of course couldn’t pay attention to them in the GRA’s late-1700s anti-Dutch activism in starting such codification – they couldn’t read Arabic, and besides, those books would have been guarded jealously.

I really should get those books left by my father and have an Arabic scholar look at them…

Samboerou, it’s not about negation or eclipsing the role of X or Y; it’s not to say that ‘without Afrika there is no Afrikaans’. It’s just a matter of history. Afrikaans was being spoken at point A, whatever its origins (but I take that as read; even the Taalmonument – opened on the centenary of the establishment of Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners – acknowledges the influence of African languages, for instance), but Afrikaans had not appeared in any WRITTEN form until point B. That point B is then the earliest EVIDENCE of its written form, which happens to be in Arabic, and which is interesting given the way that the later cultural history of the language was twinned with purist Afrikaner identity.