Speeches

Public Lecture on Indigenous Languages and the South African Justice System by the Hon Andries Carl Nel, MP, Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development at the University of Mpumalanga, Mbombela Campus, on 28 July 2026

Programme Director Vho Mashudu (Professor Mashudu Davhana-Maselesele, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Teaching and Learning).

Ndi a livhuwa nga maanda. Ndo takala nga maanda u vha hafha. Ndi humbela pfarelo. Ndi amba Tshivenḓa, fhedzi a thi ambi zwavhuḓi-vhuḓi.

The Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Mpumalanga, Professor Thenjiwe Meyiwa;

Professor Aldo Stroebel, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation and Internationalisation;

Professor Moses Mbewe, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Postgraduate Studies, Engagement and Planning;

Members of the University Council and Executive Management;

Members of the Senate and the academic staff of the University;

Our distinguished respondents, Dr Thembelihle Makanya, Dr Mazanai Musara, Dr Sam Nzioki and Dr Nonzwakazi Maqubela;

Dr Sibongile Masuku;

The CEO of PanSALB, Dr Keaobaka Seshoka;

uMntfwanenkhosi Sivesihle Vuyolwethu Dlamini and other traditional leaders here present;

Representatives of government and public institutions;

Members of the judiciary and the legal profession;

Students of the University of Mpumalanga;

Colleagues, comrades and friends:

Dumelang. Lotjhani. Sanibonani. Molweni. Ndi matsheloni. Avuxeni. Goeiemôre. Good morning. Bom dia. Bonjour. Habari za asubuhi.

I extend an equally warm greeting to South African Sign Language users and to all who join us through interpreters.

I also acknowledge the scholars, language practitioners, translators, interpreters, and lexicographers who have dedicated themselves to the development of South Africa's languages. Their work reminds us that every language carries more than words. It carries memory, identity, knowledge, social experience and conceptions of justice.

 

The university of the rising sun

It is a particular honour to deliver this lecture at the University of Mpumalanga. This University is one of two public universities established by the democratic state after 1994. It therefore embodies an important principle: institutions are not merely inherited; they can be created.

The democratic state can establish new centres of knowledge, locate them differently, open them to people previously excluded, and ask them to undertake intellectual work that older institutions neglected.There could hardly be a more fitting place for this discussion.

Mpumalanga is the place of the rising sun—a sun that signifies hope and renewal, but also illuminates oppression and exploitation and a proud history of resistance associated with heroes such as Gert Sibande, Ruth First, Nokuthula Simelane, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Henry Nxumalo, Saul Mkhize, Nomoya Masilela and Mahatma Gandhi.

It is especially poignant that this lecture takes place shortly after the fiftieth anniversary of the 1976 student uprising that reminds us that language is never only a means of communication but a dynamic expression of relations of social, economic and political power.

It is equally significant that we meet shortly before the seventieth anniversary of the Women's March of 9 August 1956.

These struggles made possible both the creation of institutions such as this University and the adoption of our democratic Constitution.

 

Preamble to the Constitution

We meet during the year in which South Africa celebrates the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution under the theme: "One Constitution. One Nation: Reflect. Renew. Recommit."

The theme asks us to look backwards and forwards at the same time: to reflect upon the history from which the Constitution emerged, to renew the institutions through which its promises must be realised, and to recommit ourselves to the unfinished work of constitutional transformation.

Before proceeding, I respectfully invite everyone to rise, whether in body or in spirit, and to recite the Preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa:

"We, the people of South Africa,

Recognise the injustices of our past;

Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land;

Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and

Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.

We therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic so as to—

Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights;

Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law;

Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and

Build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.

May God protect our people.

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso.

God seën Suid-Afrika. God bless South Africa.

Mudzimu fhatutshedza Afurika. Hosi katekisa Afrika."

The Preamble matters to today's subject because it speaks in the first-person plural: "We, the people."

Yet a people does not exist without language. We remember injustice through language. We debate social justice through language. We give reasons for the exercise of public power through language. We formulate rights through language and encounter the law through language.

If the law speaks in words that most citizens cannot use confidently, the constitutional promise of equal protection is weakened at the very point at which it must become real.

 

Language as a constitutional foundation

It is therefore significant that language appears not at the margins of the Constitution, but in Chapter 1, among its Founding Provisions.

Section 6 recognises twelve official languages, including South African Sign Language.  More importantly, section 6(2) does not merely celebrate diversity. It diagnoses a historical injustice.

