by Thinus Ferreira
It's a silver anniversary for M-Net's Afrikaans TV channel kykNET which marks its 25th anniversary today, since it started on DStv on 15 November 1999.
There are fortuitous strides and moments in popular culture that forever influence and alter the trajectory of the zeitgeist.
Although the creation of kykNETas a new start-up pay-TV channel by M-Net with Afrikaans programming for Afrikaans viewers was a business move that was planned, it's serendipity that it launched when it did.
Looking back, kykNET essentially "saved" Afrikaans and saved DStv if it can ever be said that a mere TV channel has that power and can save a language or a pay-TV business.
But make no mistake: After rugby content ranked number one, on the field that blue K has been MultiChoice's most valuable player over the past quarter century in South Africa.
Besides the rise of Afrikaans newspapers and magazines which helped to congeal Afrikaans culture around a type of collective consciousness in the previous century, kykNET as television became the heir apparent: The strongest glue reflecting, showing off, unifying, molding, influencing and moving the language forward.
Without a kykNET for the past 25 years as an electronic medium showcasing Afrikaans as a vibrant language, Afrikaans' space within the public sphere would have been even more diminished.
It is the popular culture impetus of kykNET - its forever-push in pumping out general entertainment content that happens to be in Afrikaans - that has had the biggest impact and solidified its place as the largest media driver of Afrikaans as a living and evolving language.
Over the past two and a half decades kykNET hasn't spoken Afrikaans. It has shown it.
Through various genres, stars, travels and stories, kykNET hasn't taught a language but shown a lifestyle - a multiplicity of people, views and inflections.
Combined, this subconsciously sent and are sending an incredibly powerful mass media message: Look at them, look at us, look at me - it happens to be in Afrikaans, it is Afrikaans, Afrikaans is me, Afrikaans is "oukei".
Without kykNET that 100% saved it, Afrikaans film in 2024 would be dead - and that's not an overstatement. Without kykNET, Afrikaans in current affairs programming, in documentary programming, and natural history content on TV would be extinct. Again, it's no over-dramatisation.
True, kykNET also gave us real housewives from Pretoria and the winelands - superfluous glamarama fodder that did nothing to move Afrikaans forward per se - but what is any media machine, in any language (just ask Lady Whistledown) without some gossip and some scandal?
Languages don't just live on because they exist. They continue because they're preferred and are desired to be used and spoken.
Over 25 years kykNET has kept and made Afrikaans desirable as a language, through making and reflecting back to its audience desirable content.
The people we've seen and the characters we've been shown are very often the people we want to be - or to be with.
They so happen to speak Afrikaans - making you feel, as a viewer, entering their world just much as they keep entering ours, that it's the most natural thing in the world to talk just like they do, since they speak just like I mos do.