How 2 Sign Language Interpreters Became Unlikely Pandemic Stars
When Andiswa Gebashe was growing up in Soweto in the 1990s, she had two dreams.
“I wanted to be an actor, and I wanted to be the president,” she says.
Today, improbably, she is both – thought not exactly in the way she imagined.
Gebashe is a South African Sign Language (SASL) interpreter for South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, interpreting his televised speeches on the coronavirus pandemic on live TV for the country’s deaf community.
“When you are up there interpreting, part of the job is to embody the speaker,” says Gebashe, who grew up with a deaf father and signed before she ever spoke. “So when I’m on stage with him, I’m not Andiswa. I am actually the president.”
And with millions tuning in for the presidential updates on the coronavirus and the country’s continuing lockdown, Gebashe and her fellow presidential interpreter Nicoline Du Toit have also become known figures here in their own right – or as one local newspaper put it, “low key celebrities of a very unusual persuasion.”
Since March, when the country’s coronavirus lockdown began, their signing has been the subject of memes and viral videos, shared among hearing South Africans impressed by the way the natural expressiveness of SASL seems to hold a mirror to the frustration, exhaustion and incredulity that many here felt as the pandemic warped the shape of daily life. In one popular meme, Gebashe was captured in what looked like mid-scream (facial expressions are used in sign languages to convey tone) as the president announced a two-week extension of the country’s lockdown in early April.
That attention, in turn, has helped raise the profile of SASL itself – whose users have long advocated for it to be made South Africa’s 12th official language.
“The world sees us as disabled, whereas we see ourselves simply as a linguistic minority,” says Modiegi Njeyiyana, a deaf academic who studies SASL linguistics at Stellenbosch University. “All this attention on our language creates awareness, and that can only be a good thing.”
For Gebashe and Du Toit too, being the stars of memes and music videos, and doing the morning talk show circuit has been fun, but also beside the point.