It recognises "the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages of our people" and imposes a positive duty upon the state to take "practical and positive measures" to elevate their status and advance their use.

The constitutional wording is exacting. It identifies history, not linguistic inadequacy, as the source of inequality. It requires action, not ceremonial recognition.

It requires measures that are practical and positive, not promises that remain permanently aspirational.

Section 6 must also be read with equality, dignity, freedom of expression, cultural participation, education, access to courts and the right of an accused person to be tried in a language that the accused understands or, when that is not practicable, to have the proceedings interpreted.

 

Declarations of interest

Before proceeding further, I must make declarations of three "I's". Declarations of irony, of intimidation, and of intellectual interest.

Firstly, I must declare the obvious irony of delivering a lecture on indigenous languages in English. English is not my first language. The irony is not personal, it is institutional. English remains the principal language of legislation, judgments, legal publishing, university teaching, professional exchange and advancement. I use it today as a shared medium, but that convenience itself reflects the historical process this lecture addresses.

Secondly, I must make a declaration of intimidation. I am delivering a public lecture on language and the justice system following in the giant footsteps of Chief Justice Mandisa Maya who recently delivered the Linguistic Human Rights Public Lecture, "Proceedings Including Judgments in Your Own Language". She argued that language rights are not linguistic luxuries but conditions for dignity, equality and meaningful access to justice.Proceedings must be understood, interpretation must be competent, and judgments should increasingly be available in people's preferred languages.

Her intervention is of exceptional importance because it places linguistic transformation within the constitutional responsibilities of the Judiciary itself, turning multilingual justice from an academic aspiration into an institutional imperative.

As President of the Supreme Court of Appeal, she also made history by writing the court's judgment in AfriForum v UNISA in isiXhosa and English.The judgment concerned the language policy of the University of South Africa regarding Afrikaans.

Thirdly, I must make a declaration of intellectual interest.Former Chief Justice Pius Langa observed that judges and lawyers enter decisions with intellectual and social "baggage". Apartheid legal culture often concealed those influences behind claims of technical neutrality.

Constitutional culture requires greater candour, because respect for legal decisions should arise from the quality of the reasons offered rather than the status of the person who offers them.

In that spirit I disclose my own baggage.It is the baggage of a revolutionary constitutional democrat, a member of a national liberation movement and of a party of the working class and the poor, and a person whose intellectual outlook has been shaped by a materialist conception of history.

I do not offer that declaration as a substitute for argument. I offer it so that the premises of my argument can be examined rather than concealed.

I summarise this declaration in ten theses.

• Thesis One, material reality exists independently of our consciousness of it.
• Thesis Two, human beings transform nature through labour and, in doing so, transform themselves.
• Thesis Three, social being shapes consciousness: ideas, values and legal systems are profoundly influenced by material conditions and the forms of social organization that arise from them. These, in turn have a profound influence on the maintenance, or transformation, of those same material conditions and social organization.
• Thesis Four, everything exists in process; societies, institutions, languages and laws are never entirely static. We must therefore, in the words of Rick Turner, always look at "the present as history."
• Thesis Five, development occurs through contradiction, because every social order contains tensions that generate pressure for change.
• Thesis Six, quantitative changes can accumulate until, sometimes abruptly, they produce qualitative transformation.
• Thesis Seven, opposing tendencies are mutually constitutive, they represent a unity and struggle of opposites that shape one another. Accordingly, we must understand reality in its interconnected totality.
• Thesis Eight: history is structured but open-ended; it is neither predetermined nor random. Material conditions and social contradictions generate discernible tendencies and possibilities, but their outcomes depend upon human agency and struggle. People make history, but they do so under conditions inherited from the past.
• Thesis Nine, theory and practice form a unity, because ideas are tested and refined through social action.
• Thesis Ten, social institutions are historically produced and are therefore historically transformable.

These theses inform the central proposition of this lecture: legal languages are historically produced social institutions.

They emerge through political power, economic development, cultural practice and institutional labour, as courts, legislatures, universities, professional bodies, publishers and communities create and transform the languages through which law is understood.

This premise matters because language debates are distinctly vulnerable to abstraction.

In what Anton Jäger calls an age of "hyperpolitics", political feeling intensifies while durable organisation weakens.

Controversies erupt rapidly, identities are asserted and moral positions harden, but the institutions needed to sustain collective action remain thin.

