[imagesource: Lindsey Appolis]

There is a special brand of Afrikaans that comes straight out of the Cape Flats.

The language is so unique that Amy Jeptha, a multiple award-winning director, is making a movie about the people who still speak it.

Barakat will be the first-ever film in Afrikaaps, per BBC, an Afrikaans dialect with borrowed words from a few other languages.

Those include Dutch, English, Malay, Portuguese, and Indonesian, as well as the country’s indigenous Khoi and San languages.

In that sense, it is basically Afrikaans but with that specific pronunciation only found in the Cape Flats.

The language was once also called Kombuis Afrikaans, but this is a term that Jeptha would rather stay away from “because it makes it feel like it’s a lesser version of Afrikaans which it’s not”.

Instead, she asserts that Afrikaaps is “a legitimate, creolised form of the language” and made it the main dialogue in the film so as to promote it.

And because language is often culture, the movie will also be about the mingling of Muslim and Christian culture in the Cape Flats.

Jeptha wanted to overturn the perception of there just being crime, gangs, and drugs in the Cape Flats, an area formed by the disenfranchised people who were forcibly located there by the former apartheid government in the 1950s.

Cape Town’s mixed-race communities are often depicted negatively and one-dimensionally, so hopefully, Barakat, which means blessings in Arabic, will show a more hopeful side to the area and its people.

The story is about a widowed Muslim mother who wishes to marry her new love, a Christian man, but her four sons disapprove as they are still processing the loss of their father.

Jeptha was brought up “half-half” “with a Muslim dad and a Christian mom, giving her the ideal lens through which to shoot the film.

Give the trailer a watch, but also a good listen:

The name of the film is also interesting, as in Afrikaaps, Barakat refers to taking home a gift, normally confectionary or food, that is left over from a party.

But “a Barakat can also come in a form of a person in disguise” according to some imams that Jeptha spoke to, adding herself that “blessings come in different forms and can come unexpectedly”.

It’s great to see Afrikaaps making waves, with films like Barakat pushing for the “emancipation and empowerment of Afrikaaps speakers” and representing a culture and a place in a new light.

Blessings abound for Barakat.

[source:bbc]