Our neighbor and friend was a serviceman working at Stanford’s service station, a very well known garage in Kimberley. Our children and theirs were of a similar age and we often visited with them. I always had my car serviced at Stanford’s, and usually asked for Bing to do the work. In time the city wanted the site and the Stanford brothers sold the business and retired. At that time Bing and another serviceman set up a new business which became the Volvo dealership and service station of Kimberley. Of course I did not drive a Volvo, but I continued to go to Bing for any automobile work to be done, and years later when I went near Kimberley I always stopped to greet them.
Bing once related something that had happened to him. Since he was so well thought of people came to him, even from the adjoining province to have him service their vehicles. We would say “state.” This “boer” (farmer) was a very emphatic that he must be addressed in his own language, demanding that Bing speak Afrikaans with him. Often such persons would simply turn and walk away if one spoke English, but of course Bing knew Afrikaans; in fact he knew the latest technical terms for everything about a car. But, because he was not impressed with this clearly uneducated man’s demands, he said certainly he would use Afrikaans. However the Afrikaans language, not having words for so many technical things, has new words that have been have been created as they were needed. Some are very new. Bing used all the very latest words knew very well that his customer had not the faintest idea what he was saying. As expected the gentleman soon stopped him and said, “It’s all right, I understand English. Use English, please.”
At that time, I was printing quite a lot of Bible study materials, from translations, into Afrikaans. As everything printed in South Africa at the time had to carry an ISBN number and copies had to be provided to the State Libraries of Record. My name became known as a publisher in Afrikaans. I was amazed to open my mail one day to find a gold embossed invitation to attend the opening of an Afrikaans Cultural Museum in Bloemfontein. The featured speaker was to be the State President, and most of the members of parliament had been invited, of course. As I knew I would be like a fish out of water and would not understand much of what was happening, I thought it best to decline attending. The event was being held at Bloemfontein, the former capital of the old Afrikaans Republic, a hundred miles away. Incidentally, South Africa really has three capitals. The capital building and some departments are in Pretoria, Bloemfontein is the Judicial Capital, that is where the Supreme Count convenes, and Cape Town is the home of Parliament. Interestingly, Pretoria and Bloemfontein are in Afrikaans speaking areas, while Cape Town is considered to be English speaking, but has a very pronounced accent all it’s own.
South Africa has ten official languages, plus several more that are not considered to be official. It was when we were able to publish booklets and tracts, working from translations, in all ten of those languages that the demand really blossomed. There were not just thousands, but actually hundreds of thousands of requests, and from all over Africa. We were forced out of mailing free correspondence Bible lessons, when sanctions, closed areas to mail service, postage rates soared, and an acute shortage of staff forced us to change our distribution methods. We retreated to working from a located shop and area, and to stop promoting outside of South Africa. Things may now be changing, for as Greek was the world language at the onset of the church, English seems to be becoming the same in today’s world. Still, there is nothing like addressing a man in his own home language. He may be comptent in English, but he still loves his own home language.
Thinking of that, when the schools opened to all races and languages teahers were shocked to be told that when many of their potential students noted on their application forms that they were English speaking, even though they could only speak an African language. Chaos reigned when class sizes jumped, in the original rooms, from twenty or so to forty or more, speaking a number of different languages, and half of them could hardly understand a word of the teacher’s language. To add to the chaos, many Afrikaans speaking teachers, themselves not speaking English well, were teaching advanced classes in English grammar. The result was that the teacher used such terms as, “We is all going,” or “borrow me your pencil.” Those two illustrations actually were common in our own children’s own classes even when schools were still segregated.
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