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This Week 100 Years Ago: Headlines from 05 9, 2025

Looking Back a Century

Welcome to another edition of This Week 100 Years Ago, where we roll the clock back exactly one century to see what was making headlines. It’s 9 May 1925: flapper fashion is in full swing, radios buzz in living-room cabinets, and Model-T Fords still rule the roads. Yet far beyond the Charleston and jazz clubs, a linguistic revolution is stirring at the southern tip of Africa.

Afrikaans Steps Onto the Official Stage (9 May 1925)

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On this day, the Parliament of the Union of South Africa passed the Official Languages Act No. 8 of 1925, formally recognising Afrikaans as an official language and—crucially—replacing Dutch in that capacity.

What Happened

  • Parliamentary Vote in Cape Town: Lawmakers, many descended from both British settlers and Boer republics, debated whether the Dutch that had evolved locally into Afrikaans deserved its own legal status.
  • Victory for Language Advocates: Years of campaigning by writers such as C.J. Langenhoven bore fruit. Langenhoven famously drafted the motion that clinched the vote, arguing that Afrikaans better reflected the speech of everyday South Africans than archaic European Dutch.
  • Cultural Ripple: Newspapers from Johannesburg to rural dorpies celebrated—or lamented—what they called ‘taaldag’ (language day). Schools planned to switch textbooks, civil-service forms were hurriedly re-printed, and poets toasted in Cape wine.

Why It Mattered

This single act accelerated Afrikaans literature, radio broadcasting, and ultimately politics. Within a generation it would become a pillar of national identity—sometimes proudly, sometimes controversially—during the complex decades of South African history that followed.

2025 Side-Glance

  • Multilingual Momentum: A hundred years later, South Africa recognises eleven official languages; Afrikaans now coexists with isiZulu, Sesotho, and many more.
  • Tech & Translation: In 2025, AI live-captioning makes parliamentary debates instantly available in every official language—an accessibility dream the 1925 MPs could scarcely imagine.
  • Cultural Revival: Younger South Africans mix Afrikaans with English and isiXhosa in music genres like Afrikaans hip hop—proof that language never sits still.