The first written Afrikaans was taught in Cape madrasahs and set down in Arabic letters. A century later the same language was standardised as a white one. Both things are true, and Cape Town is where you can see it.
Before there was Afrikaans
There was no single language at the early Cape. There were Khoekhoe languages, spoken here long before 1652. There was the Dutch the Company brought. There was a Portuguese creole used across the Indian Ocean trade, and there was Malay, which worked as a lingua franca across the Indonesian archipelago and travelled here with the people taken from it. In his survey chapter on Afrikaans for the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures, Robbert van Sluijs notes that Khoekhoe people at the Cape were already familiar with a jargon form of English carrying Portuguese and Dutch words before the Dutch settled.
Between 1652 and 1808, van Sluijs records, about 63,000 enslaved people were brought to the Cape, first from Angola and Dahomey, later from Madagascar, Mozambique, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and the Mascarenes. They were deliberately kept apart from others who shared their language. Some used a Portuguese creole. Others used improvised forms of Dutch. By the 1760s about half the enslaved population had been born at the Cape. That is the setting in which a new language took shape.
How Afrikaans was made, and by whom
The standard summary is that Afrikaans arose from the colloquial Cape Dutch of the settlers, changed under the influence of Khoekhoe, of South African Portuguese Creole and of South African Malay. Van Sluijs is careful to add that exactly how Cape Dutch became Afrikaans has not been settled, and it is worth keeping that hedge. Scholars have argued for a creole stage, for gradual second language learning by Khoe and enslaved speakers, and for combinations of both.
What is not in dispute is who did the learning. South African History Online quotes Neville Alexander's blunt version: without Khoikhoi, San and above all enslaved people being forced to learn Dutch, Afrikaans would not have developed. You can hear them in the vocabulary. The Dictionary of South African English derives baie from the Malay banyak, piesang from pisang, blatjang from belachan and baadjie from baju, and gogga comes from Khoekhoe.
Our guide to Afrikaners and Afrikaans culture covers the language as it is spoken today. This page is about how it got written down, and who was left out of that story.
Writing Afrikaans in Arabic letters
The first people to write this language down at any scale were Cape Muslims, and they used Arabic script. The Afrikaans Language Museum in Paarl calls Arabic Afrikaans the form generally accepted as the first written Afrikaans, and says 74 works have so far been identified, written between 1845 and 1957: student notebooks, voting posters, publications and manuscripts, with more still in private hands.
The best known of them is Abu Bakr Effendi's Bayan al-Din, printed in Istanbul in 1877, but it is not the beginning of the tradition. Achmat Davids, who spent decades on this material, dated the writing tradition from 1815 to 1915. Reviewing Davids' study in Tydskrif vir Letterkunde in 2012, Muhammed Haron sets out what Davids showed: Cape religious scholars did not simply borrow the Arabic alphabet, they engineered it, building vowel systems and diphthongs the script had never needed before, a process Davids called innovative orthographic engineering. Davids also corrected earlier European scholars who had misread the manuscripts, including Adrianus van Selms, who had coined the term Arabic Afrikaans in the first place.
The madrasah and the koples book
The reason any of this exists is schooling. Writing in Tydskrif vir Letterkunde in 2008, Suleman Dangor explains the sequence. Tuan Guru, the first official imam at the Cape, taught in Malayu at the Dorp Street madrasah he established at the end of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century Cape Dutch had replaced it as the language of instruction, because that was what the children actually spoke. Those children were barred from the public schools, so they could not read the Latin alphabet. They could read the Arabic script, which they had learned for worship. Teachers therefore wrote the everyday language of the Cape in the letters their pupils knew.
The classroom object was the koplesboek, described by Dangor as a handwritten reader containing sections of Islamic books or texts compiled for learners. Hein Willemse, writing for The Conversation, points to one from 1860, copied out by a Cape Town pupil descended from enslaved people, and notes that a modern Afrikaans speaker would recognise it at once. That is what a language looks like before anyone has decided who owns it.
Then the language was claimed
On 14 August 1875 a group of men founded the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners in Paarl. South African History Online records the founders, including S.J. du Toit, Arnoldus Pannevis and C.P. Hoogenhout, their aim of getting Afrikaans recognised in parliament, schools and the civil service, their newspaper Die Afrikaanse Patriot from 15 January 1876, and the membership rule that mattered: members had to be professing Christians.
Willemse's argument is that this movement built Afrikaans into a white possession, promoting it as the white man's language and pushing the descendants of enslaved and indigenous speakers out of its history, while denying that the language had creole roots at all. On 8 May 1925 the Official Languages of the Union Act No 8 of 1925 replaced Dutch with Afrikaans. From there the road runs to 1974, when Afrikaans was imposed as a medium of instruction on pupils who did not speak it, and to the Soweto uprising of 1976.
That is the erasure, and it was never total. South African History Online tracks Afrikaans used as a language of dissent throughout: the ghoemaliedjies that enslaved Capetonians sang back at the colonists, the Straatpraatjes satire columns published by the African Political Organisation from 1909, and the poetry of Adam Small.
Kaaps, and the long argument about it
Kaaps is the variety spoken across the Cape Flats, and it has the oldest claim of any of them. Writing in The Conversation, Adam Haupt describes it as having taken shape from the 1500s in encounters between Khoi and San people, South East Asians, Dutch, Portuguese and English speakers, and then being dismissed as slang once a purified Afrikaans became official in 1925. Quentin Williams, who led the dictionary project at the University of the Western Cape's Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research with the Heal the Hood Project, describes Kaaps as one of the oldest and most marginalised ways of speaking in the country.
The scholarship is not settled and does not pretend to be. Frank Hendricks and Charlyn Dyers published a collected volume, Kaaps in Fokus, in 2016. Writing on LitNet in 2024 about the third Kaaps symposium, Williams reports live disagreement among specialists over whether to call it Kaaps, Afrikaaps or Kaapse Afrikaans, and over orthography and standardisation. If you want the words themselves rather than the argument about them, see /en/cape-town-explained/slang/.
Three languages, one province
Section 5 of the Constitution of the Western Cape, 1997 gives Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa equal official status for provincial government. Census 2022 shows what that looks like at home: 41.2 per cent of the province speaks Afrikaans most often, 31.4 per cent isiXhosa and 22.0 per cent English. isiXhosa is not a minority presence in Cape Town, and it did not arrive recently. It came with the people the city's labour system depended on and then confined.
Why it matters now
The useful thing about Cape Town's language history is that it refuses the simple version. Afrikaans is not the oppressor's language and it is not innocent either. It was spoken into being by people who had no power, written down first in a script the state could not read, then taken and polished and used against them, and it is now being reclaimed word by word in a dictionary launched at the Castle of Good Hope. The food went the same way, which is the subject of /en/cape-town-explained/food/.