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30 May 2018 | Story Rulanzen Martin | Photo Rulanzen Martin
Future of MT Steyn statue discussed-Prof Johann Rossouw and Dr Luvuyo Dondolo
Prof Johann Rossouw and Dr Luvuyo Dondolo were also on the panel.
The Faculty of the Humanities hosted a panel discussion on the future of the MT Steyn statue on the Bloemfontein Campus of the University of the Free State (UFS). Panellists who came from diverse backgrounds with opposing viewpoints discussed the current position of the statue in front of the Main Building on the campus.

Panellists included academics, student leaders and activists as well as government representatives. They were, Prof Johann Rossouw from the UFS Department of Philosophy; Asive Dlanjwa, SRC president; Mohama Dipolo and Jani Swart, both UFS postgraduate students; Prof Matie Hoffman from the Department of Physics; Mr Ben Mazinga from the South African Heritage Resource Agency(SAHRA); Kelebohile Palane, a UFS student; and Dr Luvuyo Dondolo.

A special task team made a submission to the Free State Heritage Resources Authority (FSHRA). They proposed three options   to cover the statue, fence it, as well use it as a point of engagement. The FSHRA proposed that the statue become a point of engagement. “That is why the Faculty of Humanities decided to host the panel discussion. We are Humanities and we have to talk about it,” said Prof Heidi Hudson, Dean of the faculty. 

The panel discussion took place on 29 May 2018 and was facilitated by Mr Willem Ellis, research fellow at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies.


An old conversation on future of the Steyn statue
The first speaker, Dr Dondolo, said MT Steyn was a symbol of Afrikaner nationalism. “The values Steyn represents and the values of the UFS and South Africa do not correlate,” he said. Prof Rossouw added that the Steyn statue stood in the way of healing and transformation. 

SRC president Dlanjwa said conversations regarding the statue had started back in 2015 and it was not a new discussion on its future.  

“We are covering the statue because it is a subject under discussion but we have unfortunately lost that battle,” he said. He added: “The removal of the statue has nothing to do with purging a particular section of society. It has everything to do with recognising the existence and humanity of the people that share the space of the UFS.” 

Dipolo said: “We must move away from historical figures to something non-offensive.” This was a step to transform public spaces. 

Mr Mazinga said there had to be an alternative perspective regarding the debate. “It shouldn’t necessarily be about removing, but to also speak to an alternative past.” It was important to transform public spaces as there was an over-representation of one group from the past, he said.

News Archive

Code-switching, tokenism and consumerism in print advertising
2014-10-27

Code-switching, linguistic tokenism and modern consumerism in contemporary South African print advertising. This is the current research focus of two lecturers from the Faculty of the Humanities at the UFS, Prof Angelique van Niekerk and Dr Thinus Conradie.

The act of switching between two or more languages is replete with socio-cultural meaning, and can be deployed to advance numerous communicative strategies, including attempts at signalling cultural familiarity and group affiliation (Chung 2006).

For advertising purposes, Fairclough’s (1989) seminal work on the ideological functions of language remark on the usefulness of code-switching as a means of fostering an advertiser-audience relationship that is conducive to persuasion. In advertising, code-switching is a valuable means with which a brand may be invested with a range of positive associations. In English-dominated media, these associations derive from pre-existing connotations that target audiences already hold for a particular (non-English) language. Where exclusivity and taste, for example, are associated with a particular European language (such as French), advertising may use this languages to invest the advertised brand with a sense of exclusivity and taste.

In addition, empirical experiments with sample audiences (in the field of consumer research) suggest that switching from English to the first language of the target audience, is liable to yield positive results in terms of purchase intentions (Bishop and Peterson 2011). This effect is enhanced under the influence of modern consumerism, in which consumption is linked to the performance of identity and ‘[b]rands are more than just products; they are statements of affiliation and belonging’ (Ngwenya 2011, 2; cf. Nuttall 2004; Jones 2013).

In South African print magazines, where the hegemony of English remains largely uncontested, incorporating components of indigenous languages and Afrikaans may similarly be exploited for commercial ends. Our analysis suggests that the most prevalent form of code-switching from English to indigenous South African languages represents what we have coded as linguistic tokenism. That is, in comparison with the more expansive use of both Afrikaans and foreign languages (such as French), code-switching is used in a more limited manner, and mainly to presuppose community and solidarity with first-language speakers of indigenous languages. In cases of English-to-Afrikaans code-switching, our findings echo the trends observed for languages such as French and German. That is, the language is exploited for pre-existing associations. However, in contrast with French (often associated with prestige) and German (often associated with technical precision), Afrikaans is used to invoke cultural stereotypes, notably a self-satirical celebration of Afrikaner backwardness and/or lack of refinement that is often interpolated with hyper-masculinity.

References


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