YouTuber Lasizwe Dambuza recently tried to draw a fresh audience to his channel of over 300,000 subscribers by releasing a series of comedy sketches about young black South Africans struggling to learn the language at school. He then launched a series of sketches in which he played a black woman struggling to date a white Afrikaans speaker. It may have seemed like a long shot to try and bridge the race gap through a language once used so ruthlessly to enforce it, but according to Lasizwe it worked: “Suddenly I had white people, Indian people, Coloured people, everyone coming up to me in the street and telling me they loved my stuff.”