On the weekend I met a white South African man from Durban who has been living in NZ for the last 10 years, I enjoyed talking about my experiences working in Cape Town in 1996 just post the '95 NZ RWC loss to SA and the general atmosphere with new SA president Nelson Mandela.
During our conversation I mentioned my surprise about the number of young white people I'd met who were quite fluent in local indigenous African languages.
I had become friendly with a Xhosa man who worked as a local barman. One day a white SA man came into the bar and we began chatting, mainly about All Blacks & Springboks as that was a guaranteed conversation starter in SA. Surprisingly this white guy turns to the barman and asks him a question in the Xhosa language and they begin conversing in Xhosa. I was dumbfounded, I asked the white guy how he knew Xhosa to which he replied Xhosa was my nanny's language.
The SA man I met last weekend told me the same about himself being fluent in Zulu, that was the language of his nanny.
While I understand the ugly racist politics behind why both these men had had African nannies growing up and their respective nannies being unable to speak English as were only permitted, under apartheid, to speak in their native tongue or Afrikaans the irony of NZ's ugly govt's fear of young NZers being exposed to te reo (Māori language) wasn't lost on me nor on my SA friend from Durban who said he couldn't understand why this #NZPol govt is so backward when it came to promoting te reo and bilingualism in #NewZealand.
I find this Te Māngai Pāho report on NZers attitude to te reo has restored my confidence that this white supremacist NZ govt doesn't represent the majority of NZers.
Whakawhetai ki a koe.