Language can easily become hyperpolitical in this sense.

We proclaim that indigenous languages must be elevated, yet fail to build the terminology units, translation systems, publishing programmes, professional incentives, digital corpora, teaching materials and budgets required to do so.

Hyperpolitics can produce symbolic heat without institutional accumulation.

A progressive programme must instead connect conviction to organisation, recognition to resources and constitutional aspiration to cumulative work.

A language of jurisprudence is not a viral event but an intergenerational project within the wider project of economic, social and cultural transformation.

 

Three legal functions of language

To clarify that project, I propose a distinction among three legal functions that a language may perform.

First, a language may be a language used in legal proceedings. A witness testifies in it, an accused person follows evidence through it, or a litigant consults through it. Competent interpretation is indispensable at this level. Without it, participation may become illusory and a fair trial may be compromised. A corollary to this is that language is an enabler of rights.

Secondly, a language may become a legal language. It develops a sufficiently stable technical vocabulary to express legal rules, institutions and procedures. Dictionaries, translated statutes, standard forms, terminology lists and professional training contribute to this development.

Thirdly, a language may become a language of jurisprudence. At this level, it does not merely carry legal ideas first formulated elsewhere. It participates in generating legal concepts, forms of reasoning and theories of justice from within its own intellectual resources. Judgments are conceived and written in it. Doctrine is debated in it. Students learn to reason legally through it. Communities bring concepts embedded in it into conversation with the Constitution.

The three functions overlap, but they are not identical.

Interpretation can make a proceeding accessible without changing the language in which authoritative legal reasoning is produced.

A translated dictionary can expand vocabulary without creating a community of scholars who develop doctrine in that language.

A genuinely multilingual constitutional order therefore requires more than interpreted access. It requires participation in the production of jurisprudence itself.

Translation remains essential, but it is not neutral. Translation is never the mechanical replacement of one word with another.  It is an encounter between conceptual worlds.

Ubuntu or botho joins relational personhood to reciprocal obligation; ukuhlawulela brings together compensation, atonement and restoration; ukubuyisana concerns the rebuilding of relations after conflict; lekgotla, inkundla and indaba denote processes and institutions of deliberation, consensus and authoritative decision; hlonipha expresses respect through conduct, language, kinship and social position; and ilima or letsema evokes reciprocal communal labour.

None is fully captured by a single English equivalent.

Nor should we assume that English legal concepts can simply be transferred into another language without being tested against its grammar, history and social experience.

Translation, at its best, changes both sides of the encounter. It reveals assumptions that appear natural in the dominant language and creates new possibilities of legal thought.

 

Indigenous languages before colonialism

To understand the present, we must reject one of the oldest assumptions of colonial jurisprudence: the claim that Africa possessed customs but not law.

Long before European settlement at the Cape, the peoples of southern Africa had developed normative systems governing political authority, land, succession, marriage, trade, diplomacy, compensation, dispute resolution and public accountability.

However, there was never a single, undifferentiated African customary law.  

Each tradition arose historically, changed over time and reflected particular social relations.Most of these legal systems were predominantly oral. To call them merely "unwritten", however, is accurate but insufficient. Writing was not absent because people lacked intellectual sophistication. Legal authority was organised differently.

European traditions increasingly located authority in canonical texts: Roman sources, religious law, royal ordinances, statutes, deeds and judicial reports. African traditions often located authority in living institutions and collective practice: families, councils, elders, traditional leaders, communities, memory and deliberation.Law therefore remained embedded within social life rather than separated from it as an autonomous textual system.

Legal language likewise remained connected to everyday language. People used the languages through which they organised ordinary life to understand obligations, authority, injury, restitution and justice. In a real sense, communities spoke their own law. However, this history should not be romanticised.

Precolonial societies contained hierarchy, patriarchy, conflict, coercion and unequal power. Living customary law is neither inherently just nor constitutionally immune.

In Alexkor, Bhe, Shilubana, Gumede and Mayelane, the Constitutional Court recognised customary law as an independent source of norms and a living, evolving system whose development must be respected, but whose rules, like all rules, remain subject to dignity, equality, freedom and the Bill of Rights.

The Court's jurisprudence is important precisely because it rejects two opposite errors:

• the colonial reduction of customary law to a primitive relic, and the romantic insulation of every inherited practice from constitutional scrutiny.
• Indigenous languages thus do not approach the Constitution as empty containers awaiting legal content.

