A five-year legal battle between the University of South Africa’s (UNISA) and the main Afrikaner lobby group, AfriForum has come to an end with the highest court ruling in favour of AfriForum.

The South Africa supreme court ruled as unconstitutional, the controversial plan by UNISA to phase out Afrikaans as a medium of teaching.

The university in 2016 changed its English and Afrikaans dual-medium language policy to strictly English I what they explained was to address imbalances of the past and because of low demand for courses in Afrikaans.

UNISA is not the first South African university to face challenges over its language policy. In 2019, the University of Pretoria also the teaching of scrapped Afrikaans language.

Many have seen the language as polarising as it had been forced on black learners during the apartheid years and led to the Soweto student uprising in 1976.

AfriForum has welcomed Wednesday’s ruling by the Constitutional Court but cultural analysts sees the ruling as meaning Afrikaans being favoured over other African languages.