Heritage Day: poet celebrates Kaaps dictionary

Gaireyah Fredericks spoke at the Iziko Bo-kaap museum on Thursday. Photos: Ashraf Hendricks

“One cannot complete one’s identity without language,” says award-winning author and poet Gaireyah Fredericks. She was speaking about the rich history of Kaaps at the Iziko Bo-Kaap museum’s Heritage Day event on Thursday.

Kaaps is a unique vernacular with roots that go as far back as the 1500s and developed over the years through contact between Khoi and San people, enslaved people and settlers. It is closely tied to Afrikaans but distinct.

Fredericks is a Kaaps advocate and translator, and contributed to the Kaaps Woriboek – the first-ever Kaaps dictionary released earlier this year.

It is trilingual: Kaaps, Afrikaans and English. The project was led by UWC linguist Professor Quentin Williams.

The dictionary formalises the language and codifies the standard spelling of Kaaps words, roots and grammatical rules.

Fredericks said one of her favourite Kaaps phrases is “ma se kind”, which is an endearing phrase meaning “mother’s child”.

“Anyone can be a ma se kind,” she said. It means “you are now my brother, you are now my sister.”

She read her poem “Kaaps is Hollands”, which describes the reclamation of the language Kaaps. She describes how Kaaps has historically been seen as a “dumb language” or something spoken by people of a “low class”.

She says the first time she saw the word “djy” in a poem by Kaaps pioneer and writer Adam Small. When she said it aloud, she felt she had become connected to her ancestors again.

“That’s the day where I became a we, where I became a whole community,” she says.

For the first time, the word “djy” now appears in a dictionary.

Fredericks spoke of the importance of formalising the language for the next generations. “It is a necessary act for us as a country, as a people, as a community, so that the youngsters that are born now, they are truly born free,” she says.

She was inspired by several writers who wrote in Kaaps, but they all had their own spelling system. “Now we have one spelling system”, she says about the dictionary.

“I have to secure everyone else after me to be able to look and see on paper their audio-language in the flesh, and they experience that bliss, that identity that comes with it, that representation, that validation. All those beautiful things that we never had,” she says.

Video: Ashraf Hendricks

All Iziko museums and galleries offered free entry on Heritage Day, including the Bo-Kaap museum.

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