They carry accumulated legal memory.

They encode understandings of reconciliation, kinship, authority, consensus, land, obligation and restorative justice.

The constitutional task is not to freeze those concepts in an imagined past, but to bring their intellectual resources into a dynamic conversation with democratic constitutionalism.

 

Colonial conquest and the separation of law from society

European settlement transformed the relationship between language and legal authority. The Dutch East India Company did not merely establish a trading station.

It introduced a colonial state built through written administration, commercial contracts, property registration, taxation, official correspondence, documentary archives and a permanent bureaucracy. Colonial conquest was therefore not only military and territorial. It was institutional and linguistic.

Dutch became the language of colonial authority, not because it possessed superior expressive qualities, but because those who controlled the state controlled the language through which the state operated.For the first time in southern Africa, state law became systematically detached from the ordinary linguistic life of most people subjected to it.

Law increasingly spoke one language while society spoke others. Indigenous legal systems did not disappear. Communities continued to resolve disputes and regulate social relationships. Traditional institutions continued to exercise authority. But the institutional balance changed.

One legal order increasingly possessed the coercive power of the colonial state; others operated within spaces tolerated, restricted or redefined by it. Mahmood Mamdani's account of the bifurcated colonial state helps illuminate this process. Colonial government constructed a division between citizens governed through civil institutions and subjects governed through administratively fashioned custom. That bifurcation was legal and political, but also linguistic.

Languages associated with the central state, commerce and professional education accumulated official authority, while indigenous languages were confined increasingly to local administration, community life and the domain labelled "customary". This was not genuine legal pluralism among equals. It was hierarchical pluralism. The state could recognise customary institutions while subordinating them, preserve African languages while restricting their functions, and invoke tradition while reshaping it for administrative control.

 

Industrial capitalism and the division of linguistic labour

British occupation did not simply replace Dutch law with English law. Roman-Dutch law survived and continues to shape South African private law. Older forms persisted within new institutions. Yet the mineral revolution transformed the political economy within which legal language developed.

The discovery of diamonds and gold accelerated urbanisation, expanded railways, intensified taxation, enlarged state bureaucracies and created new demands for labour regulation, finance, insurance, banking and commercial litigation. Industrial capitalism produced not only a social division of labour, but what may be called a division of linguistic labour. English increasingly occupied commerce, finance, the higher courts and advanced professional education. Dutch, and later Afrikaans, retained influence in agriculture, education, parts of public administration and substantial parts of the legal profession.

Indigenous African languages remained the principal languages through which millions organised family life, customary relationships, community institutions, local exchange and everyday social existence. This differentiation was not natural or merely cultural. It reflected institutional investment and the organisation of production. Different languages acquired different social functions because institutions equipped them unequally.

English thereby accumulated linguistic capital: not merely vocabulary, but the intellectual labour embodied in dictionaries, textbooks, journals, legislative conventions, reported judgments, archives, teaching practices and professional networks.

Each generation inherited and enlarged what previous generations had produced. English came to appear naturally suited to jurisprudence because the institutions of jurisprudence continuously produced it as such. The history of Afrikaans provides decisive evidence that legal languages are made rather than born. Afrikaans was once dismissed as an unsophisticated dialect.  Through deliberate institutional work, however, it became a highly developed language of law and scholarship.

Universities established Afrikaans faculties; scholars wrote textbooks; judges delivered judgments; legislatures drafted statutes; publishers invested in legal literature; terminology committees standardised vocabulary; and students were trained to think legally through Afrikaans. Afrikaans did not "mature" biologically. It was developed socially.

Its history therefore refutes the suggestion that indigenous African languages lack some inherent capacity for advanced legal reasoning. The relevant question is not whether isiNdebele, siSwati, Xitsonga, Sepedi, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana or Tshivenda are capable of jurisprudence. The question is whether South African institutions will invest the sustained intellectual labour required to develop that capacity within the modern legal system. The National Liberation Movement described the South African social formation as colonialism of a special type: coloniser and colonised occupied the same territory while remaining divided by deeply unequal social, economic and political relations defined by race, class and gender.

Whatever disputes attend the concept, it directs attention to the institutional reproduction of domination.  That reproduction included a hierarchy in the production of legal language. English and Afrikaans occupied the institutions that generated authoritative state law, while indigenous languages were largely excluded from the commanding sites of jurisprudential production. We might therefore speak of the means of legal production: courts, legislatures, universities, law schools, law reform bodies, professional associations, publishers, libraries, archives, digital databases and, increasingly, artificial-intelligence systems.

