South Africa unease plays out on campus

Three young women, immaculately dressed for a day in the office rather than an afternoon on campus, chat and laugh during a break from class. It has been a testing few months. Like a number of other students across South Africa, they have seen their university thrust into the headlines.

Plans to drop Afrikaans as a teaching language have prompted protests

Statues have been torn down, fights with an ugly racial hue have broken out during "varsity" sports events, and well-rehearsed debates about race and segregation have pushed their way back on to the national agenda. All this when they have been trying to sit exams.

The language the young women seem most comfortable chatting in, Afrikaans, has found itself back in the spotlight. The women speaking it are "coloured", mixed race, and from a group who increasingly make up the bulk of Afrikaans speakers - 13% of the population now claim it as their first language. 


South Africa's top six mother-tongue languages:

• Zulu: 22.7%, Xhosa: 16%, Afrikaans: 13.5%, English: 9.6%, Setswana: 8%, Sesotho: 7.6%
• South Africa has 11 official languages altogether
• English is the most commonly spoken language used officially and in business

Geraldine Meyers laughs and gives up trying to trace her ancestry for me - she finds it ridiculous that South Africa still defines everything in terms of race.
But it is a stubborn vestige of South Africa's troubled past, and it exudes from every pore, even if it is not always spoken about.