Marketing and Communication
PanSALB had a few opportunities to get learners to reflect on the ’76 Soweto Uprisings. We were invited by the Office of the Institutions Supporting Democracy to set up exhibitions in Parliament on 8 June and join the Youth Parliament on 15 June at the Gauteng Provincial Legislature. Then, of course, there was the main commemoration on 16 June, where President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered the main speech on 16 June in Johannesburg, FNB Stadium.
Youth Month is usually a great time for communities to step back and think about the languages we use in schools and whether incorporating more indigenous African languages could actually help fix some of the struggles in our education system. It is on this basis that our goal with the outreach was basically to show that indigenous African languages aren’t “secondary” to European ones; they deserve the same respect and opportunities. We spent time showing off various spelling and orthography rules and dictionaries to make the point. The English-Setswana Maths and Natural Science bilingual dictionary was a huge hit! It was cool seeing learners realise there is a maths lexicon and grammar in an indigenous language. Considering that we were targeting youth, we thought it made sense to discourage them from mimicking South African Sign Language for views as part of the wider promotion of linguistic human rights.
That said, chatting with people at our stall made one thing pretty obvious: we have a long way to go before mother-tongue education is no longer stigmatised.