These institutions do more than apply law. They produce vocabulary, identify authoritative sources, structure professional memory and determine which legal arguments can circulate. Control over these means of legal production profoundly shapes which languages accumulate jurisprudential authority.

 

Political economy of language

Neville Alexander provides the language theory required to understand this history. For Alexander, language was neither a cultural ornament nor only an individual right. It was a question of political economy, social equality, democratic participation and nation formation. Languages acquire power because institutions give them power.Alexander rejected the idea that linguistic choice is neutral. A society may formally permit people to use their languages while organising every consequential institution through one dominant language.

Under those conditions, formal freedom coexists with substantive inequality. Those who command the dominant language can enter higher education, professional work, public administration and law with greater confidence. Others must bear the cognitive, financial and emotional costs of operating through an additional language and through professional intermediaries.The dominance of English therefore cannot be explained by its inherent clarity.

It reflects the accumulated history of the colonial state, commerce, schooling, universities, publishing and administration. Conversely, the marginal position of African languages does not demonstrate incapacity. It demonstrates exclusion from the domains in which intellectual capacities are developed and publicly recognised. Alexander opposed both assimilation into English and the apartheid form of multilingualism. Assimilation preserved colonial privilege behind the appearance of a common language. Apartheid multilingualism promoted African languages within territorially bounded ethnic projects designed to divide the oppressed.

Democratic multilingualism must pursue a different objective: unity without uniformity and diversity without separation. His distinction between linguistic status and function is particularly important. Constitutional recognition gives a language formal status. But a language acquires social authority only when it performs consequential functions in education, government, science, commerce and professional life.

Recognition without functional expansion can become a form of symbolic compensation for continuing material inequality. Applied to justice, Alexander's argument is clear. Indigenous languages will not become languages of jurisprudence merely because witnesses may use them through interpreters.

They must progressively become languages in which pleadings are prepared, statutes are explained and eventually drafted, law is taught, judgments are reasoned, legal commentary is published and constitutional concepts are debated. This development will not occur through market forces alone.

The existing linguistic market rewards English precisely because past institutions invested in it.

Government, universities and the profession must therefore undertake deliberate language planning: terminology development, lexicography, translation, publishing, teacher and lecturer development, professional certification, digital corpus creation and sustained funding.

Alexander also warned against identifying every language with a fixed and bounded ethnicity. Languages overlap, borrow and change; citizens possess multiple identities and often speak several languages. The constitutional project must not reproduce Bantustan boundaries in linguistic form. Multilingual justice should expand individual and collective agency, not assign each person permanently to a supposedly authentic ethnic language.

 

Transformative constitutionalism and linguistic transformation

This brings us back to Pius Langa.

Although Karl Klare introduced the term "transformative constitutionalism" into South African legal scholarship, Langa gave it a distinctly South African jurisprudential content.

He treated the Constitution as the continuation of the "historic bridge" described in the Epilogue to the Interim Constitution: a bridge from a deeply divided past towards a democratic future. The bridge is not a neutral structure across which society walks unchanged. The Constitution is an instrument for reconstructing social relationships and public institutions. Langa accordingly described transformative constitutionalism in terms broad enough to encompass a social and economic revolution.

Its purpose is not exhausted by a change of government or the formal abolition of discriminatory laws. It seeks to transform political institutions, legal culture, material inequality and the relationship between public power and the people.Central to that project is substantive equality.

Identical treatment can reproduce injustice where people enter institutions from profoundly unequal historical positions. Constitutional analysis must therefore ask what practical conditions are necessary for people to enjoy dignity, freedom and equal citizenship. In the context of language, it is not enough that everyone is formally free to speak any official language if only one language provides direct access to legal education, precedent, professional advancement and authoritative reasoning. Langa also emphasised the transformation of legal culture.

Apartheid legality relied heavily upon a culture of authority: Parliament had spoken, an official was empowered, a rule existed. Constitutional supremacy demands a culture of justification. Every exercise of public power must be supported by reasons consistent with constitutional values. Yet reasons exist through language. If legal culture must be transformed, then the linguistic medium through which reasons are formulated, tested, taught and understood must also be transformed.

This is the extension of Langa's theory that I wish to propose: Transformative constitutionalism requires linguistic transformation because legal culture is produced and reproduced through language. The claim does not diminish the value of English legal thought. It contests monopoly, not communication.

