Colleagues familiar with his life and work will be saddened to hear that Neville Alexander, a leading and highly influential South African academic, linguist, revolutionary and anti-apartheid struggle veteran has died aged 75 on the 27th of August following a recent diagnosis of lung cancer.
He was born in October 1936 in Cradock in the Eastern Cape; his father was a carpenter, and his mother, a schoolteacher. Neville gained a BA in German and History from the University of Cape Town in 1955 and following the award of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation scholarship he moved to Germany where he gained his PhD at the University of Tübingen in 1961.
He was already politically active by the time he returned to South Africa and joined the African Peoples Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA) and became a founder member of the revolutionary Yu Chi Chan Club, which promoted guerrilla warfare, and the NLF (National Liberation Front), which sought to unify ant-apartheid groups. In July 1963 he, was arrested and later convicted of conspiracy to commit sabotage. He was imprisoned on Robben Island for ten years alongside Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu for his anti-apartheid activities and it was here, at the so-called ‘University of Robben Island’ that he came to understand that intellectuals are people who seek to understand and change the world, not necessarily people who teach about in universities and he retained this grounded and humble approach in all spheres of his life and activities
On his release, Neville Alexander became an early pioneer in the field of language policy and planning in South Africa. It is thanks to his work and those he gathered around him that we have had the opportunity to understand more fully the political complexities of language, colonialism and liberation through organisations he was closely involved in such as the National Language Project, Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA), and the highly significant Language Task Group, which advised the government on its multilingual language policy, one of the true achievements of post-Apartheid South Africa. His most recent work focussed on the tension between the importance of creating a truly multilingual society and the harsh reality of the hegemony of English, whose dominance threatens the dignity and full acceptance of indigenous languages.
Neville Alexander wrote a series of influential books and articles that will serve as a fine memorial. These include ‘One Azania, One Nation’, written under the pseudonym No Sizwe, which analysed the distribution of power and privilege class, caste, and colour terms; ‘Sow the Wind’ (1986), which provided an analysis of the politics underpinning the uprising in South Africa. In 1989 he published ‘Language Policy and National Unity in South Africa/Azania’, a short but highly book on language policy, in 1990 he published ‘Education and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa, in which he argued that investment in education would lead to the true liberation of South Afric, and in 2002, came ‘An Ordinary Country’ in which he reflected on the politics of South Africa's transition to democracy, about which he was fearlessly and fiercely critical, describing South Africa in an article of 2011 as a ’profoundly sick society’. At the time of his death, he was working on a new book on language and peace with Arnulf von Scheliha of University of Osnabrück. He will continue to speak with us.
Throughout his entire life, Neville Alexander remained true to his conviction that education could play a vital role in the struggle for liberation and sought to bring this about both through his written, scholarly output and also through his direct, hands-on involvement in grassroots, community based education projects in the townships. Let the final word go to him, writing about his education on Robben Island:
“We taught one another what we knew, discovering each other’s resourcefulness. We also learned how people with little or no formal education could not only themselves participate in education programmes but actually teach others a range of different insights and skills. The “University of Robben Island” was one of the best universities in the country. It also showed me that you don’t need professors’
