I don’t recall - I certainly don’t see Arabic as an African language, but AFAIK North Africans are mostly descended from indigenous people, like Berbers or Egyptians, who converted to Islam, so are as African as any Zulu.
Europese or Europeër depending on if adj or noun. Which I’ve also seen in apartheid-era signs, but yes, mostly it’s “blankes” vs “nie-blankes” - possibly because the “Afrikaanse” for “African” would just get confusing 
I know a very nice gentleman who came here from S.A. - after he got his citizenship he joked that he is “African American”. it was obviously a joke, and no one seemed to take offense.
I don’t think we are going to find the holy grail of defining ethnic identity because ethnic identity is extremely complex and means different things to different people basically everywhere you go. People are never going to fit neatly into universally consistent “native/not-native” slots, because these categories aren’t particularly natural ones.
All we can really do is think of the social reality of ethnic identity, which is again complicated by the fact that a lot of the social reality was dreamed up by people who saw the world through a lens of now-discredited racial pseudo-science.
Trying to come up with clear definitions that will apply neatly everywhere is a lost cause.
Fair enough. I mean, I think there are contexts in which the ‘Thabo Mbeki “I am an African”’ sense of the word is appropriate. But I wouldn’t argue with your approach in general.
I also wouldn’t quibble with the description of white SAns as “European” in the same sense that Indian SAns are described as “Asian”. However I do take issue when it is used in a delegitimising, “go back to Europe where you came from” kind of way.
How old are the folks you know? I’m wondering if it’s a generational thing. As I said my friends (mid 20s to early 30s) think of themselves as South Africans with a convenient EU passport, but I get the impression that their parents identify much more strongly as Italian or Portuguese or whatever.
If I have my apartheid history right, the terminology shifted from “native” to “Bantu” and from “European” to “white” around the early 60s, and then from “Bantu” to “black” around the late 70s.
Forget White SAs. There’s a whole slew of non-black North Africans who don’t claim to be African-American if they move to the US. Hows about we get ourselves all butthurt about that???
I had a white coworker argue with me that our Ghanaian coworker was the only “true” African American in the building. The idea that the guy might actually self-identify as “Ghanaian American” never occurred to her.
It is a language that has been in Africa for a thousand years. I do not see why it is not ‘African.’
The heritage is without any doubt mixed, There were the Banu Hillal tribal migrations who brought numbers.
I see no reason that they are not African. Backwards applying the concerns of the 19-20 century to other periods does not make sense to me.
[quote[Europese or Europeër depending on if adj or noun. Which I’ve also seen in apartheid-era signs, but yes, mostly it’s “blankes” vs “nie-blankes” - possibly because the “Afrikaanse” for “African” would just get confusing :)[/QUOTE]
the point is there is a difference there on the afrikaans side that is not mere translation I think.
As would I
30-40(-ish)
Oh, no, it’s certainly not as strong as it is in their parents, but it’s there. Of course, I hang out with a particularly Eurocentric bunch, given my involvement in the SCA.
The shift from “European” to “White” happened from the 60s but there were still signs using "European in as late as around 1980, I know, I saw them. This would be in Jo’burg, not Cape Town.
Because it’s an introduced language - Arabic is Asian, French is European - that millions of Africans speak both doesn’t make them “African languages” “Languages spoken in Africa”, sure, but that’s not the same thing.
Neither do I.
Obviously, there’s a continuum, and the more distant the migration, the better the claim to being naturalized to a place. So I’m not going to go around claiming Germans aren’t Europeans because their culture distantly originates in the Asian steppes (or wherever the IndoEuropean Urheimat is). That would be absurd. But it would be equally absurd to consider people who actively despised the label “African” as being African.
I don’t think so. It’s not like the signs were separately written up by an English white person and an Afrikaans white person - one person wrote the text, most probably a White Afrikaner, and that person saw European and Blanke as equivalent.
It is Afro-asiatic and has its common ancestor with berber in NE Africa.
‘Introduced’ is a silly idea for a language present in the continent for a thousand years, spoken natively in dialect forms by the majorities in all the North African countries (replacing its cousin berber langauges and egyptian).
my primary dialect in Arabic is not even intelligible easily with the asian arabes, from so many berber features absorbed.
,
French is a quite recent import, yes, and it is not really the mother language of any but a small minority.
The general rejection of the African label by the white south africans is the best explanation, not the ideas of introduction.
I have danced around this semantic “African-American” bush enough times to get weary of it. Some of it is grammar, some is logic, and not a little of it is thinly veiled racism. If you enjoy the dance, have fun. I’m told some people like to Morris Dance.
And the Indo-European languages have a common ancestor somewhere outside Europe, doesn’t make the European ones not European.
Nevertheless - the language originated outside Africa.
And Afrikaans isn’t easily intelligible to Dutch speakers, either. Doesn’t really make it not a Dutch offshoot.
That small minority still represents several million speakers of French as a first language. Lots more than many African languages. So why discount French? And if time since introduction is a factor (as opposed to actual locus of origin) consider Afrikaans has only really been a recognized language of its own since 1925.
I think they both have importance - there are valid reasons, IMO, for not legitimizing colonial hegemony (such as the Dutch/Boer states) by nativizing it. Marking it as “Other” serves as a reminder of its origins outside the colonized area & gives the lie to the neocolonial whitewashing idea of geopolitical homogeneity. Accurate naming of a thing, the stark reveal of origins, is an act of resistance to any colonialist revisionist claims of having had legitimate authority to conquer - highlighting the alien origins of invader cultures serves as constant reminders of what happened, so that it not be allowed to happen again.
and bantu originated outside of the southern AFrica.
And?
It is mere historical accident to freeze the analysis.
So, it is South African politics, not any objective standard of analysis.
the discussion is sterile then, your standard is a political position.
My husband is a white South African, and we are currently living in Europe, but ultimately plan to live (and have lived for a few years) in the US, where I’m from. He would not, even as a joke, call himself African-American.
He has spoken, often, of how the unusual political situation in SA meant that he never felt as if he belonged as a citizen, member, however you wish to term it, of the nation of South Africa. He was born in 1984, so his dislocation is not based on active participation in, or resistance to, apartheid. His family background is somewhat unusual – though he was raised English-speaking, his mother was raised bilingual Afrikaans-English, and father’s parents were German immigrants who fled the Third Reich. Needless to say, this meant that even within ‘English’ communities in SA, he didn’t feel a part of any given group.
He has spoken many times of how he has felt more at home in the USA than he did in his country of birth, or either of the other places we’ve lived (UK and Germany). Part of that, I think, is the diversity of the US is familiar, but he is not overwhelmed with crushing guilt by his very existence there.
And if asked, I’d characterize the Bantu languages as West-Central African in origin.
It’s not freezing the analysis, it’s highlighting the origination
All positions are political positions.
no it is freezing the analysis in a point in time based on a frozen moment for a political reason.
Your type of thinking is not that different than the Europeans who refuse the integration of the Maghrebine origin - really the logic does not look very different to me.
no they are not, but I understand you are a neo marxist so you would believe such things as truths so there is no point in discussing.
All reasons are political reasons. And no, going back to origins isn’t freezing a point in time - like I said, doesn’t matter if it’s 1000 years or 90, what matters is provenance.
I have no problem with integration - I consider Afrikaners fully integrated South Africans.
I’m not a Neo-Marxist or any flavour of Marxist.