A multilingual jurisprudence would permit legal concepts to move in several directions. It would allow constitutionalism to speak more directly to people's lived experience and indigenous concepts to reshape constitutional reasoning. Transformation, in Langa's account, is a permanent ideal rather than a destination at which society finally arrives.

That insight protects us from two errors. The first is triumphalism: the belief that formal recognition in 1996 completed linguistic transformation. The second is despair: the belief that three decades of slow progress proves that transformation is impossible.

If institutions are historically made, they can be remade, although doing so requires organisation, resources, experimentation and time.

 

Constitutional supremacy / Parliamentary sovereignty

At this point it is necessary to address a contemporary argument.

Some propose that South Africa should abandon constitutional supremacy for parliamentary sovereignty and simultaneously replace Roman-Dutch law with an indigenous legal order.

The grievance to which this proposal appeals is real: our law remains marked by colonial inheritance, economic exclusion and distance from the lived experience of many citizens.

However, the proposed remedy, whilst radical in form, is reactionary in substance. Parliamentary sovereignty was the constitutional instrument through which apartheid was enacted.

It permitted a racially exclusive Parliament to classify people, dispossess communities, restrict movement, suppress political organisation and insulate injustice behind formal legality.

The 1996 Constitution does not remove power from the people and hand it to judges. It records a democratic decision by the people to bind every institution, including Parliament, to dignity, equality, freedom, accountability, the rule of law, and transformative programme underpinned by justiciable socio-economic rights. Nor should decolonisation be reduced to erasing Roman-Dutch law by proclamation.

South African law is already a mixed, historically layered and constitutionally transformed legal system. Roman-Dutch law, English law, legislation, customary law and constitutional jurisprudence interact within it. The question is not which single tradition must annihilate all others, but how every inherited rule should be tested, developed or discarded in the light of the Constitution and the lived realities of people, united in their diversity.

Section 211 requires courts to apply customary law when it is applicable, subject to the Constitution and legislation.

The Constitutional Court has repeatedly recognised customary law as an integral component of the legal system, not a tolerated exception to "real" law.

Its doctrine of living customary law seeks to understand norms as they develop in community practice rather than freezing them in colonial codes and official textbooks.

Abolishing constitutional supremacy would not liberate customary law.

It would remove the normative framework through which women, children and marginalised members of communities can contest unequal exercises of both public and traditional authority.

A progressive approach must reject both colonial contempt for customary law and any attempt to place any power beyond constitutional justification.

 

Constitution and advancing multi-lingualism

This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the adoption of South Africa's Constitution - a milestone that reminds us of the profound gains made in language development, language protection and promotion since the advent of democracy.

We have laid the foundation for a democracy that values and protects linguistic diversity through the creation of institutions such as the Pan South African Language Board (PANSALB) and the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, as well as enacting legislation such as the Use of Official Languages Act and the South African Language Practitioners' Council Act.

 

Justice Vision 2000

Justice Vision 2000, published under Minister Dullah Omar during the first years of democracy, offers an important institutional counterpart to Langa's theory.

It was far more than a departmental plan. It sought to transform a fragmented, racially unequal and often oppressive justice system into one that was legitimate, accessible, effective, representative, accountable and humane.

Justice Vision 2000 also contained a more explicit language agenda than is sometimes remembered. It identified technical procedures, unfamiliar terminology and the use of English and Afrikaans as barriers to meaningful participation.

It committed the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development to simpler court language, professional interpretation, translation into official languages, plain-language legal documents and the development of policy on the language of record.

That programme remains strikingly contemporary. Considerable progress has been made in representativity, constitutional jurisprudence, interpretation and access to legal information. Yet the central contradiction persists.

Indigenous languages are used extensively by court users, witnesses and accused persons, while the authoritative record and the production of precedent remain overwhelmingly English. The system often permits people to enter the courtroom in their own language but requires the law to leave the courtroom in English.

Justice Vision 2000 sought to transform the institutional infrastructure of justice. Our generation must deepen that project by transforming its linguistic and jurisprudential infrastructure. The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development's 2019 Language Policy strengthens this commitment, ensuring that the justice system is inclusive, accessible, and reflective of the voices of all.

The Language Policy flows from the Use of Official Languages Act and aims to promote the equitable use of all 11 (as it was then) official languages, to regulate and monitor the use of official languages in the Department and to facilitate equitable access to the services offered by the Department.

