And so eventually the debate on Afrikaans in universities ended not with a bang but a whimper in the Constitutional Court last week. Decades of intense struggles to maintain a few exclusive Afrikaans universities, at one point, and then to retain Afrikaans as a primary language of instruction, at a later point, all came to a screeching halt in the court of Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng.

I lived through the worst of those debates on three historically Afrikaans university campuses; a placard at the University of Pretoria, Praat Afrikaans of hou jou bek (Speak Afrikaans or shut up), still disturbs me. It is therefore a relief that the language question has finally been put to bed.

The question of Afrikaans in the classroom was never about language. It was about power. It was about a group that had lost political power now trying to reassert its identity and authority through Afrikaans. It was about Afrikaans as the proprietary rights of the few and not as a linguistic asset belonging to the many...