According to what I've read (which could very well not be representative of the language as it's spoken by your community), grammatical gender (which Dutch stil

According to what I've read (which could very well not be representative of the language as it's spoken by your community), grammatical gender (which Dutch still has) is largely dead in Afrikaans. There is no case system present in Afrikaans. Much like in English, you wouldn't modify the article of the word because that word is part of some innate class ("gender") of nouns. Die held, die heldin, die helde, etc. In German, you would have der Held (hero), die Heldin (heroine), die Helden (heroes)/die Heldinnen (heroines), and those articles would change depending on the noun's role in the sentence (ie "der Held" -> "dem Helden", if the hero is the one receiving something in a sentence). English and Afrikaans still have remnants of grammatical gender and case, but it's not really enough to be considered a prominent feature of the language.