It aims to promote good language management for efficient public service administration and service delivery and facilitate access to services, resources, programmes, information and knowledge.

Importantly, it seeks to redress the linguistic inequalities of the past, which resulted in the underdevelopment of indigenous African languages and discrimination against speakers of such languages.

The Policy is based on the following guiding principles:

• usage, practicality, expense, regional circumstances, the balance of the needs and preferences of the population (as a whole and in the province concerned); 

• the imperative to take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of indigenous languages of historically diminished use and status;

• the provision that all official languages must enjoy parity of esteem and must be treated equitably.

It acknowledges the demographics of the country in terms of human settlement caused by apartheid policies and the establishment of ethnic-based self-governing states prior to 1994.

It mentions Mpumalanga specifically – stating that Mpumalanga, which incorporates the former self-governing territory, the KwaNdebele homeland, had isiNdebele as official language.

As the Ndebele community is largely concentrated in Mpumalanga, the Policy recommended that, despite isiZulu being the most spoken language in the province, isiNdebele should be selected as an official language for use in the province.

IsiNdebele is the least spoken language in all other provinces, and failure to select it for Mpumalanga would result in its exclusion from official government use and substantively diminish its status as official language.

Courts are at the heart of the justice system.

Court interpreters are among the most important, yet often least visible, professionals within the justice system.

They facilitate communication between judicial officers, prosecutors, legal practitioners, accused persons, witnesses and members of the public.

Without interpreters, many people would simply be unable to participate meaningfully in court proceedings.

To give practical effect to the constitutional right to a fair trial, we have invested significantly in language services.

We currently employ approximately 1 900 court interpreters across South Africa.

In addition, we have a database of more than 500 ad hoc interpreters, including South African Sign Language interpreters; and foreign language interpreters.

Across all provinces, Shona is the most frequently requested foreign language, with certain provinces also needing translation in Chichewa, Amharic and Igbo.

This database of interpreters continues to grow as the demand for language services increases and shows our commitment to ensuring that courts remain accessible to everyone, regardless of the language they speak.

Our interpreters make justice understandable and accessible.

Their ongoing training and professional development is vital.

In October 2025 South Africa became the first country in the world to introduce the Court Interpreters' Robing Programme.

This recognised court interpreters as professionals who play a direct role in protecting constitutional rights.

Interpretation remains indispensable. However, we must progress from interpreting participation towards multilingual production.

 

What is to be done?

What, then, should be done?

Universities are often described as institutions that transmit knowledge.

They also manufacture legal consciousness.

They educate future judges, magistrates, advocates, attorneys, prosecutors, interpreters, legislative drafters, public servants and academics.

They determine which sources students regard as authoritative, which concepts they learn to articulate, and which languages they associate with intellectual seriousness.

Oxford influenced the development of English law.

Leiden shaped Roman-Dutch jurisprudence.

Stellenbosch, Potchefstroom and Pretoria contributed greatly to legal Afrikaans.

The University of Mpumalanga now faces a comparable historical question: will it merely teach the legal languages that history has handed to it, or will it help create the multilingual jurisprudence that constitutional democracy requires?

This is not a task for a language department alone, nor for a future law faculty acting in isolation.

It requires cooperation across linguistics, education, sociology, history, information technology, philosophy, public administration and law.

Dr Makanya's focus on service delivery, Dr Musara's on the economy, Dr Nzioki's on media and communication, and Dr Maqubela's on gender already demonstrate that language cannot be confined to a single academic silo.

The legal meaning of language is shaped by the institutions through which people live.

The future of indigenous languages will also depend on technology.

Artificial intelligence, speech recognition, machine translation and digital government services all require quality language resources.

Languages that are not developed digitally risk being left behind.

Partnerships are vitally important – and will become more so in the future.

Government must enter this partnership as more than a funder and more than a consumer of translation.

It should help identify areas of public need, provide access to appropriate non-confidential legal materials, support internships and terminology projects, and incorporate successful research into policy and practice.

Government reinforces the importance of partnerships with institutions such as PanSALB, universities, the Linguistic Society of South Africa, the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) and the Judiciary to strengthen multilingualism across the justice sector.

Through the Brigitte Mabandla Justice College, our court interpreters continue to receive specialised training to ensure that they remain equipped for an evolving justice system.

