Since the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in 2020, universities worldwide have undergone unanticipated changes in how they operate and deliver the academic programme. Chief among these changes has been a wide-scale adoption of emergency remote teaching (ERT). This phenomenological study draws on critical pedagogy to analyse the experiences of South African academics of how the adoption of ERT influenced their use of multilingual pedagogies. Seven lecturers from seven different South African universities were purposively selected to participate based on their prior use of multilingual pedagogies. They teach in fields such as politics, history and education, with some based in traditional universities and others at universities of technology. The participants' reflections reveal that they essentially found using multilingual pedagogies amid emergency remote teaching very challenging. The challenges can be grouped into three categories: shifts from in-person to on-screen interactions; shifts in the types of multimodal resources used to teach multilingually; and shifts from approaches that intellectualise indigenous languages to approaches that are focused on delivery. According to these educators, multilingual teaching online, particularly in the context of emergency remote teaching, does not bode well for the intellectualisation of indigenous South African languages.