Other exciting projects and partnerships include the work being done by the South African Judicial Education Institute (SAJEI) through, for example, its Traditional Leaders Mediation Training Programme which seeks to strengthen dispute resolution capacity within traditional leadership structures through the formalisation and enhancement of mediation practices.

A phased language implementation strategy has been adopted to ensure inclusivity and accessibility and the training manual will initially be translated into IsiZulu, IsiXhosa and Setswana, with further languages to follow in subsequent phases.

The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, through the Brigitte Mabandla Justice College, should seriously consider signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Mpumalanga to strengthen the administration of justice.

We believe a collaboration between the University of Mpumalanga, SAJEI and Justice College could create a national centre of excellence for justice sector education, research, and professional development. 

Such a Memorandum of Understanding could have a five-year implementation plan built on the following five pillars:

• Education and Training;
• Research and Innovation;
• Indigenous Languages and Access to Justice;
• Digital Justice, and
• Community Engagement and Public Legal Education. 

Together, the University, SAJEI and Justice College can create a seamless national learning pathway for future judicial officers and justice practitioners.

Potential collaboration areas could include:

• Joint certificate programmes,

• Research on access to justice and indigenous languages,

• Interpreter and court language training,

• Legislative drafting and plain language initiatives,

• Judicial and prosecutor training in multilingual justice,

• Student internships and workplace-based learning, and

• Digital learning modules that can be shared nationally.

Further projects that could be implemented between the Department, Justice College, the Linguistic Society, SAJEI, and University of Mpumalanga could include the following: 

• A National Justice Education Partnership to become a leading partnership for justice education, judicial development, research, innovation, and multilingual access to justice. Each partner has a distinct role and responsibility: the University of Mpumalanga for academic qualifications, research, and student development. SAJEI for judicial education and judicial expertise. Justice College for professional development, public service training, digital learning, and implementation across the justice sector.

• We could develop specialised justice programmes together in the form of joint short courses or postgraduate certificates on indigenous languages in the justice system; court interpreting and legal translation, plain language drafting of legal documents, customary law and constitutional law, access to justice in rural communities, and alternative dispute resolution rooted in indigenous knowledge. The University provides academic expertise, Justice College provides justice practitioner expertise, and SAJEI contributes the judicial perspective.

• There is the possible establishment of a research hub: A collaborative research programme could examine language barriers in courts, access to justice, community justice systems, indigenous legal knowledge, and justice innovation. This could produce policy papers and publications that directly inform the work of the Department.

• We could also work towards a student pipeline into the justice sector: The Department (through Justice College) could coordinate vacation and volunteer work, internships, workplace-based learning, and exposure to courts, Master's Offices, State Attorney offices, and Family Advocate offices.

• We could host joint Annual Justice Dialogues bringing together judges, prosecutors, magistrates, academics, students, traditional leaders, and legal practitioners with a focus on justice reform and contemporary legal challenges.

• Through an Indigenous Languages Unit for Justice, housed in the Department's library and Justice College, and working with the University, we could develop legal terminology in indigenous languages, create multilingual court resources, produce legal dictionaries and glossaries, support interpreter training, research language and access to justice; and advise government on language policy in the justice sector.

• We could undertake capacity building for justice officials with Justice College leading professional development for family advocates, clerks, registrars, court managers, interpreters, and legal administration officials, and the University contributing academic input

By combining the University's academic expertise, SAJEI's judicial expertise and Justice College's national training mandate, the partnership could make South Africa a leader in multilingual justice, education and innovation.

 

Conclusion:

The rising sun does not abolish the night by declaration. Light grows across the landscape.

In the same way, a multilingual jurisprudence will be produced through accumulated work: one concept clarified, one interpreter trained, one student taught, one textbook written, one judgment translated, one database enlarged, one institutional partnership sustained.

Quantitative changes can, in time, become qualitative transformation.

The late President Nelson Mandela once said -

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart."

Language is the lifeblood of the law. Without words, rights cannot be claimed, enforced, or protected.

For justice to be real, it must be spoken in the languages of the people.

Indigenous languages are not only cultural treasures – they are essential instruments of empowerment.

Thirty years after the adoption of the Constitution, our task is not merely to praise its multilingual promise.

It is to build the institutions through which that promise can speak.

Let us ensure that every language of our people can become a language not only in which justice is heard, but through which justice is imagined, reasoned and made.

Let this University, in the place of the rising sun, help lead that work.

 

I thank you.